Food from trade routes

[Nor'easter]

I originally mentioned this in the City Sprawl thread started by Xienwolf (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=295795), and it generated some responses. I didn't want to hijack that thread, so I'm starting a new one on this.

As Gekko pointed out in that thread, and I'm sure others have commented on before, it's never made sense in base Civ that cities have access only to the food in their immediate surroundings. We all know that in the real world, going way back, food has been traded.

How could this be represented this in FfH?

Basically, you'd need to simulate food preservation, with the attendant ability to transport food over long distances -- in base Civ, this would probably be based on having researched a tech like refrigeration (I think it is).

In FfH I can think of a couple of things:

1) Historically, before the advent of refrigeration, spices like cloves were used to preserve food, and explorers sought out sources of such spices. Among the resources available in FfH, incense probably comes closest. So a civ with access to incense could have additional food from trade routes. Maybe +1 food per trade route or, if that's too powerful, +.5.

2) We don't have refrigeration in FfH, but we have the next best thing, Ice Mana, which would allow freezing food for transporting over distances, analogous to refrigeration. Access to ice mana could therefore also allow additional food from trade routes. This would benefit only the Illians and whoever controls the Letum Frigus, so it could be unbalanced, I'm not sure. Would be a nice bonus for the Illians, though, and would make the Letum Frigus quite valuable.

Just some thoughts. As I said, I didn't want to hijack the City Sprawl thread.

[[to_xp]Gekko]

ice mana, reagents, a hipotetical "spices" resource, salt, and I guess Yggdrasil would be nice resources to boost food yield from trade routes. grains should work to a lesser extent, I believe they are a lot easier to store and conserve than livestock.

btw, another mechanic that could work is to have "food caravans" that work kinda like a great merchant. you build one ( it should probably be buildable with food surplus, hammers should be useless ) , send it to a city, sacrifice it like a disciple and you get -x food in the city where you built it, and +x in the city you sacrificed it in. with +x being affected by resources etc. I think MC had an idea similar to this a while ago.

[sputnik323]

If there is going to be big changes to the economic/food systems, why not also change the number of resources giving more bonus. Having tons of cows should = tons of food.
Im in support of this idea, there are major things that could be changed to add strategy to the game.

[Nor'easter]

@Sputnik

I don't know to what extent, if any, Kael and the team want to change the economic/food system. I was just trying to think of a simple mechanism to represent the fact that as a society progresses, its cities cease being completely dependent on food produced locally and are able to trade and transport food. The absence of this kind of thing has been a really strange thing in base Civ.

@Gekko:

I was trying to avoid adding new resources to the game, since there are already so many, although you're right about salt and certain types of spices being used to preserve foodstuffs. One could also imagine nature mana allowing food to be preserved for transportation over long distances -- keeping fruits and vegetables fresh. I was trying to do something simple, so I didn't initially propose that for nature mana, since I didn't want to turn that into a perceived must-have resource.

As for food caravans, interesting idea, but I think that would lead to more micromanagement than is necessary. One nice thing about Civ 4 is the way trade routes develop organically on their own. Yes, you can affect them with certain civics and buildings, but on the whole they develop independently of what a player does. So adding food to trade routes would give the same result as food caravans but without the player needing to manage it, IMO.

[rezaf]

Isn't food caravans actually a ancient concept that dates back to civilization 2?
Iirc, you could build caravans and move them to another city and then either have them help build a wonder (if one was in production) or open up a trade route, either dealing in some good or in food, the latter choice subtracting food from the source city and adding it to the target cities balance.
_____
rezaf

[Ranbir]

Yes, I miss the Civ2 caravans. Providing food from a smaller settlement was almost a requirement to keep supporting your larger metropolises.

[[to_xp]Gekko]

Nature mana affecting food trade makes sense to me

[Keeper_GFA]

Or body mana to speed those caravans along.

I'm not a fan of food trade, other than the odd single food leftover. I wouldn't mind food being counted nationally and increasing population everywhere. But actively trading a lot of food around would add more micro (and possible exploits) for not much fun IMO.

