In Progress Settlement Food Going Down For No Reason

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Summary: Recently I noticed that my Settlement, Sargot, had continually low food stocks despite the garrison being small enough to feed and all the villages being in perfect prosperity. I cannot submit a screenshot, but I do have the town's stats. The town had nearly a prosperity of 7000, with a militia of nearly 400 and a garrison of 250. Loyalty and Security was also high, as was the prosperity of the surrounding villages. The food stats read:

Inside Production +15
Prosperity -159.2
Garrison -12
Hunting Rights +2
Calioc (Village) +18
Etirfurd (Village) +18
Orchards +18
Date Fruit +1
Meat +8
Fish +8
Grain +51
Grape +5
Olives +3
Butter +3
Beer +8

If my math is correct, the town should be producing nearly 158 food with a deficit of 171. While the math here checks out, the town previously produced food at such a rate with the same garrison and prosperity that food stocks were always full. Even with no garrison at all, the town would be apparently be at a food deficit. Is this intentional?
How to Reproduce: Unknown
Have you used cheats and if so which: No cheats
Scene Name (if related): N/A
Media (Screenshots & Video): N/A
 
Do you have a save file of session that you experienced this issue? With your save file, we can reproduce the issue much easier and faster. For more information regarding how to send us your save files, you can check this thread out. You can find your save file here:
C:\Users\username\Documents\Mount and Blade II Bannerlord\Game Saves

You can send your save files to us via upload.taleworlds.com site. Please write your username and this threads URL into the description box so that we can find it easier. Thanks for reporting and sorry for any inconvenience!
 
Do you have a save file of session that you experienced this issue? With your save file, we can reproduce the issue much easier and faster. For more information regarding how to send us your save files, you can check this thread out. You can find your save file here:
C:\Users\username\Documents\Mount and Blade II Bannerlord\Game Saves

You can send your save files to us via upload.taleworlds.com site. Please write your username and this threads URL into the description box so that we can find it easier. Thanks for reporting and sorry for any inconvenience!
Ok, I uploaded the latest save file along with my user name and the post link. Thanks for helping so far.
 
Generally speaking without the screenshots though, it sounds to me like its as intended.

Prosperity means population.
So the higher prosperity the more mounts to feed.

Why you had no issues before could be of many reasons.
Example before it had a huge stock of grain in the market or other foods or that the other villages which isnt looted, went to Sargot to sell their food, and now they go to other towns.
Caravans comeing in haveing been raided, or is now at war with your faction.

Rule of thumb for me is if towns start to act up like this for me is that I just go to other villages(specially grain) and just dump it into the market).
Just dump 1k of grain and usually it will counter it for quite some time.

There is so many small things that trickle down into it(but yah they will figure it out prolly) but this is more a tip for you as a player from another player to "fix" it yourself when the issues arise and so you dont "loose fun" over this issue.
Like if you look at nearby villages there is several Vlandian that produce grain nearby, and also some Battanian villages.
Just go to them pick up grain and dump.

Another thing that it dont tell you is also if you look at the town - management when in the town, you'll see a small basket icon at the top.
This shows what the town consume, and that dont include food only.
So horses, tools etc aswell.
So if there is little of that in the market aswell it also counts - surplus goods in the market adds to food production(even if its not just food mind you).

Another trick if you got the denars for it, is to travel to a nearby city and buy all the items in the market then sell in your town :razz:
Also if you look at your market - are the prices, green yellow or red for goods(need to have a trade perk to see the colors I belive though).
This indicates if its in demand(red) so if you just buy up alot of those products nearby you can satisfy the need to the city that way.
 
Got the file, forwarded it. IF this case will be confirmed as a bug by our QA team we will try to fix it, if it is something that the design team should handle the issue will be forwarded to them.
 
Not a bug, cities with a lot of population will be in a food deficit. However, there should be a way for caravans to buy food from other regions. If there is high prosperity, there is money; and where there is money, there is a way.

But for now, working as designed :

This or not have the arbitrary cap on food production from villages.
Or instead put a cap on prosperity vs "natural" food production from villages so it dont go out of control so to speak.
And you get this "frustrating" mechanics where you either "let it go" or micromanage.

The problem of course if you let it go it will revolt most likely over time, and if you go micromanage and leave the frontlines - then typically you loose "lots" of progress..

I think the problem is abit on "players" atleast thsoe who are like me who is "too invested" into the games, and its not "just numbers" (not sure how to properly describe it).

