Food trade system

Hallo,

I have an idea for a mod that would enable cities to trade food. There would need to be a special technology, like Logistics, to enable that, or it would get enabled with any of currently available technolgies.

How would it work?

Every city that has food surplus more then 1 can sell food to other cities for gold. There should be a trade route established which will remove 1 Food and and ? Gold in supplier city, and it would add 1 Food and remove ? Gold in city that is buing.

The need for that system is quite reasonable - there is a lot of places in the world that cannot produce enough food for themselves but produce a lot of other stuff what makes them rich enough to buy food elsewhere and still growth - this makes the farmlands existance reasonable

Mechanic proposal:

City that would sell:
- have a surplus more than 1
- can never sell below 1 surplus (so it still can growth)

City that would buy:
- has enough gold to buy food
- is in need of food (has 0 food left for growth)

Price:
- price can be set based on distance
- a rule to buy from it's own civ, first, could be set

Of course there can be more complex mechanics like cities that have a potential to growth (unused tiles that give production or gold) would look for food to buy, and cites that have avoid growth will not buy more than it needs to be at 0 growth (happens when city had grown on bought food so trades cannot be cancelled to avoid hunger) and city has to be connected with road to supplier, etc.

My question is - do you think creating such thing is possible without changes to DLL itself?

I don't know if it's possible, that's to be answered by an expert, but though it would make A LOT of sense, and would affect VERY positively the player's gaming experience, I see another issue here for the time being: the AI wouldn't be able to take advantage of this mechanic. As long as the AI keeps spamming trading posts even when you have rebalanced the other improvements to make them more useful, then neither it would realize that building a couple of "intensive farming settlements" could supply half of its empire's food needs.

I think a food trading system might over complicate matters.

What might be an idea is a food caravan - a unit that is built in one city (and that city will not store food during the building time) and then moves around like a normal unit. When over a city, a new unit ability would show up, which would drop X amount of food into that city and consume the unit. The amount of food the caravans create would be dependant on era and technologies.

damocles88 said:

I think a food trading system might over complicate matters.

What might be an idea is a food caravan - a unit that is built in one city (and that city will not store food during the building time) and then moves around like a normal unit. When over a city, a new unit ability would show up, which would drop X amount of food into that city and consume the unit. The amount of food the caravans create would be dependant on era and technologies.

Click to expand...

This is an idea - but it some disadvantages. Basically it causes player to micro-manage food distribution and comes with a great cost that a supplier city cannot build anything at this time. Second problem is money - do caravans get money in return so it would actually simulate a city paying for it's food?

I was more thinking that the cost for the food comes from the caravan producing city being out of action for a short while. So players would have to balance between giving the small city a food boost, or building something to benefit the other city. The micromanagement is not really any different to having to micro manage the trade deals. The caravan approach would give a finer grain of control over the food distribution, and it would allow players to build up small armies of caravans to give boosts to new cities (this could be capped by making caravan maintenance costs expensive). Plus it would be a lot easier to do with the current mod tools.

please see my posts here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=9447194

I've been playing around with a mechanic that is similiar to food trade. Basically I'm trying to make it so that food resources produce Agriculture Resources. Deer, Cows, Sheep and Fish produce Meat Resource, Wheat produces Grain Resource, and Sheep and Cow produce Dairy Resource. These resources will allow the production of improvements that increase a city's food production. The Granary improvement grants +3 Food (consumes grain), Water mill improvement grants +5 (also consumes grain, only buildable on river tiles.), Smokehouse grants +3 (consumes meat), Creamery grants +3 (consumes dairy), and Supermarket grants +9 (Consumes meat, dairy and grain). These buildings have a maintenance cost, but don't require the plot to be worked to provide their bonus.

I'm still trying to figure out how to impliment all of that though .

Plasmabunny said:

I've been playing around with a mechanic that is similiar to food trade. Basically I'm trying to make it so that food resources produce Agriculture Resources.

Click to expand...

great idea
i think it can be implemented easily by xml

killmeplease said:

great idea
i think it can be implemented easily by xml

Click to expand...

I thought the same, unfortunately I'm not sure the capabilities are there in the XML. There doesn't appear to be any support for adding resources that aren't placed on the map at map generation (so no way to code in for an improvement to generate a particular resource in certain circumstances.) Plus I don't think that Improvements have the built-in logic to have resource requirements.

I eventually decided to try using a building (Farmer's market) that will grant access to Agricultural resources based on food resources in the town's territory, but there doesn't appear to be support for buildings producing resources either. So yeah , looks like I'm waiting for a patch. I figure fireaxis will likely add these sorts of functions eventually, I just wish I knew where I could make such suggestions so that there would be a better chance for such a thing to be implimented.

i believe you can change sheep cow etc resources to be strategical ones so they will be displayed at the top as iron oil etc.
and make buildings consume say cow or sheep
(so no intermediate meat resource)

i've tried to make xml changes but they seem not to work at all (not even one of them). so i think maybe i do it wrong?

can anybody help please?

ok i've solved this problem, my mod lacked UpdateDatabase action.
now it works. i will upload it to the mod browser as i'll finish with ui tweaks, civilopedia etc.

@killmeplease - well this may be the one to obsolete my idea.... is it ready?