BattleMaster Community
BattleMaster => Development => Topic started by: Tom on January 19, 2012, 01:41:33 PM
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I am working on rebalancing the region system, something that I have planned for a long time.
The basic idea is that cities are way too important and way too big. The world we simulate didn't have this amount of urbanisation.
The result is fairly simple: Population of cities will be reduced, population of rural and other regions will be increased. Food and gold production will change as well, but not on a 1:1 basis. Rather the focus is to keep it stable at least on the large scale (whole-continent view). In fact, gold production will increase slightly (10-20%).
Now for food, there is a bigger change. Food will be produced daily in the future, not in weekly harvests. This should dramatically simplify food management. Both food production and food consumption will be increased a bit (around 30%) so there are less rounding issues with daily cycles.
I am still working on the details. But I would like to send this live soon, because some improvements to region management depend on it. For example, with this new system we can give region lords a much better estimate of food production and consumption, again making managing the region easier for them.
Naturally, some regions will profit and some will be hurt by this change. There is not much I can do to avoid that, it's the nature of all change. That is why I tell you now. If your realm already runs heavy on cities and has too few rurals, or the other way around, this will affect you strongly. Though it's not simply "bad" - if you have many cities, you will suffer a decrease in gold income, but since you will have fewer citizen to feed, your food shortage may be less critical in the future.
Here are the numbers I am currently playing with. They are for informational purposes and may yet change before I send them live!
- Cities: 60% population, 80% food, 78% gold
- Townslands: same population, 125% food, 126% gold
- Rurals: 140% population, 180% food, 144% gold
- other regions: 120% population, 165% food, 144% gold
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There are already townslands with more population than cities. What marks the difference? These changes will mark it even more: for example. Akanos will have a pop. of 5340 while Caiyun will have 12050!
Not that I'm complaining mind you; these changes would be amazing for my townsland. More of everything for me!
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i doubt it'll be a blanket thing. small cities will likely not lose pop, much as huge rurals/towns would not gain even more pop.
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Wouldn't this make cities and townslands about equal? As townslands have the main benfit they can feed itself, while cities still need to import their food.
Is it intended that townsland will work far more effictive then cities?
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Glad to see we're finally moving forward with this.
I just want to check, Tom, that we will, in fact, be monitoring the situation for a month or three after the change, and prepared to tweak values that are no longer sane or are otherwise causing problems.
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With the new numbers and a rough math work...
Outer Giask will produce 44% more effectively gold and 92% more effectively food then Giask. Based on the amount of peasants that are required to produce gold/food.
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I think that there definitely needs to be some weighting in the values. The smaller cities should not get shrunk as much as the largest, and the smallest maybe even get a boost to pop/income, while the largest townslands might even need to shrink.
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I think that there definitely needs to be some weighting in the values. The smaller cities should not get shrunk as much as the largest, and the smallest maybe even get a boost to pop/income, while the largest townslands might even need to shrink.
That could destroy the entire power balance there is at this moment...
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That could destroy the entire power balance there is at this moment...
That's the idea. Well, that and making things more realistic.
Raviel is really going to rock now.
Townslands have room to grow, since they don't have to stick all their citizens behind huge walls--think of them as suburbs for the cities. Dallas is only 1 million people, while the Metroplex is 6 million.
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I can understand why rurals get more population and income and cities lesser, that's a good change but I was not talking about that power balance. I meant more between realms as realms with larger regions would get a decrease and those with small regions an increase per indirik's idea.
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Townslands have room to grow, since they don't have to stick all their citizens behind huge walls
Yet... they can still be fortified.
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Yet... they can still be fortified.
But only to level 2.
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The feedback is good.
Yes, I will change things a little, with large cities shrinking more and smaller ones less, and also large townslands gaining a bit less.
And yes, we will keep an eye out for "strange regions". With over a thousand regions to change, over all the islands, there is no way we can do it individually. So it's going to be a few formulas applied and then we can tweak a few(!!) individual cases that really make no sense at all.
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um... i think dwilight town vs city might end up different from other islands...
said this before.. i reckon the best ducal seat (for duke+lord combo obviously) in most dwi places are the townsland rings (until the city buggers off to the next realm and lock you in)
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um... i think dwilight town vs city might end up different from other islands...
said this before.. i reckon the best ducal seat (for duke+lord combo obviously) in most dwi places are the townsland rings (until the city buggers off to the next realm and lock you in)
I'm lord of Raviel townsland, not a duke, and I can travel to any realm I choose and align my townsland to that realm. I'm not sure what that would do, probably tons of loyalty penalties and "distance from capital" messages, but I'm pretty sure that if Port Raviel joined Astrum, I could realign Raviel to D'Hara.