Still a thing they need to do is that armies should prioritize to buy food from villages instead of towns, this is a huge factor in starvation(for short term, or in some rare cases longterm, some cities have poor production to start, and often 2-3 armies will go to it to restock, vs going to the neighbouring cities which have abundance of grain(Lageta is horrible this way, I've seen Battania, Vlandia, Northern Empire, Western Empire and Aserai all go to the city pending on who they are at war with(Battania travel from Seonon to Lageta, then to siege Sargoth(Vlandia).
Aseri at war with Vlandia, bunker up in Lageta then hit up their target Sargoth..
 
The problem is bad design; if there is a food deficit, population growth and prosperity growth should slow down and at some point come to a halt. There can't be significant growth when there is a food deficit. In real life, if a prospering city has reached the size where food becomes scarce; price of food will increase by a lot, poorer people will start leaving the city and merchants will be motivated to come do food runs to the city.

Maybe what they mean by prosperity is actually population. If there is a lot of population in a city, but not enough food, the people will start going hungry and angry toward the local noble.

There should be a way to lower prosperity, for example by removing prosperity buildings.
 
The problem is bad design; if there is a food deficit, population growth and prosperity growth should slow down and at some point come to a halt. There can't be significant growth when there is a food deficit. In real life, if a prospering city has reached the size where food becomes scarce; price of food will increase by a lot, poorer people will start leaving the city and merchants will be motivated to come do food runs to the city.

Maybe what they mean by prosperity is actually population. If there is a lot of population in a city, but not enough food, the people will start going hungry and angry toward the local noble.

There should be a way to lower prosperity, for example by removing prosperity buildings.

Cough cough that is the issue "prosperity" do mean population in terms of the food value.
I've actually made a post about it in suggestion to change the word.
But it gained 0 traction/intrest, like right after the game started in EA.

Maybe not a need to lower prosperity, but instead an option to "cap it" so we dont have to micromanage it once it comes to some crazy points, where all the negative effects kick in.
Should flatten out more when it comes to the point of "sustainable" population based on amount of villages tied to it.

The core issue though, is that it needs too much micro-management for my taste.(but my taste isnt always aligned with Taleworlds) so short story long, when EA is over --> I'll start playing with mods, I never during, to avoid any extra sources of error when reporting etc.
But once EA is over - boom I'll use a ton of the tracked mods over on nexus that fixes alot of the design choices I dont agree with.
 
Maybe not a need to lower prosperity, but instead an option to "cap it"
Isn't this already the case? Or is it just restricted by food production.
I was wondering about it in other post.

Still a thing they need to do is that armies should prioritize to buy food from villages instead of towns, this is a huge factor in starvation(for short term, or in some rare cases longterm, some cities have poor production to start, and often 2-3 armies will go to it to restock, vs going to the neighbouring cities which have abundance of grain(Lageta is horrible this way, I've seen Battania, Vlandia, Northern Empire, Western Empire and Aserai all go to the city pending on who they are at war with(Battania travel from Seonon to Lageta, then to siege Sargoth(Vlandia).
Aseri at war with Vlandia, bunker up in Lageta then hit up their target Sargoth..
And yeah, if I understood the concept correctly, this is also a big problem because it causes fluctuations in food availability reducing prosperity and creates problems like loosing garrison, as discussed in this thread.
 
Isn't this already the case? Or is it just restricted by food production.
I was wondering about it in other post.


And yeah, if I understood the concept correctly, this is also a big problem because it causes fluctuations in food availability reducing prosperity and creates problems like loosing garrison, as discussed in this thread.

Afaik there isnt a hard cap on it, but a softcap, so once you get higher up there, there will be some debuff to it, I belive its called something like "rent prices"? (I dont have a save where I can actually see what its called).

There is several things that cause prosperity to rise.
You can boost it by the settlement buildings, by governor perks etc.
However a huge factor is "market goods" so if the town have surplus of that(this includes items that arent food aswell, so horses, pack animals, iron, wood, tools etc etc, but those dont impact the town as badly as lack of food though).
The problem with alot of the cities is that they dont have grain produceing village attached to them(and those will typically suffer alot, cause they can replenish the lack of grain that visiting lords buy up, "fast enough") and thus you get the dips.
This is a total nitemare if several of those "free lords" from rebelfactions that survived, but lost their lands, decide to stay in your towns.
As they will help vs looters, yes, but they will also buy "all the food".

But yah overall ideally they "rework" it abit so its less of a micromanage task, or that it wont result in tanking loyality etc as hard as it does.
So that it can "recover" over time on its own.

