Global Food

Sonereal

♫We got the guillotine♫
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What if we doubled the food output of food resources, and made all surplus food count toward a global value?

From there, through a special screen, you could put weights on cities so that the surplus goes to just maintaining (no starvation, no growth) a city, or surplus so the city could grow.

That way, you could have a handful of specialist cities dedicated to being specialist-y while you have puppet city slaves feeder cities dedicated to producing a food surplus.

Bonus points in that food/bonus resources are now valuable enough to be tradeable like gold/strategic resources.

I picture it working like gold, so you can build up a stockpile of food.
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Potential Issues

-AI. As always. I'm pretty sure it isn't too hard to make the AI think intelligently when it comes to keeping its people at least fed. Where it may have issues is with its decision making regarding what to do with the food surplus and figuring out which cities to weigh.

I'm not entirely knowledgeable on the decision making of the AI right now, but it can clearly be weighted to prefer some settlement positions over others, building choices over others, units over others, etc. It should be possible to get the AI to place weights on certain cities in certain situations.

Another solution could be to just make the AI ignore the mechanic and have it act like it does already.
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Why is this good enough to be warranted?

A lot of ideas are posted simply boil down to "throw more into the game". The main reason I want this particular idea is because I was playing the game last night and kept thinking to myself wouldn't it be great if I can make my puppet cities exist ONLY to feed my core cities, with puppet growth only there so they can work more farm hexes?

After all, they feed the core culture, strategics, and luxuries.

Secondly, I hate city-states with only bonus resources. I don't think they should be THAT useless, right?
 
Its a good idea. I've never understood why each city has to harvest its own food. Why not have rural cities that ship food to large industrial centers? Would be more realistic and allow for exciting city specialization.

Its not even a modern thing either, as much of Rome's food supply came from North Africa, rather than local farms.
 
While certain cities had their food supplies imported in ancient times, it's only been since the industrial era that it became common place.

I think it would be a good idea to make a global food pool at the advent of railroads or flight.
 
Remember the oft-revered MOO II had its freighters mechanic, which provided life-sustaining food as long as the colony wasn't blockaded. It did require an investment in dedicated units (the freighters), but required no additional micromanagement. In Civ, a comparable mechanic might require trade routes and perhaps a new purpose for granaries (or a new dedicated food storage/transport building that is unlocked at, e.g., Civil Service).
 
Now that I think about it, it might not be difficult in getting the AI to treat puppet cities differently from core cities when it comes to which improvements are chosen to be constructed. Namely, the Puppet AI Governor would weigh farms more, grow the city with the surplus generated by itself until it can work all the farms+resource improvements, and then stop growing and put all food into the food store, which all ends up feeding the core cities of the AI.

It means, for the most part, that puppet cities have low-production, high-food yield. The would probably come with a higher-maintenance since their production would be low and constructing wealth buildings would be difficult.

This could be made up by the fact your core cities are now growing larger, allowing for more specialists/worked trading posts. Same with the AI. Conquered territory that remains puppeted would now be completely about feeding the core food and resources, which is truer to real life. I would even go as far as to say the puppet city shouldn't build anything except defensive structures and happiness buildings and wealth.

While certain cities had their food supplies imported in ancient times, it's only been since the industrial era that it became common place.

I think it would be a good idea to make a global food pool at the advent of railroads or flight.

It would be way before railroads or flight, and be around the point regions start producing an exportable surplus. Early on, food yields could be low enough to only support marginal growth, while later on, specialized breadbaskets could produce enough to feed itself and potentially several other cities.

After all, the fact certain cities were able to import their food meant there were regions with a food surplus high enough to export food.

Though, in retrospect, exporting food like gold instead of food resources like luxuries might not be a good idea.

Remember the oft-revered MOO II had its freighters mechanic, which provided life-sustaining food as long as the colony wasn't blockaded. It did require an investment in dedicated units (the freighters), but required no additional micromanagement. In Civ, a comparable mechanic might require trade routes and perhaps a new purpose for granaries (or a new dedicated food storage/transport building that is unlocked at, e.g., Civil Service).

I never played MOO II. :(

Otherwise, I like the idea. A city with a granary might use the surplus food to first fill up the granary (whose size is based on population), before contributing it to population growth. The idea of the granary could be for emergencies such as when trade is slashed or your breadbasket is hit with nukes. That way cities don't go into instant super starvation when one road is pillaged.

Maybe Granary Stockpile=# of Citizens*Food Requirement to Feed Citizens*Number of turns it takes to repair one road hex.

Though, a middle ground between increasing the granary stockpile and growth would probably be better so a city doesn't spend ages not growing because the granary is filling up.

Edit: Though, I don't think a unit would be a good idea. Having more units moving in-between cities is the definition of problematic given 1UPT.
 
It can certainly work. Civilzation Revolutions poured food into a bucket, the same way gold and other resources get bucketed in Civ V.

That's probably my biggest knock against V. Without a bucket, every civ expends trememndous effort just keeping itself alive. In Civ Rev, you had farmbelts and you had massive centers of industry.
 
Wait. I didn't know CivRev did that.

How did the AI handle it?
 
Hmm. I might be remembering CivRev incorrectly, and I can only recall it partially. It's been quite a few years.

I do recall there's no starvation, so if a city's not producing food it doesn't shrink. Food is just a mechanism for population growth. Settlers can be produced and sent to established cities to beef up their population, in which case they inject food into it.

Having said that, I don't see an insurmountable problem with the idea of a food bucket. Excess food from a farmbelt city just gets tossed into the bucket and divided evenly amongst any city connected to the capital by a trade route.

