drallim33
Sergeant
If you read what I wrote again I think you will find you actually agree with me. Arbitrarily lowering consumption rates will not solve anything. Expenditure and consumption are not the same thing.tools
This will not help. It would just mean the towns grow larger to absorb the extra supply. Which is fine actually, and makes sense, except that they grow to the absolute limit of supply, leaving no buffer.I'd think that increasing food production at the village level would be the best solution. I.e. Villages would make more food if they could sell more food, as they would in a real market economy (and they could sell more food if cities demanded more food via higher in-city consumption + external party sales via the cities).
You need to cap the growth of the town so it does not continue to grow to the very limit of the food supply. So it only grows when there is abundance instead of as soon as there is enough. Because the supply is unstable, villagers only come every few days, and caravans are unpredictable. Villages can be raided, wars can disrupt trade etc.
I think this could be achieved by:
- not growing unless the granary is full. If the granary is not full then clearly you are not in abundance and growing is a bad idea
- if there is a shortage, capping growth to that shortage. Is food at -10? Then growth should be no higher than -10.
I also think the non-food goods should factor in, but currently they do not as far as I know, except for some small bonuses. Currently any town with lots of food (grain mainly) will grow huge and consume it all. If there is any leftover it is priced high because of the prosperity modifier on the prices. This means almost no food gets exported from towns with high food supply to towns lacking food. Actually the opposite happens, caravans buy food from low prosperity towns to sell to the high prosperity ones, because of the price modifier, causing a feedback loop. Like imagine if it was profitable for you IRL to go to a local market, buy all the apples, and then go and sell them to an apple farmer. Makes no sense.
If growth was also limited by non-food goods as well, then it wouldn't just be the food towns growing and hogging all the food. Salt and wool towns would need to import food to grow, and food towns would need to import salt and wool, or whatever.
The final icing on the cake would be that the town only buys what it needs, then spends whatever it has left on cheap goods, that are in surplus and below base price, and gets a prosperity bonus. This way the towns would maintain a decent stock even with low supply. Right now towns are naiive like a hungry dog, if a town only needs 50 food but can afford 200, it will buy 200, perhaps causing it to starve the next day. Whereas if it just bought what it needed, and then a little extra that was in surplus (below base price), it might go the whole week with enough food.
I could have worded that better but the point is that there are two effects from prosperity. First the town spends more/less on goods, based on prosperity, altering demand and prices. Second, in addition, the prices are raised/lowered based on prosperity. So it's a double effect.I could well be missing something; forgive me if so. But isn't 'prosperity' the dev's central method for channeling demand mechanics, basically? Some of the modifiers do complicate / problematize a free market economy for sure. But I think the prosperity based modifiers don't fall into that category - they are supposed to be ways of representing demand in aggregate, considering that it's not feasible to have thousands if individual buyers/sellers per city.
This is one of the reasons the towns go to 0 prosperity. Because all the prices drop when prosperity drops, regardless of the actual demand. So you can have a town completely out of stock of an item, but the price is still low compared to the rich town next door. So caravans just buy everything there for cheap, town runs out of money because it is selling everything for cheap, and ends up with nothing.
The trading simulation should result in scarce goods being expensive, but it can get overpowered by the prosperity modifier. The two things are conflicting with each other.
My reply is a bit late, seems like you've already come to some of these conclusions yourself. Similar problems at high prosperity, a town can be starving even with food in stock, because it can't afford to buy it.