Example I often try to be "clever" with what cities I get, so I pass up on or give back fiefs I get.
So I can instead get Seonon/Marunath or Epicroeta(close to my "homelands" - Sturgia)(so its less likely to be raided to pieces if we are at war with someone on the other side of the map(Khuzait).
All of theese towns have 1 or more grain produceing or several nearby grain produceing villages nearby(attached to castles).
While sometimes I've had dips where an army buy up all the grain resulting in a -50 food --> before it reaches 0 from haveing a granary with 700 -> it is replenished.

Meanwhile if I have Amperal instead on the other side of the map, when this happends, 0 villages nearbye is grainproducers(not counting the Tyal and Baltakahnd villages) it will not recover and I actively have to go to it, and buy grain from the nearbye villages and dump it in the market.(often for profit mind you).

Ideally the function of the granary would work different, that "instead of it being" an invisible buffer as it is, also count as a "cap" on how much the visiting lords/armies can buy of grain. Thus preventing this issue.

Cause in 90% of the time a city is starving is lack of grain(some other goods aswell of course, but it dont have as sever an effect).

Go into the town management, look at the "basket" you'll see how much units each town consume pr day.
1 tool, 1 horse, 1 wine , 1 oil etc you get the idea.
But then you see the amount of grain it consume vs the others, its alot.
Thats why dumping the grain is so "needed" and good to counter this issue.

The problem though is that the caravans will see "oh cheap grain!" and buy it sometimes..

Dont get me wrong its fairly decent system they have in place, but it could be abit less "annoying/Taxing" for the player when they are in the warpace(or for those of who get locked in eternal battle at one point, where there is 0 peace, just endless wars(ok you get peace with 1 faction, but then another declare etc, so its a chain of wars(to balance it out I get it, but its annoying, and it dont feel "fun" over time.)

Thus we cant focus on fixing theese issues, cause then well all the progress in the wars is lost in days typically, which we had spent "years" to get etc.

There needs to be a "fatigue" added or some mechanics to counter warmongering overall(given that initiating war is easy, but getting peace is almost impossible).(for players who get locked in chain wars, up until that point the game is awesome)

But since we got not time to micromanage villages and towns, cause of war, well then this is an issue.
 
Ideally the function of the granary would work different, that "instead of it being" an invisible buffer as it is, also count as a "cap" on how much the visiting lords/armies can buy of grain. Thus preventing this issue.
Nice explanation, thanks. This looks like it can be part of the solution, it can probably eliminate the issue almost completely. Just limit the food available in the markets (that lords can buy) and prioritize always having a minimum reserve.

This would probably fix the issue with caravans seeing and buying up food when you dump it in a town because the food you would dump would fill up the "minimum food reserves" and not put it available in the markets thus not creating a surplus and not affecting the prices and economy.

I imagine a problem this system would create is not having enough food for lords to buy (this problem is really an underlying one not the result of these changes), but I also guess that they would go to other settlements where the is food availability? if not, they should.
This suggestion should also solve or mitigate the issue
Still a thing they need to do is that armies should prioritize to buy food from villages instead of towns
Also, having some ways reduce the prosperity/population (prosperity drift) should be implemented, like having a disease/plague mechanic where
  1. Disease would be always present and have a negative effect on prosperity the higher it is.
  2. Higher population/prosperity means higher chance of creating events like plagues which would more severely affect prosperity.
  3. Both of these should also be depend on food availability, so that when food availability is very reduced you can reduce prosperity faster to return to situation where food is available.
This should not hard to implement and because these caps are necessary to keep prosperity stabilized I think instead of having hidden caps just call it disease and plague.

Other mechanics similar to this could also have an effect on prosperity.
The prosperity of towns go out of control as the game advances. I see many hitting over 6k easily which does cause problem, more over food as it gets harder to feed people because of it. One simple way to fix it would be to make a bigger prosperity drift like we have for loyalty and security. that would help them from going out of control, not that they cant get 6k but just stop almost all from blowing past it.
On the flip side if you own a town and it is on the front lines and gets attacked and villages sacked it become way easy for it to drop below 1,000
Please give a decent size prosperity drift
But having a single event/variable that causes a big prosperity drift is not good imo because multiple of these events can significantly impact prosperity in an uncontrolled way.

This is why artificial caps (normally dependent on the variable you want to cap or dependent on a variable that controls the variable you want to cap. E.g.: prosperity affects prosperity; food affects prosperity. Respectively) are preferable.

This is why I think something like the disease/plague mechanic I proposed should be preferable.
 
Nice explanation, thanks. This looks like it can be part of the solution, it can probably eliminate the issue almost completely. Just limit the food available in the markets (that lords can buy) and prioritize always having a minimum reserve.