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The feedback is good.
Yes, I will change things a little, with large cities shrinking more and smaller ones less, and also large townslands gaining a bit less.
And yes, we will keep an eye out for "strange regions". With over a thousand regions to change, over all the islands, there is no way we can do it individually. So it's going to be a few formulas applied and then we can tweak a few(!!) individual cases that really make no sense at all.
Tom, Tim and I hammered out a set of formulas for this way back when which I think would redistribute things nicely. I'll see if I can dig up the spreadsheet when I get home, but it handles the large vs small region thing and redistributes population within geographic areas.
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I believe we should distinguish mountain, woodland, and badland regions more, instead of lumping them together as "other".
Mountain regions should have much higher gold income but much lower food production than an rural region. They should be net food importers like cities. Currently it seems that most mountain regions can feed themselves. If realm A wrecks realm B's food supply chain, realm B shouldn't be able to keep its gold mines, iron mines, and stone quarries operational.
Woodland regions should be somewhere in between an rural region and a mountain region in terms of income and food production.
Badland regions should have much lower food production and population than an rural region, especially if the region looks like a desert or a tundra on the map. You could argue that they still generate some income from trading and crafting. Dwilight is pretty good at making this distinction, but on the other maps, a badland region is not that different from an rural region.
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I believe we should distinguish mountain, woodland, and badland regions more, instead of lumping them together as "other".
Mountain regions should have much higher gold income but much lower food production than an rural region. They should be net food importers like cities. Currently it seems that most mountain regions can feed themselves. If realm A wrecks realm B's food supply chain, realm B shouldn't be able to keep its gold mines, iron mines, and stone quarries operational.
Woodland regions should be somewhere in between an rural region and a mountain region in terms of income and food production.
Badland regions should have much lower food production and population than an rural region, especially if the region looks like a desert or a tundra on the map. You could argue that they still generate some income from trading and crafting. Dwilight is pretty good at making this distinction, but on the other maps, a badland region is not that different from an rural region.
When you think about it, badlands and mountains operating the way they do is a balance thing. Otherwise starvation would be far too powerful. This way SOME gold is maintained even when your main gold sources, like cities are starving, giving you some possibility to continue to fight and perhaps rescue the realm.
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I somewhat get what you mean, but I feel that you can't call it balanced when most realms don't even have access to mountain regions. I would be fine with mountain and badland regions staying food-neutral, which seems to be how they work now. I would object, however, to turning mountain and badland regions into food exporters. That's just getting silly if ask me.
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I somewhat get what you mean, but I feel that you can't call it balanced when most realms don't even have access to mountain regions. I would be fine with mountain and badland regions staying food-neutral, which seems to be how they work now. I would object, however, to turning mountain and badland regions into food exporters. That's just getting silly if ask me.
We don't balance realm choices. Just like we don't balance so every realm has a net food surplus. It would be impossible anyway as the Dev team don't control where and how realms form. However
towns are also generally able to feed themselves and produce good gold. At the end of the day region envy is supposed to create friction, if every realm had the same access to similar regions, bang there goes that friction.
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Mm mountains...Where people train and monks stay. You'd think they figured out how to find food there to feed at least themselves. And, of course, they have gold if they're sitting on a mine. Not all mountains have valuable minerals though.
On the other hand, at least on Dwilight, this would actually make it viable to have Balance's Retreat area settled.
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We don't balance realm choices. Just like we don't balance so every realm has a net food surplus. It would be impossible anyway as the Dev team don't control where and how realms form. However
towns are also generally able to feed themselves and produce good gold. At the end of the day region envy is supposed to create friction, if every realm had the same access to similar regions, bang there goes that friction.
Right, so make the regions "more different" then. Make the mostly mountainous realm and the mostly woodlands/badlands realm next to it salivate after each other's regions. Don't make them all the same.
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Right, so make the regions "more different" then. Make the mostly mountainous realm and the mostly woodlands/badlands realm next to it salivate after each other's regions. Don't make them all the same.
In either of those two cases, both realms suck so much they should be salivating about ANY extra region they can claim.
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Any Barca players want to take offense at this? ;)
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Any Barca players want to take offense at this? ;)
Saex
Type:Woodlands
Population:2991
Gold:189 gold
Food:92 bushels
Larodais
Type:Badlands
Population:2390
Gold:215 gold
Food:157 bushels
Zolon
Type: Moutains
Population:4500
Gold:388 gold
Food:81 bushels
In general Badlands have low populations and reasonable gold. There food production can vary from just enough to a small surplus, which often depends on placement, if they are near production rurals it will make sense that they produce more than a desert badlands for example.
