Issue with cities' food supply/consumption

[Fremder]

So after now 160 hours of excessively playing the game. There are some major issues with cities and their management.

The root of all is the food system. I will explain why.

Food in cities is important as it fuels everything. From income, troops over militia & garrison to trading.
The food in a town is composed of multiple factors
1. the villages and their type of production (steady)
2. the buildings in the city (steady)
3. the availability and amount of food on the market (fluctuating)

During a war point 1 and 3 get altered:
a: villages get raided/destroyed - your are loosing the food income
b: villagers from said villages are gone to stock up the market with products
c: caravans have a harder time to reach cities and supply them

Imagine due to a raid we loose a village. This village is now destroyed for quite some time.
Immediately our granery gets drained as we have negative food now. If the granery is depleted we will start loosing prosperity, militia and garrisoned troops. So basically humans starve to death.
But caravans will still buy food from our town worsening our situation. You can however dump 1000 units of fish into the market. Our food is now positive again and we stopped our garrison from dying. Although the price of fish is now extremely low in the citiy due to the high supply, this leads to caravans swarming the city and buying out all the fish and the city has a food shortage yet again. And all the people in the city starve yet again.

I have this problem now in all of my cities during a war (the amount of lords raiding everything because do anything else is so annyoing). I do not know how i am supposed to keep my cities prosperous or defended if i cant supply my garrisoned troops with food. Especially since you have to put high tier troops in cities because units lvl extremely slow in cities (castles lvl way faster so you put your low lvl units there and put them later on in your cities). You can have garrisons of like 500 units but at 80-160 unit strong garrisons most cities start starving naturally.
The tices like daily production, or the policies do not allow enough tweaking in that system.

A quick fix could be that our garrisoned units use the food in the stash, if the city is starving. Let the peasants starve before my precious garrison.

My suggestions in the long run is that we can build a garrison granery that fills up before the city granery and is only accessed by the garrisoned troops. This granery should also be able to be filled by ourselves, especially during a siege(if the siegeing army does not have the perk of stopping everyone entering/leaving the city).
This granery should have also a max capacity at max lvl to support a maxed out garrison(like 500 or reduce that to 300) for 10 (7?) days.
Currently there is no way of helping a city during or after a siege with food. (yeah i can dump it on the market so the price gets inflated and the next caravan will buy it out again).This needs to be adressed aswell.

Another suggestion would be that prices of food should rise way more drastically during a food shortage, increasing upkeep of the city. Also price hikes should only go down to normal as soon as the cities granery is filled again. Currently we have huge daily fluctuations and my cities often cant fill their granery when i am in peaceful times.
Preventing buyout of food that is available in large quanitity, but needed is another point. Like yeah we have 1000 units of fish but actually we need minimum 800 so that the town has enough to not starve, but anyway we sell 900 of that.

I have had cities where the whole garrison of 120 units(of possible 500) and 400 militia completely died only because prosperity was really high and caravans where still buying out food from the market, leading to a negative 19 food although all villages were up and supplying.


I know these "background" simulations are not as exciting as the battlefield, but they are well needed to enrich the sandbox.

 

[Galrad]

I agree, this is something that needs to be fixed. A garrison should keep a garrison food reserve for at least a week.
But i dont think caravans are the problem. Sure, they buy food to trade away even when the city is starving but this is historically acurate (the irish potato famine and ireland still exporting grain to england is an example that comes to mind) and i think it would be hard to fix. Because that would mean reworking the pricing of goods or how caravans act.
If Taleworlds decides to do something about it, i think Kingdom Policies would be a good place to start. It could give playes some control over the matter while still alowing for some diversity. Maybe there would be two or more mutually exclusive trade policies:
Free Trade: The cities grow faster, are more prosperous and are visited by caravans often. Caravans are allowed to buy food while the city starves, prices fluctuate a lot and garrisons need to buy food on the market.
Some kind mercantilism/resilient cities policy where caravans can't buy any goods that are needed by the city and garrisons (militia even?) hoard large amounts of food while even the civilan granarys are often filled because food is rarely traded away. Of course this would limit prosperity, gowth and all industries that rely on imported goods. (And maybe increase the wages for garrisons.)
It would also be interesting to have a fixed prices policy where prices of all goods are forced to a level which traders/caravans would consider non profitable (nether for buying nor selling). This would of course halt almost all trade and have serious consequences for all other economic aspects, reducing tax income by some heavy 70 % (or similar). Harsh, but maybe just what a ruler with an iron fist needs in a time of war.
I think kingdom policies have a lot of not-yet-used potential!