This would probably fix the issue with caravans seeing and buying up food when you dump it in a town because the food you would dump would fill up the "minimum food reserves" and not put it available in the markets thus not creating a surplus and not affecting the prices and economy.

I imagine a problem this system would create is not having enough food for lords to buy (this problem is really an underlying one not the result of these changes), but I also guess that they would go to other settlements where the is food availability? if not, they should.
This suggestion should also solve or mitigate the issue

Also, having some ways reduce the prosperity/population (prosperity drift) should be implemented, like having a disease/plague mechanic where
  1. Disease would be always present and have a negative effect on prosperity the higher it is.
  2. Higher population/prosperity means higher chance of creating events like plagues which would more severely affect prosperity.
  3. Both of these should also be depend on food availability, so that when food availability is very reduced you can reduce prosperity faster to return to situation where food is available.
This should not hard to implement and because these caps are necessary to keep prosperity stabilized I think instead of having hidden caps just call it disease and plague.

Other mechanics similar to this could also have an effect on prosperity.

But having a single event/variable that causes a big prosperity drift is not good imo because multiple of these events can significantly impact prosperity in an uncontrolled way.

This is why artificial caps (normally dependent on the variable you want to cap or dependent on a variable that controls the variable you want to cap. E.g.: prosperity affects prosperity; food affects prosperity. Respectively) are preferable.

This is why I think something like the disease/plague mechanic I proposed should be preferable.
At this point I support anything to stop the out of control prosperity gets
 
Ok, thanks for looking into it.
Do we have any updates for the situation? Cause recently i noticed that happening as well, but to a castle and with a castle you literally cant do anything to get it out of starvation... This is obviously expected cause food is finite and prosperity keeps growing forever, the only way to have negative prosperity drift is through running out of food completely which kills your garrison in the process. This seems so unnecessary, cause it would be any easy fix: just make it so whenever you have negative change in food, prosperity decreases or freezes.
 
@cuce I think a prosperity drift like we have for loyalty and security would be amazing and solve it so easily, just need to determine the range and drift numbers but its early access and the beta branch, install it and we can test it before it goes to the main branch
 
Overall though from playing in 1.65 Beta I think its much better than it was tbh from what I can see.

Still some of the issues is related to "lords" emptying out the market for some of the "fundamental" resources that the cities use.

Ideally you should "rethink" or redesign some of the villages or the mechanics.
I find that in the cities that have 2 villages specially, where none of them produce grain this is typically an ongoing issue.
Towns with grainproduction, I rarely see this issue at all, unless of course its village been raided.

A simple fix though would be to up the grain of that villages supply to be abit more.
Or make the AI not be able to buy food items that isnt "Green".(in terms of relative market value).

Example Diathama (NE originally town).

5800 prosperity, 2 villages attached, both villages have 600+(meaning they each give 18 food)
Yet there is 2 lords from other factions(read I conquered it) so they are at peace with my faction, but they keep on usieng the town as their "base" so to speak, and thus they keep on empting the grain.


I go to the village attached to Rhesos castle and the one attached to Epicroeta and buy cheap grain, and dump it in Diatham and for a few days the food is +.
Then I go join the war effort again, and within 1 week it goes from +24 food to +3 and then it starts to go down -.
While the granary have 700 capacity, it will only last that many days before it goes down.
Now if you just let it go and empty the granary the population will however suffer and it will decrease over time.
Until it hits a lower population, and the food balance out better.

Basically its very "frustrating" for some ppl who "care too much" (like me) and thus we want to micromanage it.

Ideally you'd put some softcaps or hardcaps on the towns based on the amount of villages and their production, so that this micromanagement arent needed.

That or make the goods on the market not be sold to caravans and lors when they are red.
While its true the prices for grain for instance is still high in my town, I stopped a caravan and asked him for tradetips - and he bougth grain and went to sell it to another town nearby where the price was higher.

Basically there needs to be a "reserve" on the marketproducts so they dont sell themselves into starvation so to speak.
You can easy find the "needs" of the town in thar city management and the basket.
There you can see that the town consumes xyz, and unless those needs are met and then some, the goods shouldnt be sold.

Selling yourself into starvation is kind of a bad mechanics tbh.
 
@cuce I think a prosperity drift like we have for loyalty and security would be amazing and solve it so easily, just need to determine the range and drift numbers but its early access and the beta branch, install it and we can test it before it goes to the main branch
sorry for the late answer.

the nature of food consumption and prosperity creates a drift. Adding another layer on top might just make the world more static. Instead at the moment we are looking at ways to stabilize prosperity increase and create a buffer before decrease.
 
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