Poll

Your Opinion on Food and the Markets in Dwilight

My region produces a surplus but I don't bother to sell the food
0 (0%)
My region produces a surplus but I find it too inconvenient to sell the food
1 (4.2%)
My region produces a surplus and I sell all the food that I can but no one buys it
2 (8.3%)
My region produces a surplus and I sell all the food and it is usually bought
7 (29.2%)
My region is in a deficit but I don't bother to buy food
0 (0%)
My region is in a deficit but I find it too inconvenient to buy the food
0 (0%)
My region is in a deficit and I place buy orders that rarely get filled
6 (25%)
My region is in a deficit and I play buy orders that usually get filled
5 (20.8%)
I don't play on Dwilight but want to vote for something
3 (12.5%)

Total Members Voted: 23

Voting closed: March 04, 2013, 02:40:10 PM

Author Topic: Your Opinion on Food and the Markets in Dwilight  (Read 21797 times)

Chenier

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I'm still convinced that ANY realm on ANY continent that has 4 cities, and 1 stronghold, while only having 3 Rural regions SHOULD have irreparable food problems which make it almost impossible to exist functionally as a realm. On top of that, you have 2 badlands regions in your bunch of 13 regions. So, your realm should pretty much not be possibly able to function. The food situation no matter what the devs code will not make D'Hara a realm which can conceivably exist upon what it has without them doubling in size and not taking a single extra city.

I disagree. We should be able to import from other realms. Constantly. With great effort.

We were doing quite fine before food was intentionally deleted from warehouses and food production across the continent was manually turned down.

I never asked for D'Hara to be self-sufficient. Heck, I think D'Hara would be a lot less fun if it were. But I do want there to be plenty of food production on the island so that all realms on the map, with a bit of trade, can be fed.

I'm not saying that D'Hara needing food is hurting the food situation on dwilight. I'm trying to explain why getting food from a largely food-positive realm (Morek) to a relatively food-negative realm on the other landmass is so hard to do. It wouldn't matter if it was D'Hara or some other realm, you'd still need to go through a middleman in most cases unless you were able to get a trader out to the other realm.

When I went to Corsanctum, Morek, Swordfell, and Luria Nova, I only saw like 4 sell offers, 3 of which were restricted to realm-only, the last one was for 100 gold per 200 bushels and I only saw it for a few hours. Even the "largely food-positive" realms don't have much to sell anymore. Because there just ain't such a thing as a "largely food-positive" realm anymore. This doesn't create interaction, it just makes every realm no longer able to have trade at any meaningful levels with other realms.
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Tom

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I never asked for D'Hara to be self-sufficient. Heck, I think D'Hara would be a lot less fun if it were. But I do want there to be plenty of food production on the island so that all realms on the map, with a bit of trade, can be fed.

They can. Dwilight currently produces 226% of its demand. Yes, it is autumn. But even considering that, the island produces a steady 13% surplus of food on average. And with the amount currently in granaries, it could feed itself for 24 weeks if all food production dropped to zero this instant.

There is more than enough food around. If you can't find any food, it is not because it doesn't exist.

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They can. Dwilight currently produces 226% of its demand. Yes, it is autumn. But even considering that, the island produces a steady 13% surplus of food on average. And with the amount currently in granaries, it could feed itself for 24 weeks if all food production dropped to zero this instant.

There is more than enough food around. If you can't find any food, it is not because it doesn't exist.

But that's not really very meaningful.

First of all, for a realm to want to sell food, they're going to need way more than a 13% surplus.

Second of all, the way to ensure that food will be traded is to have areas that have a serious overall deficit and areas that have a significant (>75%) surplus near each other, but not near enough that it's easy for one realm to control them both.

The problem with using food as a trade good is twofold:

1) Realms that can't feed their regions (one way or another) die. Very quickly. Starvation is incredibly harsh, and there is absolutely no way to mitigate it other than providing all the food every region needs every day.
2) Because of this, any attempts to rebalance the food supply into something like I mentioned above will fail badly—because the realm in the deficit area won't live long enough to buy food from the surplus area.