Woodlands are usually in between rurals and badlands, they also have a low population, but generally produce less gold with a higher food surplus.
Mountains generally have a higher population, good gold production and lower food production. Its not uncommon for mountains to need to import food. This reflects the labour intensive activity of mining.
Of course it varies, some regions are better examples of there "types" then others and it is by design that some regions are less desirable then others. When you also add the fact that region type affects what infrastructure you can build and probably has some other hidden effects that most the players haven't found, types are not so irrelevant as as been suggested.
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Fair enough. I'm just worried that giving mountain regions a large food production boost would turn them into food exporters. Realms which previously imported food would suddenly find themselves with a large food surplus... which may nip a few future wars in the bud.
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Fair enough. I'm just worried that giving mountain regions a large food production boost would turn them into food exporters. Realms which previously imported food would suddenly find themselves with a large food surplus... which may nip a few future wars in the bud.
The change is about populations, moving more people out into rural areas and the like. If anything the net food production of mountains could reduce, as a higher local population eats into that small food surplus.
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- Cities: 60% population, 80% food, 78% gold
- Townslands: same population, 125% food, 126% gold
- Rurals: 140% population, 180% food, 144% gold
- other regions: 120% population, 165% food, 144% gold
I apologize if I'm misinterpreting Tom's post, but that seems like an adjustment to population, food production, and gold income. The uniform adjustment to "other regions", and giving mountain regions a 165% food boost, is what I'm arguing against.
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I apologize if I'm misinterpreting Tom's post, but that seems like an adjustment to population, food production, and gold income. The uniform adjustment to "other regions", and giving mountain regions a 165% food boost, is what I'm arguing against.
Don't forget that total food consumption will also rise. I mentioned that as well. It is still a small rise, but taking both population and food demand increases into account, it's more like a 10% food production gain.
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I apologize if I'm misinterpreting Tom's post, but that seems like an adjustment to population, food production, and gold income. The uniform adjustment to "other regions", and giving mountain regions a 165% food boost, is what I'm arguing against.
If you are going to adjust populations obviously some of the other parameters need to adjust as well.
You missed some other important parts of his post
Food and gold production will change as well, but not on a 1:1 basis. Rather the focus is to keep it stable at least on the large scale (whole-continent view). In fact, gold production will increase slightly (10-20%).
Now for food, there is a bigger change. Food will be produced daily in the future, not in weekly harvests. This should dramatically simplify food management. Both food production and food consumption will be increased a bit (around 30%) so there are less rounding issues with daily cycles.
Those changes will help give the values he threw around some context, in particular note that the increase in food production for things like bandlands is largely part of the 30% general increase to offset the increase in food consumption.
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here's another thought.
um.. why have hard pop caps? wouldn't a player (ie.. region lord) imposed cap be more interesting? (ie.. a player can figure out how much food region produces.. what pop cap it can support and then increase/lower the cap to dictate the food surplus/deficit and then do whatever about the surplus/deficit)
for that matter.. don't define rurals/cities/towns.. just have base terrain type (plains, whatever civ style tile) limiting resource production, then let the players dictate the pop. very crowded region with a food deficit would be equivalent to a city, for example.
have a cap on the number of pop available to dedicate to farming or whatever food. (to simulate more land used for living, less land for farming)
by removing towns/cities/rural (because those are description relative to pop rather than terrain), you can allow people to build castles anywhere with the pop to sustain it. and allow every region to be capital, etc.. if the players want it.
and that you don't have to besiege castles just to go march past them... surely the whole point of most castles is not that you block the road with them literally and physically.. but that if you leave one in enemy hands behind you, the enemy can base around it and hit you from behind.
a long term goal perhaps?
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um.. why have hard pop caps?
I've thought about that one long and hard a few years ago.
The problem is that soft or no caps are very, very, very tricky to do right, and very, very easy to "game". And the other reason is that BM is very intentionally not one of those neo-liberal "growth or death" games. This is one of the few games that don't work on an exponential growth curve, the basic economic concept of BM is to make you manage what you have.
Yes, the hard caps are unrealistic. But they dramatically simplify a lot of things, from coding to gameplay, and work best at making the game what it should be.
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While you're at this, how about introducing Dwilight's mountains to the world of Battlemaster and make them worthy of conquest like all other mountain regions in BM?
I've never understood why they're so worthless, contrary to their counterparts on other continents.
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While you're at this, how about introducing Dwilight's mountains to the world of Battlemaster and make them worthy of conquest like all other mountain regions in BM?
I've never understood why they're so worthless, contrary to their counterparts on other continents.