 

[Fremder]

Yeah i agree cravans are realisitc buying out food and such.
The issue basically is that the price of fish for example gets really low although thats basically their only food to feed the people in that town. Leading to a sellout of the fish although their food situation overall is dire as nothing else is basically available after such an insertion by the player. The price shouldnt be solely determined by the amount of fish but by the amount of all the food in a city. So that a freshly siege lifted town that got provided by supplies from the player doesnt sell everything out the next day only to have a shortage again. That would nowehre realistically happen.

I think its not a policy issue although they are a great tool to further enable the player to take control over such situations.

 

[ComradeCoconut]

I mean the main problem is I just can't have a proper garrison because as soon as one village is raided they all start to starve. I don't really care how it's solved so long as it is solved.

 

[Fremder]

I mean the main problem is I just can't have a proper garrison because as soon as one village is raided they all start to starve. I don't really care how it's solved so long as it is solved.

It doesn't necessarily need to be raided, but simply the market gets out bought, because other cities in the area have a food shortage, even enemy cities and neutral caravans buying out your town because their town has higher prices. So you have now a shortage in food aswell and your garrison dies because of this.

Second thought is that you can't even reach 500 unit strong garrison that's 1 food per 20 units = 25 food consumption. You need to starve your cities prosperity down to have 25 food excessive for such a garrison, but in that process you'll even loose garrison as garrison and prosperity are equally treated in terms of food distribution.

Yeah this needs to be changed.

 

[drakkan44]

This is normal that city reach an balance in late game on its prosperity and its food supplies. But if this balance give penality on loyalty and impossibilty to get a garrison, there is a big pb. I basicly can't have a garrison in my city even with all my village prosper.

Here is a recap of the solutions we thought :
> a 2nd granary for garrison that fill before the poeple ones
> a big variation one food price scaling on food shortage
> a minimum stock of food in market that could be fix by a policy

I think that having a minimum stock of food in market may be redundant with a big variation one food price scaling on food shortage. High prices already prevent caravan from buying food.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

I vote for gutting this stuff for now. Make castles and towns a Unit piggy bank and paycheck and don't mess with the economic bull**** until the rest of the game is finished.

Playing bet 1.2 today I loaded up tons of food for my new town, got them to +food, rounded up bunch of bad dudes and leveled them, dropped some off and when to train up more, game back, my bad dudes are gone.
I have +food, there's no reason I should be getting -garrison. The whole existence of town for me is to store troops.
That was my whole day, feeding my town and building for the next wars and it's just flushed down the toilet.
Doesn't work, isn't fun, gutt it and fix next year.

 

[Figulus]

There problems should be alleviated by installing a governor , it'll give them something to do other than adding a point to popularity.

 

[drakkan44]

@AnandaShanti : why you say that the pb should be "fix next year"

 

[MojoJojoGR]

Am i missing something?

I see people over-analyzing this issue.
This is a game breaking problem but at the same time I feel like this is the simplest problem to solve.
Just increase the food capacity or remove it completely.

Why has this gone unaddressed for so long is beyond me. Its as simple as changing a single number in the game code. And if you thing about it is completely illogical for a town to have the same food capacity throughout is life, without putting its growth and prosperity into consideration.

Currently the food cap is 160, which is completely ridiculous if you consider that towns with a prosperity of 8000+ need 160+ a day. Why would a prosperous town throw away its extra food when its barely enough to feed them for a day.
As a result all you need is one bad day or one caravan to buy the food for your town to get into a downward spiral.

