Warehouse rationing

[Sacha]

Basically this would be an option for either the lord/steward of a region, or the banker. It would allow you to ration any food in your warehouses.

For instance, there is 500 food in your warehouse, and your region consumes 100 bushels a day. Your realm can't supply any more food for another 10 days. Normally, you would be faced with the following scenario: after 5 days, your food is gone and your region starts losing peasants until the next shipment arrives. To me it just doesn't make sense... no sensible Lord would let his peasants feast for five days and then starve for another five days.

With rationing, you could make that food last 10 days instead of five, by only giving out half the required daily rations. Your region will go hungry, but there will be no widespread starvation killing off a bunch of your peasants.

This would make managing developing cities a bit easier, especially big ones. For instance, Giask on Dwilight is causing us some major headaches. We want to stop the city from growing by controlling how much food goes there, so they peasants have just enough food to sustain themselves, but they do not procreate. It's a logistical semi-nightmare that requires some micromanaging, which I believe is not the way the game is supposed to head towards. Adding an option to ration food would make things a lot easier.

Giving the ration option to the bankers also gives them some more to do besides setting taxes and crunching food numbers, and at the same time it gives them the means to check the power of Dukes, by allowing them to shut off the food supply to the cities. To prevent it from being too powerful, perhaps rations should be set at a bare minimum of 50% of the required bushels.

[Zakilevo]

I like this idea. I was actually thinking about suggesting this as well but wasn't sure if the dev team would say yes.

Maybe the banker or duke can control something like a quarter ration, a half ration and a full ration kind of things? Setting your ration on a quarter should reduce production, morale and control quickly too since people won't be able to work as hard as before with only eater a quarter of what they used to. (+ reducing population growth to almost none)

[Shizzle]

Getting a city like Giask to go from 0 to 160,000 is supposed to be a logistic nightmare :)

[Bedwyr]

Yes, but the idea is to stop growth you cannot feed.  Right now, cities are in boom-bust cycles where the population reaches unsustainable levels, starves, and then grows to an unsustainable level again.

I concur that it would be very, very nice to have some form of rationing that effectively zero'd population growth.

[Sacha]

I like this idea. I was actually thinking about suggesting this as well but wasn't sure if the dev team would say yes.

Maybe the banker or duke can control something like a quarter ration, a half ration and a full ration kind of things? Setting your ration on a quarter should reduce production, morale and control quickly too since people won't be able to work as hard as before with only eater a quarter of what they used to. (+ reducing population growth to almost none)

AFAIK, the famine rules are as follows:

-Supply 100% of daily required rations, and your city be well-fed and it will grow in population.
-Supply between 50% and 100%, and your city will go hungry. Population won't grow, but there won't be any starvation, and I think there is a penalty to stats as well.
-Supply less than 50%, and the city will starve.

If that's correct, then sending quarter rations would still cause starvation. Not only will there be no growth, there will be a decline in population.

[Indirik]

I once came up with a system for rationing food to alleviate the explosive growth followed by devestating starvation that we have now. Tom didn't really care for the idea too much. The quarter cup a day of grain that peasants get already isn't exactly a feast. But maybe if enough people want it, and we can come up with a simple enough system, he might agree to take another look at it.

[JPierreD]

Just add the option to feed them 50%, instead of 100%, and face exactly the same results you'd face as if you only had 50% of the needed food in the warehouse. It's quite simple.

I do think, though, that it should be an option for each Lord, not for the Banker.

[egamma]

Right now, all you have to do is send 25 bushels to a region of any size and it won't starve. That seems a much more like gaming the system than an actual rationing system.

[Bael]

Some sort of rationing system is really needed. Either what has been suggested, or just a percentage system, releasing a certain percent or what the region normally would consume daily.

[Daycryn]

Hmm, yes, but a minor quibble: it should be granaries instead of warehouses.

[Chenier]

Or an alternative system: chase undesirables. Set a wanted max population level. Population growth past that limit is chased away to other regions. :P

[Shizzle]

forced migrations have been well-documented in the MA. :)

[Chenier]

forced migrations have been well-documented in the MA. :)

Good. Now do it!  8)

[Sacha]

That wouldn't really work if the city is surrounded by fully populated regions :P

[Chenier]

That wouldn't really work if the city is surrounded by fully populated regions :P

They can then push them farther out. To Barca, in this case.