The solution (or part of it, at least) is what I mentioned in the dev thread: allow for three levels of food distribution, half, normal, and double.

This, combined with a slower descent into utter starvation (and a quicker climb out of it), would make food no longer the "all-or-nothing" proposition it is today—and thus make it possible to consider trading it, even when you don't have a year's worth of stockpile and a 100% surplus.
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Chenier

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They can. Dwilight currently produces 226% of its demand. Yes, it is autumn. But even considering that, the island produces a steady 13% surplus of food on average. And with the amount currently in granaries, it could feed itself for 24 weeks if all food production dropped to zero this instant.

There is more than enough food around. If you can't find any food, it is not because it doesn't exist.

Does this consider rot? Troop consumption? Monster consumption? Looting? Zuma demands? Seasons that can only be bad or average? I assume it does not. Not to mention lords that can't be bothered to actually sell their surplus.

Assuming all food in in granaries, that's 1% rot per day. And no bad seasons anywhere, and that there aren't any troops, and that the Zuma don't exist, and no hordes spawn, and that everyone's at peace. You start the year in the first day of summer (which is where the surplus starts), with a balance of 0 bushels. Continent-wide, consumption is 100 bushels a day while producing value is, on average, 113 bushels. By the end of the year, you will have produced 9492 bushels of food, consumed 8400 bushels of food, and will have seen 937 bushels of food rot, leaving you with 155 bushels more than you started with.

So assuming the best of scenarios (which is far off reality), Dwilight doesn't produce a 13% surplus on average, but a 1,84% surplus once you include rot.

1,84% continental surplus average, without including food not stored in granaries and rotting faster, food eaten by troops, monsters, or the zuma, and the bad seasons people keep having. Is it that much of a surprise that food is so hard to come by?

(Note: the largest surplus on hand would be on the last day of Summer, with 26 day's worth of consumption, without considering rot. With this scenario, over the year 8% of the food produced rots.)
« Last Edit: March 03, 2013, 04:44:37 PM by Chénier »
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Tom

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Ok, let me put this in stronger numbers:

There are currently over 100,000 bushels stored in the granaries.

There are less than 2,000 bushels in offers on the market. That includes "realm only" and all other limited trades.



Anyone who thinks that the existence of food is the issue and not the fact that existing food is not being sold is IMHO living in a fantasy world.


Chenier

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Ok, let me put this in stronger numbers:

There are currently over 100,000 bushels stored in the granaries.

There are less than 2,000 bushels in offers on the market. That includes "realm only" and all other limited trades.



Anyone who thinks that the existence of food is the issue and not the fact that existing food is not being sold is IMHO living in a fantasy world.

Is it much of a surprise if only 2% of the food is put on the market, when the yearly surplus is of 1,63%? of what's produced?

Also, what's on the market, at any given time, is not representative anyways. Especially since it's winter right now.
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It is fall currently...

Chenier

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It is fall currently...

It is?

I could have sworn... Well I guess that explains why my region is making a surplus all of a sudden.

Still, that's 2% of the food being on sale, for a continent that produces less than 2% more than what it consumes once rot is factored in. People hording food isn't the problem. That 98% of the food isn't on sale is NORMAL. It's Fall, after all, people need to stock up for winter.
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Indirik

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I find myself in nearly complete agreement with Chenier. 13% surplus is nowhere near enough to allow an active food market. The cumulative rot from gathering enough to sell, as well as the amount that rots in stockpiles as a matter of routine, probably takes care of most of that surplus.
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Lorgan

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And then there's all the regions that haven't fully grown back yet from the Long Winter.

Chenier

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Because correct me if I am wrong, and your statement that Dwilight produces 13% more food than it requires does factor in rot. 'cause as I said, otherwise, once rot is factored in, it produces at most a 1,84% surplus.

