Here's a question: Why does Dwilight NEED to produce an overall surplus? Why do all regions have to be fully fed in order for the island to be successful?
A key idea from Tom's Might and Fealty game is that if you want some places to grow, that means other places won't grow as much. Thus, production truly does become an exchange in resources.
Why not implement part of this idea in Battlemaster, or perhaps just Dwilight/testing?
To do this though, you'd need to make an important change to make it viable and not just anti-fun. Namely: Allow region lords the ability to choose an artificial cap on population for their region. This will be the maximum population which the lord chooses to feed at any one time. (This cap would have to be lower than or equal to the actual population cap of the region.)
What this would do is prevent the growth/starvation cycles which have been seen many times on Dwilight. Instead of growing to 20k pop in your city, then starving back to 12k pop, you can simply set a cap at 15k population. When this cap is hit, extra population that is born is forced to either emigrate away from the city, or population growth simply stops. In this way you get to grow your population to a certain point, and then not have to worry about feeding an increasingly larger population that you don't have the production to support. This cuts out all the negative effects of starvation caused by this cycle. Now, if you can't feed whatever population you have, you'll still have them starve, but now you'd have much more control.
There is no need for rationing under this plan, and this sort of implementation has far less opportunities for abuse than a rationing plan.
