Food shortage in Cities downward spiral

Users who are viewing this thread

andreashun

Recruit
Summary: There is currently a downward spiral for food shortage in Cities because food shortage negatively influences prosperity, and vice versa. My city of Ortysia was already at over 6300 prosperity and had positive food production, but when I put troops into my garrison, I suddenly had a food shortage after a couple of days. There is currently NO way to counter this effectively. I only had around 200 garrisoned troops, of the over 500 I could have. In contrast the food stocks are way to small. But the MAIN PROBLEM is that my prosperity just eats my food production completely, the higher it gets, even if I have the city set to food production. If I go to the trade menu, there is plenty food (over 300 grain, and 30-50 grapes, fish, meat, cheese, butter, dates...) but still it says food is short, just because of the high prosperity values.
Now after a few weeks, my prosperity is dropping constantly because of food shortage. At the same time, my garrisoned troops are leaving because of food shortage. And the food shortage still remains because of prosperity.
There NEEDS to be a WAY TO COUNTER! Let me donate money/food directly to the city management so I can counter the food shortage, I have 1500 grain in my inventory and a lot of other food, plus over 3.5 million gold, but I can't do anything. Let me donate money to villages so they can increase their militia, so they don't get raided as easily. Let me have a companion and his party patrol between the cities and villages I own to fight looters and bandits (not just have the companion wander of to do whatever, but actually give him commands and a patrol route or whatever). There's many possible solutions, the easiest is to increase the possible food stocks and let me donate food manually. Right now it's completely broken.

After a couple month of constant food shortage (I tried selling tons of food to the market regularly but it didn't do anything) my prosperity dropped by over a thousand to 5200, my food shortage still is very high, and my garrisoned troops have almost all left... That is just frustrating. Happens in a similar fashion in all my cities.

How to Reproduce: Happens automatically to cities once the prosperity gets high enough and you have some troops in the garrison.
Quest/Settlement Name (if related): Ortysia, Jalmarys, Zeonica, Rhotae, Poros, etc.
Media (Screenshots & Video): ;
Version: 1.0.6
Computer Specs
:
OS: Windows 10 Pro
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super
CPU: Intel i7 6700k
RAM: 32GB GSkill RipJaw 3200MHz
Motherboard: Asus Z170 Pro Gaming
Storage Device (HDD/SSD): Samsung EVO 840 SSD
 
I came and signed up for the forums expressly to make a post about this problem. Thanks for beating me to it, and with much greater detail than I would have managed. :wink:

But to add a data point, I am experiencing this on my first castle as well. I've maxed out every castle upgrade, the bound villages are in good shape and one of them produces grain, I keep the surrounding lands free of bandits, and I've tried reducing my number of garrisoned troops to the point where there's finally enough food to go around, all to no avail. (I need that garrison. I have enough space for 403 troops, but apparently only enough food for a few dozen. This is, for obvious reasons, WAY less than ideal. I need that garrison to build up my forces so I can expand.)

This is causing my prosperity to plummet, and I can find no way to improve the situation.
 
I came and signed up for the forums expressly to make a post about this problem. Thanks for beating me to it, and with much greater detail than I would have managed. :wink:

But to add a data point, I am experiencing this on my first castle as well. I've maxed out every castle upgrade, the bound villages are in good shape and one of them produces grain, I keep the surrounding lands free of bandits, and I've tried reducing my number of garrisoned troops to the point where there's finally enough food to go around, all to no avail. (I need that garrison. I have enough space for 403 troops, but apparently only enough food for a few dozen. This is, for obvious reasons, WAY less than ideal. I need that garrison to build up my forces so I can expand.)

This is causing my prosperity to plummet, and I can find no way to improve the situation.

Thanks for the reply and the additional info on the situation with castles. Since I don't have any castle I couldn't have said anything on that front.

I can add that my Cities are all maxed out as well, and they are set to Irrigation for max food production.
I loaded an old save, just when I stocked up may garrison and took screenshots for comparison.
;
These where taken on day 429 in-game. As can be seen my prosperity is at over 6600 and growing, and my food production is fine as well. I added 295 troops to my garrison, which according to the information provided was within my food production limits. A couple of weeks later the decline set in and by now (see screenshots from original post above, taken on day 568) my garrisoned troops are all gone (10 left with -9 expected change). My prosperity has dropped to 5200 and is still dropping, as is the food shortage which clearly indicates a negative feedback loop!

