How Food could be better handled.

[builer680]

I would like to see "Food," and its effect on population growth, be represented in a very similar way to how "Happiness" is currently handled in Civ 5. Namely, as a Global Resource much like Gold and Science. Food is a much more natural choice for a Global Resource than Happiness, for the simple reason that you can put it on trucks and ship it places.

In previous versions of Civ, this was represented with Caravans the player could manually move. I found that tedious, but a good idea in general. It would be easier to just use the current way Happiness is represented for Food.

Food surplus empire wide would allow empire wide city growth. A deficit in food would halt or even reverse growth. A good Food city (and the surplus it generated) would allow for the support and respectable growth in multiple Production cities that may not produce quite enough food for themselves locally.

On a positive note, this would not introduce "magical" infinite Food supplies (ala Maritime CS). You are having to farm it somewhere, but all cities can benefit from it... not just the one city surrounded by Farms.

 

[attackfighter]

I like this, there'd have to be a way to distribute it unevenly though (without micromanaging) so your cities aren't all the same population. Micro managing would just take too much time.

Maybe have population growth start at a set rate that can later be influenced by buildings. eg your cities base growth is one pop every ten turn, with hospitals increasing rate by 20%. Would be more realistic, and it would mirror the population explosion of the 20th century, as your percentages could pile up exponentially

dunno if any of this would help gameplay though

 

[Roto-Router]

I've wanted to see options along this line for a while. Micromanaging should be an option for those of us who enjoy it, so for that use you could put in some kind of circular graph showing all your cities, where you could drag and drop food trade routes (which would also work for other trade goods, if there was anything else worth trading in the game). For those who don't like that kind of management it might be enough to put a set of radio button options for food exports from that city: 1) Disable food exports, 2) Enable routine food exports, 3) Enable emergency food exports. 1) is obvious, and should be the default. 2) Would export some reasonable fraction of excess food (30-50%) to those cities with the slowest growth, and 3) would only export food to a starving city or cities. You might also want to put in options to exclude food exports to puppet cities.

 

[builer680]

I like this, there'd have to be a way to distribute it unevenly though (without micromanaging) so your cities aren't all the same population.

This would come about naturally due to cities being founded at different dates.

I agree in concept though. It should have an option for micromanagement, but by default ship automatically to promote growth in all cities. Micromanagers could choose how much and which cities to grow in preference to others, but all such growth would be constrained by the total amount of Food produced empire wide.

 

[filli_noctus]

If a mechanism was put in allowing you to add a portion of excess food in your cities to an empire wide 'food bank' which could be used to feed overpopulated cities, it would also provide an opportunity to deal with Maritime CS's. Instead of giving food to cities a set amount of food goes into the food bank to be redistributed at the players whim, two food if friends (same as currently goes to the capital) and, say, 5 at allies (number chosen for no particular reason).

 

[Babri]

This was done in a cIV mod by lemmy101. What he did was that Food distribution had different civics. In start the food was a local thing but later on you could adopt different civics in which food was depended upon commerce or a city starving gets food from other cities etc. That can be implemented in ciV too & could be an interesting feature.

 

[Andrew_Jay]

Perhaps what is needed is to make buildings/improvements in your cities a "draw" for population.

Temples, Markets, Factories, etc. attract people to a city and are what drive population growth provided that you have the food to feed those people. The more developed a city is, the greater a share of food it receives from the national stockpile and the more people it has. Thus you can have a low-population place like Boise that produces food, but not much else, and a high-population place like New York City that doesn't produce its own food.

It could be as simple as distributing the food based on each city's share of your overall improvements. Example: two cities, one with 2 improvements, the other with 8. Split the food 20/80.

Food-generating improvements (like the Granary) could even not count in this calculation, so your food city can be developed to produce more food without also drawing more food from your stockpile.

 

[snarzberry]

I'd also say that if this was done there should be a formula that reduces the amount of food a needy city receives from a donor city based on the distance between the two to account for transportation cost. Or the transportation of food from one city to another (which doesn't need to be visually represented on the map) incurs an actual gold cost which scales with distance.

 

[builer680]

I wouldn't mind a lot of suggestions I'm seeing that are adding to the one I suggested in this thread.

For the sake of keeping it simple though, I think it should just be a Global Resource with the option to micromanage, but evenly distributed by default. That way it's simple enough for the Chieftain player yet has the option to be deep enough for the Deity player.

Transportation costs are a good idea, but I'm not sure how to represent transportation costs in a way that isn't extremely "mathy" yet intuitive at the same time. I'm sure it could be done, but it would need to be a mechanic that is easily grasped, or it's too much like playing a spreadsheet.

Lots of mechanics have that as a potential pitfall. Got any simpler ideas to represent transportation costs?

 

[CGG1066]

I wouldn't mind a lot of suggestions I'm seeing that are adding to the one I suggested in this thread.

There have been several in other threads earlier. One I started is here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=396494. Another one is here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=394699.

There's plenty of good comments throughout both - you might be interested in reading though them.

 

[Camikaze]

I like this, there'd have to be a way to distribute it unevenly though (without micromanaging) so your cities aren't all the same population. Micro managing would just take too much time.

This is a point worth repeating. It could be quite tedious.

But it would be nice if you could siphon off a bit of your food for distribution if you so desired. It would have to be limited, and there would have to be some sort of penalty involved, but it does make sense to allow it to some degree.