Huge stockpiles don't change anything to this, because Dwilight's consumption is also huge. At about 2,200,000 population, Dwilight consumes 4400 bushels a day. So if I use this number in my previous calculations, to give a number that sounds closer to the real thing, I get the following data for Dwilight:

Yearly food production: 417,648 bushels
Yearly food consumption: 369,600 bushels
Yearly food rot: 34,513 bushels
Yearly food surplus: 13,535 bushels

And this is assuming the best. Thus, without factoring rot, 100,000 bushels of stocked up food means enough food to cover in the consumption through 1,08 seasons, in other words, barely enough to go through winter. Without factoring in population growth, bad harvests, and everything else I've mentioned earlier, because population is in steady growth and a lot of cities are still nowhere near their max population.
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Tom

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Yearly food surplus: 13,535 bushels

By your own calculation, people on Dwilight have been stockpiling food for almost 8 years to reach the current storage. That is impossible.

Gustav Kuriga

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By your own calculation, people on Dwilight have been stockpiling food for almost 8 years to reach the current storage. That is impossible.

Impossible at the current rate, yes. However, I do believe you have forgotten that you had the food production lowered... which means that most of that storage was from before you lowered production.

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Dwilight currently produces 226% of its demand.

This isn't accurate. Dwilight, in autumn right now, produces roughly 150% of demand. Based on seasonal modifiers, this amount changes to:

  • Summer: 125%
  • Spring: 93%
  • Winter: 63%

This comes out to a yearly production of about 108% of demand.

This is much, much worse than the 13% figure being quoted in this thread and is the real reason droughts and winter are so serious.

By your own calculation, people on Dwilight have been stockpiling food for almost 8 years to reach the current storage. That is impossible.


Impossible at the current rate, yes. However, I do believe you have forgotten that you had the food production lowered... which means that most of that storage was from before you lowered production.

Seasons are the confounding factor here. As described above, these stocks come from the recent summer and now autumn. The island, as a whole, produces extremely large surpluses in these two seasons, but is at a deficit in the other two. It is through the two seasons of deficit that the summer/autumn stocks are consumed, and at the end of the seasonal year we can expect a surplus of about 5000 bushels per year. 5000 bushels, in the face of drought, is not much.
« Last Edit: March 03, 2013, 10:14:19 PM by ^ban^ »
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Chenier

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Impossible at the current rate, yes. However, I do believe you have forgotten that you had the food production lowered... which means that most of that storage was from before you lowered production.

This.

Also, we aren't at day 1 of summer, we are at day 9 of Fall. Which, by my calculations, would mean 67,769 more bushels at at day 1 of summer. 32,231 additional bushels of food would be reached within 7 days.

So really, you have 7 days of Fall production in surplus of what you'd have if Dwilight had had all food removed from it on the first day of summer. Which was inherited by the previous systems, and by the fact that consumption probably rose significantly faster than production (it would take 14 days of summer harvest to accumulate a surplus of 32,000 with the current population, but after the long winter, it would have probably taken a lot less time to produce such a surplus).

My calculations really aren't anything fancy or complicated. I just made an excel spreadsheet, with days 1 to 84, took the values you gave me, punched them in, added the seasonal modifiers (1 for summer, 2 for fall, .25 for winter, .75 for spring) in 1% rot per day. No magical numbers, just deductions based off the consumption of 1 bushel per 500 peasants per day, 113% average surplus before rot, and 220,000 population as according to the stats page for a week or two ago.

This isn't accurate. Dwilight, in autumn right now, produces roughly 150% of demand. Based on seasonal modifiers, this amount changes to:

  • Summer: 125%
  • Spring: 93%
  • Winter: 63%

This comes out to a yearly production of about 108% of demand.

This is much, much worse than the 13% figure being quoted in this thread and is the real reason droughts and winter are so serious.

Seasons are the confounding factor here. As described above, these stocks come from the recent summer and now autumn. The island, as a whole, produces extremely large surpluses in these two seasons, but is at a deficit in the other two. It is through the two seasons of deficit that the summer/autumn stocks are consumed, and at the end of the seasonal year we can expect a surplus of about 5000 bushels per year. 5000 bushels, in the face of drought, is not much.

If I take a 108% scenario, pre-rot, that gives me a yearly surplus of only 1,836 bushels per year, instead of 13,535.

Yearly food production: 399,168 bushels
Yearly food consumption: 369,600 bushels
Yearly food rot: 27,732 bushels
Yearly food surplus: 1,836 bushels
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