In the city display window, there's currently a checkbox for "No Growth". Obviously, such a city wouldn't counts towards how food is divided. Likewise, you could include a checkbox for "Extra Growth", in which case a city gets two shares. Obviously, these are mutually exclusive options.

And you could have a "Share Food" checkbox. Unchecking this keeps all the food in that city from being added to the bucket.

What else needs to be addressed?
 
How the AI handles it mainly. Ideally, there still would be the potential for starvation and the potential to starve a large city by ripping up a trade network is there for a savvy player.

Though, the granary being on-site food storage for when a city is cut off from the trade network should help with things.

Though, your idea about with "Extra Growth/No Growth" is better the using CivIV-styled weights.
 
This feature was somewhat implemented in Civ 2, with food caravans.

I think that this is one of the more important missing elements in Civ, and I don't think it's too far off that One World will include it. When I hear One World I imagine a re-implementation of caravans :)
 
It would be interesting only if specialists outputs are counted within the base output, which base can be increased with buildings percentages. In the state I'm not even sure that specialists outputs are counted in this way in Civ5 vanilla. If it's true, so there's no point in concentrating specialists in some cities compared to a more diffused dispatching which would be the exact same thing.

No, global food (as well as production) would be interesting into scrapping cities as we know them IMO. For a different and more rationnalized warfare especially territory conquest/armies necessity and positionning. Because the actual system of city HP and free shot is not convincing me. As well as the territory possession and acquisition by culture is not convincing me, especially in the last iteration of the series called Civilization 5.
 
It would be interesting only if specialists outputs are counted within the base output, which base can be increased with buildings percentages. In the state I'm not even sure that specialists outputs are counted in this way in Civ5 vanilla. If it's true, so there's no point in concentrating specialists in some cities compared to a more diffused dispatching which would be the exact same thing.

No, global food (as well as production) would be interesting into scrapping cities as we know them IMO. For a different and more rationnalized warfare especially territory conquest/armies necessity and positionning. Because the actual system of city HP and free shot is not convincing me. As well as the territory possession and acquisition by culture is not convincing me, especially in the last iteration of the series called Civilization 5.

That first part was in English, but I don't understand the second paragraph. :confused:
 
It was actually the first paragraph that I had trouble with. The second one seems to deal with off-topic stuff like city's being able to defend themselves.

Each unit of population eats two helpings of food, regardless of whether they're working tiles or specialist slots (or even unemployed).
 
Another big win for bucketing food is that it provides a far better mechanic for how maritime CS's work than this current design where being allied with gives bonus to every city, whereas simply being a friend only gives to the captial. The difference between the former and the latter is enormous. OTOH, with a food bucket, they can just contribue a set amount to friends, and double that amount for being an ally.
 
That first part was in English, but I don't understand the second paragraph. :confused:

It was actually the first paragraph that I had trouble with. The second one seems to deal with off-topic stuff like city's being able to defend themselves.

You have to find a field of agreement you two.

To Sonereal : you can still comment the first ;)
The second paragraph is refering to an idea of mine (a little off topic I admit, but your suggestion made me think about it strongly) that scraps cities, it is to say you have still "city" workers, but everything they work is put in a global bucket (as science and gold in Civ5, add to this food like in your suggestion + production), there's no cities anymore as we know them in the previous iterations. It's because I don't like how everything war-oriented is focused around cities, I would like to transfert the battles near cities (Civ5) into the field. (if there's no cities anymore, it's more handy all suddendly, true lol)
And if we make conquests more hexagon by hexagon rather than city by city, we'll have to more tightly pay attention to our forces dispatching around our territory (second sentence) with the help of some tools maybe (Forts ?) or new warfare system (global army?)

To steve : I think it may be a bit complicated for you, as I can't find any simpler formulation explaining the deal. Sorry. :(
 
moo2 system was quite fun and simple to use but it wasnt obvious whats better - grow domestic food or pay for the large trade fleet.

and i dont like the weights idea. its too minute to my taste

empire-wide food basket with use of "avoid growth" check box seems more attractive but not ideal too.

civ2's food caravans is what i like best of all. but this feature lacked a mechanism of established trade route cancellation.

i have made a mod for civ5 (see my sig, "food resources") that simulates food transportation in some degree. maybe you'll like my idea)

ps
didnt know civ rev was so innovative :)
i definitely have to check it!
 
I guess the key issue is that in Civ, "food growth" means "population growth".

In real life you can't turn up with a few truckloads of food and expect a city to double it's size. I think for this to work there would need to be a more complex sum to work out city growth. Maybe not having Granary/Aqueduct would put a hard limit on city size (gran to go above 3, aqueduct to go over 5 for instance). Maybe food, production and culture all contribute to growth? Which would make sense thematically. Either way I think this is the main issue.

Also would be interesting to make farms get proportionality more efficient the bigger they are - so 3 hexes together is maybe 50% more efficient, etc. Would then make "farming cities" a necessity like science or gold ones are right now.
 
So, maybe population growth should also be global and not only depend on food production. Inspired by the migration mod, there could be a global wealth factor that regulates the global population growth and a local city wealth factor that influences migration and thereby the local population growth.
 
Pretty close to real-life. You have your agracultural-focused communities that produce a lot of food that get shipped to urban centers. I wouldn't make it global, though, I'd make you choose where the extra food was getting sent and how much was sent off. Also, I'd include a spoilage mechanic that increases the cost based on how well you can preserve the food and how far it's being shipped. So sending that 8 food across the continent in wagons only produces 4 food at the end because most of it has rotted, but sending it just a few tiles away gives you 7. Refrigeration reduces spoilage almost entirely, regardless of distance.
 
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