[Nor'easter]

@rezaf:

I started with Civ 3, so I don't know about Civ 2.

@Keeper_GFA:

I agree with you on avoiding micromanagement, that's why I suggested linking food to trade routes. The idea was that as a civ's trade expands -- on its own, for the most part -- and once the civ has the means to preserve food for transport over distances (incense, ice mana, etc.), then a city's trade routes would start yielding food in addition to commerce. No micro necessary, just having access to the relevant resource.

This isn't a complaint about FfH, of course, but rather with base Civ 4 for perpetually limiting cities to the food they can grow in their own radius.

[Visage Darkskin]

I like the idea of being able to direct food resources to cities of your choosing (Tower of Complacency + Unlimited food = Exxcellent Smithers). While the possibility of directly deciding which city is giving food to which other city, and by how much sounds best, I have seen two alternatives proposed which could complement the mechanics proposed here. First, you could add a food slider in addition to science, money and culture, which would off course affect all cities. Another way would be to implement the movable resources device created for the Dungeon Adventure Modmod. I don't know how difficult it would be but you could potentially concentrate certain resources in a single city elevating it's population.
Regards.

[[to_xp]Gekko]

an additional slider to convert commerce to food sounds cool. other manas that could affect the food yield from traderoutes would be life, body (keeping meat from rotting) , water ( irrigation ) , sun ( light for growing crops ) , air ( wind spreading seeds ) , earth ( turn arid rocks into soil ) and maybe enchantment ..

[Keeper_GFA]

Death for pesticides, herbicides. Chaos for mutation (genetic diversity, new strains). Etc.
Really, isn't the health bonus from food resources supposed to imply this stuff in-game? If you want more food, how about +1 food for each food resource in your trade network (sort of like the cereal/sushi corps in vanilla).

[[to_xp]Gekko]

that would also work. the health bonus from food resources in civ4 simulates a varied diet I guess, otherwise having additional sources of the same resource should give further health ( this doesn't make a lot of sense anyway, but that's another matter )

edit: sputnik's idea below is also great

[sputnik323]

maybe someone could create a modmod of expanded trade routes. You can pick if you want food, culture, science, or production from trade routes. - some of the routes you would have to pay extra like for production and science - but that mimics more of the real world because there are trade imbalances like USA trading production to China. So... if you are trading food and production to other civs, you are yeilding more commerice.

[zup]

... We just need food from trade routes to keep our cities growing, to infinity. And no, I am not being sarcastic here.

[Guale]

The food caravans are one of the things I really miss from the good ol' days of Civ2 (hell, I still call hammers shields half of the time). I doubt a mechanic like this could be implemented easily though. However, something does need to be done about it and there have been several decent ideas posted here.

[MiKa523]

Although there were some great ideas posted, I think most of them might be too complicated or add much more than needed.
Getting 0.5 Food from each trade route in a city is simple and might be a good thing for the Malakim, since trade is their thing and their desert cities could use some food.

[Ranbir]

I was thinking maybe an option, drop down maybe in a city screen which allows it to direct x number of surplus to a target city. So if you only wanted to send 1 bit of food you can. Control on how much and where it be sent is vital, imo.

[[to_xp]Gekko]

Originally Posted by Ranbir

I was thinking maybe an option, drop down maybe in a city screen which allows it to direct x number of surplus to a target city. So if you only wanted to send 1 bit of food you can. Control on how much and where it be sent is vital, imo.

that would work. although I guess distance, resources available and other factors should have an influence on the effectiveness.

[Nor'easter]

I don't think I'd want to micromanage trading food between specific cities, I agree with Keeper GFA on that. Conceptually it strikes me as being too much of a centrally-planned economy, whereas economies in a medieval/fantasy world like FfH should probably be relatively decentralized.

I like Keeper GFA's suggestions in this context: 1) counting food nationally, although I'm not sure how easy that would be to code, and I'd want a tech and/or resource requirement; and 2) having your cities gain, e.g., +1 food, in addition to the health bonus, for each food resource in your trade network. #2 would be simple and would work for the AI as well.