I can also add that I'm constantly patrolling my area and no raids to my villages have been happening. I also take out all bigger parties of looters or bandits.
 
Yeah right now I am buying tons of grain and selling them in my town. It solves the problem, but its a lot of manual work.

Give it a try. Buy like 2000 grain and give to your town. No more food shortage (until caravans take it away lol)
 
Yeah right now I am buying tons of grain and selling them in my town. It solves the problem, but its a lot of manual work.

Give it a try. Buy like 2000 grain and give to your town. No more food shortage (until caravans take it away lol)

I tried that and it did nothing. All my cities are having plenty food when I go to the trading menu, but the shortage is still there apparently...
Also if I sell to much at once to the markets, the caravans take it immediately because of the extreme price drop.
Not a solution in my opinion (even if it would work reliably, which it doesn't) because I would have to spent all my time just running around buying food for my cities...
 
Yeah right now I am buying tons of grain and selling them in my town. It solves the problem, but its a lot of manual work.

Give it a try. Buy like 2000 grain and give to your town. No more food shortage (until caravans take it away lol)


i think they should let us put food in a stash that castles should have too not just major cities and in this stash only the garrison and town can eat from it as a backup food source and it would not be traded in the market
 
sleep for a day so the city updates the numbers.

if you add hundreds/thousands of food the city will have way too much :grin:, at least for a time.

EDIT:
OK initially I didn't think the numbers changed after waiting, which was wrong.
The numbers stabilized for a second until the caravans came and bought everything... :grin:
Literally after half a day of waiting there are already four caravans transporting all my food off and they just keep plundering my market.
But even then, every time I check there's at least 300 grain, and 30-50 grapes, fish, meat, cheese, butter, dates, etc available which doesn't indicate a shortage...

EDIT 2:
So it seems that dumping a lot of food onto the marked kinda makes it worse for me. After 7 days the numbers where worse, because the huge amount of food made all the caravans come and buy up everything. This time around there was literally nothing left (unlike before where the marked always had "some" food - see above).

An obvious and easy solution would be a food storage for the city, that you can directly access, to dump food there, so the caravans don't immediately come and buy all your food.
But on top of that the numbers do need balancing!
Right now I'm seriously considering to give away two or three of my cities because I don't wanna spend the rest of my campaign riding around trying to buy all the food, while my settlements are under attack because I'm not there to defend them...
But giving away cities just because of imbalance issues doesn't feel good...
 
Last edited:
I'm having the same issue in the same city. It's a showstopper for me. No sense trying to proceed with the game if I can't keep a garrison in my town.
 
But this surely has to be a bug, right? Why would an increased fief prosperity in any way negatively impact the food supply? It makes the game almost unplayable right now if you have fiefs, back to MP I guess...
 
I'm having the same issues and have to constantly dump food into the market for my towns. Looks like the food stock is calculated from a percentage of the available food in the market/trade screen.

It seems like a a solution could be to have towns not sale food past a certain point. Example: a town has 500 grain in the market but will only sale down to 300 or something like that.
 
Why would an increased fief prosperity in any way negatively impact the food supply?

M&B uses prosperity as a abstract concept for population and wealth. More prosperity, more people, more people, more rich people, more rich people, demand for luxury items (err grapes and wine? lol) increases, thus we have

more prosperity = more food consumption (in towns)

while villages are the other way around. They are the farmers, so the more people in villages, more food is produced, and more food is delivered to the nearby town/castle.

there is now also the open market with caravans and all that. So if you have too much of something (like grain) the price falls, so merchants will come and buy it to sell somewhere else (profit!). The other way around should work too. A starving town will pay extra for food, so merchants should bring food for you. Question are: can they get to your town? Do you have money to buy the expensive food? And so on.

Then you have policies, town buildings, etc, that impact the food production and how much you can have in reserve.

The numbers right now are likely broken tho, so it needs balancing.
 
Castle/town food deficit shouldn't scale directly with prosperity since the production bonuses for village prosperity/surrounding lands and upgrades seem to be more static for a given prosperity range, as in the OP.
 
Do workshops have an effect? I noticed I do not have this issue with 400+ garrisoned and 300+ militia (all stats maxed).

One of my shops produces food (I think it's the grape one). Maybe this creates a demand where caravans bring food as it is a necessary resource for the workshop. Not sure... but since the devs haven't addressed this it might be an unknown game mechanic.
 
Back
Top Bottom