 

[drakkan44]

Indeed, i guess you didn't understood the pb. Increasing the stock wont solve the pb.

The starvation is a mechanics that limit town growth (and that fine like that for me). But loosing troop in a prosper town dont make sense.

 

[TheShermanator]

Good ideas all around. To recap, I’d vote for the strategic garrison food reserve - via stash or other special granary.

Generally, I’m in favor of keeping the dynamic market economy but reforming it to make settlement vendors more rational as economic actors. For example, as previously stated, they should keep all food prices high unless there is a true net surplus.

Along these lines, settlement vendors should evaluate food prices based on total food supply, not just the quantity of one food item in isolation. So if, per OP, you dump a bunch of fish into a settlement’s market, but there is still 0 grain, dates, meat, etc, they should keep fish prices proportionally high.

 

[TheShermanator]

Also, these tweaks in favor of the player w food could be countered w more interesting settlement management problems. Like a town w food for the garrison but not the gen pop could have food riots, which could be devastating for loyalty and prosperity (even more than food shortages hurt prosperity now). I’d trade ruinous prosperity consequences for the ability to reliably man the walls.

 

[Forcbonly]

For the time being, I use a mod to fix it.
There is a mod which allows the garrison to stay fed without food?

 

[ghandi_de]

At heart I think it's a good mechanic - you can weaken a city by depriving it of food. Especially in a siege, this should be effective.

If you look after your settlement, prosperity will always grow until food runs out. Which means in your most prosperous cities you can't keep a garrison as it will always starve. One possible way to fix this mechanic is outside of a siege to prioritize feeding the garrison over city prosperity, which makes sense. Soldiers protecting a city will get food before feeding new citizens. During a siege the food stores should be reserved exclusively for the garrison. Prosperity will fall rapidly as citizens will starve and/or leave. Still makes sense to me.This way you can feel confident that the garrison you place in a settlement will be there until the food runs out in a siege. Placing a larger garrison will strain the prosperity of the city instead of ensuring garrison starvation.

One other observation: It seems to me the mechanic right now only punishes the player. I've besieged towns with 0 food for weeks where the defending troop count did not change at all. This seems poorly implemented.

 

[pmn1990]

Am i missing something?

I see people over-analyzing this issue.
This is a game breaking problem but at the same time I feel like this is the simplest problem to solve.
Just increase the food capacity or remove it completely.

Why has this gone unaddressed for so long is beyond me. Its as simple as changing a single number in the game code. And if you thing about it is completely illogical for a town to have the same food capacity throughout is life, without putting its growth and prosperity into consideration.

Currently the food cap is 160, which is completely ridiculous if you consider that towns with a prosperity of 8000+ need 160+ a day. Why would a prosperous town throw away its extra food when its barely enough to feed them for a day.
As a result all you need is one bad day or one caravan to buy the food for your town to get into a downward spiral.

This right here. The capacity for a city should go up to 1000 plus. Most cities and castles were able to withstand seiges lasting 100 plus days. Also prosperity shouldnt tank your food production the way it does. If anything add more weight to the garrison. Every bit of food shouldnt go to market as well because roaming armys will buy all the food i do it every other neutral city i walk by.

 

[drakkan44]

V's Garrisons Don't Eat Nor Starve - v2

Your precious garrisons will no longer starve when a passing army buys up all food in town. Donating to AI garrisons is finally worth doing. May also help against AI snowballing.

www.nexusmods.com

no more men will die starving with this. I would have prefer they patch it, but it is a beta.

 

[Maximum997]

you can weaken a city by depriving it of food

Yes. Thats why cities and castles had a food storages for years.
And in actual siege garrison warriors will be first proprity(after nobles) to feed.

Right now garrison start to starve after 1 village get burned.

 

[qmax]

My main beef is that good troops I put into a city get starved to death while militia get recruited and stay alive.

 

[Old-Bull]

The simple solution is to give your garrison access to the stash. I keep my city stashes full of food and flood the market with it every week or so to keep my troops fed. If you let the garrison access the food in the stash it solves the problem.