As IRL, food cannot simply be totally put up on the free market without any restriction or control. The market helps get a maximum price for what people are willing to pay for for any given resource, but in the case of food, everyone needs it, and so everyone will pay whatever it takes to get it. In consequence, those who need more, or aren't as rich, will be unable to pay for market price, and will starve. Food isn't a consumer good, nor a luxury, it's a necessity for all. Hiking the food price limit, combined with the new food scarcity, will not do anything to help Dwi or any other continent, starving realms. Traders from needy realms, instead of facing the lack of sell offers, will only find sell offers they cannot afford. It wouldn't make anything better.
I wouldn't really mind if food became a lot less scarce, as it is IRL.
I actually spend nearly my entire income on food, and that's at 40 gold/100 bushels
I remember I put Paisly bankrupt by buying too much food, at 35 gold per 100 average I believe, one week. I was cutting it close for a few weeks, but that week was too much, and I lost over 6000 gold's worth of infrastructure and militia. Wouldn't be as bad today, but still. The point of the trade game is not to make food so rare and expensive that cities no longer produce any profits at all.
I've always argued that the trading game should be the least onerous possible to non-traders. Tom seems to oppose "set and forget", but I really think that if we want resources in this game, they all need to be "set and forget" for the lords. Not for the traders, but for the lords. Or bankers, or whoever is in charge. "sell all food in excess of X threshold for Y price" and "buy all food to reach X threshold for Y price". The new system, by making use of bonds instead of region income, makes this more complicated (while preventing bankruptcy as well), but forcing every deal to be made manually by at least 2 people (if not 3) and putting an expiry date of a meager 2 weeks was not a good change, imo.