The Zuma already mined all the good stuff before nobles arrived :)
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I agree with Tom. In realistic terms, if we have no population cap things will be more complicated. During human history, population exploded while people had enough food but people died off in chunks when droughts, plagues and other disasters hit. If we are going to have no population cap, we should probably add disasters and plagues to control the population. You can't control population like the modern countries. BM is a medieval game and lords probably wanted as many people in their regions to get their taxes from.
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Damnit. Tim, any luck finding the redistribution stuff we came up with? I can't find the whole thing, only this preliminary version, and I know we had something more sophisticated...
Newpop = ([(if distance to city is < 50 then .1(lost city pop), if distance to city is < 100 then .05(lost city pop), if distance to city is < 200 then .01(lost city pop))+old region pop]*(if newpop > 2*oldpop, .66)
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I will move forward with my update quickly. That does not mean we can not do a better rebalancing in the future. Maybe we can do it for real this time, for example since we now have region geometries, we can actually calculate population densities, etc.
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Why the rush?
Isn't it better to adjust one time to changes rather then having to do it twice?
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Why the rush?
Isn't it better to adjust one time to changes rather then having to do it twice?
It's referred to in business as "agile" or "continual" development--making small, continual improvements rather than forklift upgrades.
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Earlier in the thread Tom said that other changes we want to make are waiting on some sort of rebalancing being made. At the moment better to get something sort of right with the rebalance, so those other projects can move forward. Something you need to remember when your team is volunteers is motivation, sometimes the best practice is the one that allows everyone to continue working on an element they find interesting, rather then the boring but reliable practice you would use if it was a commercial product.
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I'm amazed no one has asked this yet with all the talk about food, but how will weather affect harvests now? Same as usual, with weather changing weekly? Or will it be daily?
And it would be amazing to have some truly epic weather patterns thrown in. But that's just me ranting now.
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I'm amazed no one has asked this yet with all the talk about food, but how will weather affect harvests now? Same as usual, with weather changing weekly? Or will it be daily?
And it would be amazing to have some truly epic weather patterns thrown in. But that's just me ranting now.
No change to weather at this time.
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I'm amazed no one has asked this yet with all the talk about food, but how will weather affect harvests now? Same as usual, with weather changing weekly? Or will it be daily?
And it would be amazing to have some truly epic weather patterns thrown in. But that's just me ranting now.
De-Legro is mostly right, with one exception I haven't yet told anyone about: With the new region management code, weather changes aren't hardcoded to a specific time anymore. Every day the weather could change, and individually for every weather region. The longer the weather stays the same, the more likely a change becomes, so that you won't be stuck in a drought forever, but it can last a while, or it can be over in two days.
Before, doing it this way would've been pointless because of harvest cycles. Now, it makes it more interesting (and realistic).
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Awesome. That's what I was kind of hoping for. More dynamic.
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Damnit. Tim, any luck finding the redistribution stuff we came up with? I can't find the whole thing, only this preliminary version, and I know we had something more sophisticated...
Newpop = ([(if distance to city is < 50 then .1(lost city pop), if distance to city is < 100 then .05(lost city pop), if distance to city is < 200 then .01(lost city pop))+old region pop]*(if newpop > 2*oldpop, .66)
It's in a Google Doc. I'll post the link to the dev team board, 'cause I don't remember if there was anything sensitive in there.
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That went horribly wrong.
I had tested this change extensively on the dev server. Like 20 times. And when I put it on live, it just went all wrong. I don't know what happened, I'll work on it. Right now, I'll try to revert the change as good as I can. Food, Gold and nominal population are easy, but actual/current population will only be approximate.
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Please note that food consumption has also been increased. With the current production, season and weather, your peasants will produce 182 bushels tomorrow, and eat 273 bushels. The troops currently in the region would eat 1 bushels.
gone from eating a few tens of food per day to hundreds?
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Well, seems that now the only problem with food is where to store it...
Hm, is the food overview for dukes and bankers adjusted as well? As Giask consumption is listed there as 1200 bushels, while the change message said 2272 bushels.
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Yeah, as I said: That went wrong.
Multiply the estimates by about 0.2 - these were still weekly values, not daily.
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Under the new system, one of my chars is a lord of a rural that has more population now than the other's city does (Sandlakes new population = 9634, Iato's new population = 9377)
Which is pretty funky, if you ask me. I guess Sandlakes *does* cover more land, so population density is half or a third of Iato's, but still.
Just sayin'.
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Under the new system, one of my chars is a lord of a rural that has more population now than the other's city does (Sandlakes new population = 9634, Iato's new population = 9377)
Which is pretty funky, if you ask me. I guess Sandlakes *does* cover more land, so population density is half or a third of Iato's, but still.
