Food/Trade Feedback

[Tom]

For further/final tweaking of food production and trade balance, I am looking for constructive feedback. That means numbers and experience. I want to know what the surplus or deficit is, how trade is working out, if there is food on the market or if buy offers are sitting unfilled. I'd like to know what the effect on food prices is, if cities are buying or waiting for rurals to post offers. If the trade is mostly based on buy or sell offers. I want to know if regions are starving or awash in food.

This topic will accept constructive feedback only. Any and all whining, complaining, baseless assumptions, hypothetical fearmongering and such like will be mercilessly deleted. That includes deletion of complete postings if there's so much as one sentence of that crap in there. There are other topics where you can cry us a river that your realm will run out of food in two RL years and how the sky is falling because you're having a 3 bushels deficit in bad weather.

[Tom]

I will start with a few numbers valid as of right now, as the frame of reference that I'm (among other things) using for my tweaking decisions:

Right now, there ware over 200,000 bushels of food in granaries around Dwilight. Rogue regions are not counted.
That means the average region has over 1000 bushels stored. That runs from empty to several thousand bushels, with 2 regions topping the list far ahead of everyone else.

But even ignoring the top and bottom 10% or so, the total is still 160,000 bushels and the average almost 900 bushels. And that's not even counting the 13,000 bushels that are on the market right now. Which, btw., seems to have balanced out somewhat, as there are also 15,000 bushels asked. Why are they unfilled? Mostly because the buy price offered is quite low.

[Gustav Kuriga]

Mine personally has 55 bushels, and I rule a rural region that produces a surplus, and haven't sold any food for a week or two.

[Foundation]

Mine has over 2k bushels, and produces a surplus of 3 bushels per day.  Rural, full production.

[D`Este]

My experience so far is that lords need to be rememberd everytime to sell their food, even one lord came to me asking for gold while there were around 1.000 bushels stored in his region. In the cases that they sell, they mostly accept the buy offers I place.

Re enabling rotting proves to increase the micromanagement of the food, now I have to worry about not stockpiling too much food in one region and this means I have transfer food back to regions and post small buy orders when I need food. This means I depend largely on others to have food available when I need it, rather then I just buy up everything I see when it becomes available. Personally I would prefer an increase in consumption to replace rotting, as this would allow me to build up a large stockpile and not worry about food for a few weeks. I can imagine others with smaller cities think differently about it.

Trading with other realms happens only with those in reach of the market, we have a trader in the realm but even then other parts of the continents are not easy to reach.

That the kind of feedback you looking for tom?

[Indirik]

You have the capacity to store enough for "a few weeks" I have over 110 days of food stored in Libidizedd. I know that other cities in Astrum have the same, or more.

Keep in mind that Giask is an outlier with your massive food requirements. Youu *will* have special needs that most don't. You will have to build more granaries, and pay more attention to your food situation than, say, the Margrave of Gaston or Chrysantalys. But that's also why you make 3k+ gold per tax. Get used to the fact that being Margrave of Giask puts you in a special situation. You *will* have to do more work than most other city lords.

[vonGenf]

Caiyun, a townsland with 12k pop, now has a production of 13 and a consumption of 28. At food prices of 50 gold/100 bushels (next to worst case scenario, worst case scenario being "there is no food to be had"), that translates in the long term to 53 gold per week of extra spending to feed a townsland, which feels reasonable to me. I currently lose 10 extra bushel per day to rot (I'm at the high end concerning stored supplies), so that's an extra cost for safety.

[Indirik]

@vonGenf: what is the weather like in your area?

[Lefanis]

Asurbanipal (11k, 291 bushels base) Dwilight, north Shore. 
You have 2 granaries with a capacity of 2000 bushels.
You have 1631 bushels of food stored.
Your region produces a surplus of food.

I just used the Market feature from Gaston. The dukes in Astrum (eidulb) had set up some offers, which I snapped up. I believe the price was 25 per 100, though memory is hazy. Quite easy to make gold 

I'll post surplus numbers soon, I think I need to be in region for it.

[egamma]

Re enabling rotting proves to increase the micromanagement of the food, now I have to worry about not stockpiling too much food in one region and this means I have transfer food back to regions and post small buy orders when I need food.

umm...why? Rot is not exponential. You will get the exact same rot with 2000 bushels sitting in one region, as you would with 1000 bushels sitting in 2 regions, assuming both regions have sufficient granaries. And you should, with the doubling of granary size.

[Vellos]

umm...why? Rot is not exponential. You will get the exact same rot with 2000 bushels sitting in one region, as you would with 1000 bushels sitting in 2 regions, assuming both regions have sufficient granaries. And you should, with the doubling of granary size.

Is there no minimum threshold for rot?

[Anaris]

Is there no minimum threshold for rot?

No. And there never has been. All food has always rotted. Except, as I said, for the brief transitional period that just ended.

The only thing you can do is reduce the amount of rot by ensuring that you have enough warehouses/granaries to hold it all, because it rots faster outside of them.

(And before I fixed it a year or so ago, if you had too much food to fit in the warehouses, it was treating it as if all your food was outside of them. And that was when you still had a fixed 500-bushel warehouse, with no opportunity to build more.)

[Zakilevo]

I actually like the food deficit of mines and townslands. They produce a lot of gold anyway.

My region produces 0 bushel of food now as my production equals my consumption but I am losing 1 bushel a day due to having 500 bushels in my granaries.

[vonGenf]

@vonGenf: what is the weather like in your area?

Average.

[Tom]

No. And there never has been. All food has always rotted. Except, as I said, for the brief transitional period that just ended.

Actually, there is now. But it is on the very low end and should not matter for anyone's calculations. Its purpose is mainly to eliminate rot for very low food stores where a) rounding errors start to matter and b) starvation is your more pressing concern. In short, nothing to worry about, just something that makes things a bit simpler.