Message #97259

[Anaris]

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.