Just sayin'.
And we have townslands that produce 100 gold less then their city, but produce 300 more food. Guess cities are no longer so important :)
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I actually like the new change. People might actually stop appointing dukes based on cities.
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I actually like the new change. People might actually stop appointing dukes based on cities.
What do you mean, in the Luria realms our Dukes tend to have no land of their own. We appoint a Lord for the city or townsland, and a Duke over them.
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That is nice. All the realms my characters are in didn't do that. They are still following the old system.
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That is nice. All the realms my characters are in didn't do that. They are still following the old system.
It takes times for these things to change. In most cases when we converted the Dukes kept both their land and their title. You could make new Duchies on townslands, but then you invite internal conflict between the ruler and the old Dukes, which may not be something a realm is really wanting at the time.
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for dukes... the biggest problem would be elections not exactly working yet.
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Under the new system, one of my chars is a lord of a rural that has more population now than the other's city does (Sandlakes new population = 9634, Iato's new population = 9377)
Which is pretty funky, if you ask me. I guess Sandlakes *does* cover more land, so population density is half or a third of Iato's, but still.
Just sayin'.
No, what's funny about it? There is no law saying cities have to be especially large, and we used to have small cities before.
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i think i got a "bad" bargain from the change. heh.... bt, avengmil
this is from the broadcast (twice showing same numbers)
Population 8900 10200 + 15 %
Food Production 173 239 + 38 % <--- not sure about that line...
Gold Income 565 817 + 45 %
from harvest reports from the last month... (only 3 harvests.. most recent 1 missing when food prod/cons stopped working).. avengmil produced, 277, 286 in good weathers and 143 in drought.. i think it used to consume 126 a week / 18 a day <--- not quite 500 peasant per bushel (from the harvest of 277, i sent 140 bushels off to sell and i always keep a tight surplus according to warehouse numbers
but surely.. if you have a surplus before the change.. and your food production increase % is bigger than pop increase %, you get a bigger surplus? (though... maybe not if consumption is upped) anyway.. production is now 231 every 7 days.. (or 33 a day)... weather says East Islands: Average.
how come a 15% increase pop almost tripled the food consumption (51 a day <-- 200 peasant per bushel)? consumption per peasant was upped a lot too? or were food consumption before bugged and too low? very weird..
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after latest changes..
consumption per day 41, 287 per week.. roughly 250 peasant per bushel.
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Dwilight just had a turn change at 8:30 AM, Eastern time.
Anybody have any idea why?
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The turn at the regular time failed partway through. Tom manually re-ran the rest of it.
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avengmil now consumes 21 food per day... ~486 peasant per bushel
...however... it also produces 21 per day... 147 per week.. which is equivalent to a drought in old money (in absolute numbers)
ie... lower food production than before *any* change.
though consumption is roughly the same as before in terms of peasant/bushel... just slightly higher..
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Tom, several people (the Zuma GM, Solaria, Luria Nova, others on the BM IRC channel who's realms I'm unfamiliar with) are reporting that food was removed from their warehouse (consumed) according to the old figures. So, even though it's fixed going forward, a lot of people are about to starve. Can we get a food bump or something to account for the losses?
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Tom, several people (the Zuma GM, Solaria, Luria Nova, others on the BM IRC channel who's realms I'm unfamiliar with) are reporting that food was removed from their warehouse (consumed) according to the old figures. So, even though it's fixed going forward, a lot of people are about to starve. Can we get a food bump or something to account for the losses?
bua ha ha ha, the food stores of D'Hara are now paying dividends!
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Were your stores not wiped?
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My stores in Libidizedd appear to be OK. I don't remember the absolute levels, but there is still plenty of food in them to last out the week.
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Were your stores not wiped?
No. I'm not completely sure that there is as much food as they had before, but I lost somewhere between 0 and 1000 bushels.
I liked numbers the way they were at the first change--my food supply will exhaust itself 3 times as quickly, now.
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It seems like some numbers are switched around:
In Beluaterra Tepmona is producing 102 bushels daily while the peasants eat 29 of them for a surplus of 73 bushels.
Produced Consumed
by Peasants Consumed by Troops Surplus/Deficit
Per Day: 102 29 0 73
However: Todays harvest was 115 bushels, peasants and troops have eaten 73 bushels.
It seems like they eat the number that should be the surplus. No hungry troops are present in Tepmona.
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hang on.. where did you get the text from.. if it's from today's daily report (before the fixes/changes).. might as well forget them. old data. and check tomorrow's text instead