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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #131 - Famines, Starvation, Harvest Conditions

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Hello and welcome to another dev diary! I’m Alex and today I bring you famine, starvation, ruin and disast– I mean, happy Thursday!

Back in dev diary #126 we mentioned how for 1.8 we’re looking at how the availability of food affects the people in your country. Up until now, if food prices were high, that would lead to Pops dropping in Wealth. As a consequence of that, Pops would become unhappy and have their birth and mortality rates change. In extreme cases they would drop below Standard of Living 5, which would mark them as Starving and make their mortality rate be higher than the birthrate, resulting in the Pop’s population decreasing over time.

This is fine, but it created some problems we wanted to tackle. For one, Pop Needs don’t have shortages, so when the price caps out at +75%, that’s it. Food is always available, it just gets expensive. Another issue is that the starving status is directly tied to what Standard of Living the Pop has, meaning that regardless of why Standard of Living drops below 5, the pop is marked as Starving. Even if food is essentially free and the actual issue is that clothes are expensive. Lastly, the effects of starvation don’t scale as much as they probably should, so even at SoL 1, Pops can live on quite a while.

With all that in mind, there’s three main features we’ve added to flesh out this aspect of the game:
  • Starvation
  • Famines
  • Harvest Conditions

Below we’ll go into each of them in detail. Everything mentioned in this dev diary will be made available for free when update 1.8 arrives later this year.

Starvation, now ✨dynamic✨

As mentioned, up until now starvation has been a fixed status tied to specific SoL levels. In 1.8, all pops will have a metric for Food Security instead, which measures to what degree that Pop has access to sufficient and nutritious food. If a Pop’s Food Security gets too low, it will first be considered to be in a state of Mild Starvation. Here, Pops will start getting some penalties to their birth rate and mortality. If Food Security drops even lower, this status will change to Severe Starvation, where the Pops’ population starts decreasing fast. To be clear, both Mild and Severe Starvation penalties get progressively worse as Food Security drops, so it’s not a hard threshold where suddenly the full effects are applied.

You can now at a glance tell how much you are forgetting to feed your population while building another workshop. The map mode shows for each state if there are a lot of Pops starving there (proportional to total state population) as well as if they are mostly suffering from mild or severe starvation
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Now you must be wondering: “Okay, but what actually is Food Security? How is it measured?” We’ll get there, don’t worry, first I need to talk about Pop Needs though.

If you’ve spent some time with the game, you know that the way Pop Consumption works is that at different Wealth levels Pops need to satisfy certain Needs. These Needs can be things like Basic Food or Simple Clothing for poorer Pops or Luxury Food and Drinks for richer Pops. Each of these needs can be satisfied through a set of different goods. In the case of Basic Food, it can be satisfied by consuming different amounts of Grain, Fish, Meat, Fruit or Groceries.

Basic Food Shortages​

As mentioned, shortages currently only affect buildings while Pops are completely unaffected. In fact, we even only mark goods as having shortages at all if they are consumed by buildings.

In 1.8 that is changing somewhat: we’re introducing shortages for goods in the Basic Food Pop Need category. The calculation for if a good is in shortage is the same as before: if the number of buy orders exceeds the number of sell orders by too much it’s considered a shortage, so no surprises there.

What is somewhat different is that we’re also adding a shortage value to the Basic Food Pop Need itself. This is calculated essentially as the average shortage value for the goods in the Pop Need weighted over how much Pops are actually consuming each good. In other words, if 90% of your Pops’ food consumption is Grain and 10% is Fish, a Grain shortage will have a much stronger impact than a Fish shortage.

Nothing has really changed here, but I needed to break up the wall of text and wanted to remind you that this tooltip is in the game
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I’m sure some of you will be wondering if this means other Pop Needs will also be getting shortages - and the answer is no (for now at least). Contrary to building shortages where we can just add throughput penalties if goods are in shortage, for Pop Needs we need to consider what role the goods play to be able to determine what penalties a shortage in those Needs would entail. For now, we’re only doing this for Basic Food (with the penalty being Starvation, more details below), but having a defined way of dealing with and calculating shortages for pop consumption definitely opens the door for other Needs having shortages in the future (maybe heating or clothing, for instance?).

To help you keep track of the starvation levels in your country, we’re introducing a new panel which quickly shows you how many people in your country are starving and if you have any famines or shortages active. Additionally it also gives you information about active harvest conditions that might be affecting your states and what proportion of total basic food pop consumption each good has.
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Food Security​

With the background of how Basic Food Shortages are set up, we can finally go into the details on how Food Security works. As mentioned above, this is the metric we use to determine whether a pop is starving and how strong the effects are. Food Security is a value between 0 and 100%, where at 0% the pop is in a state of severe starvation and at 100% the pop has full and easy access to all the food it requires.

What determines a Pop’s food security is mainly a combination of two factors:
  • How much the Basic Food Pop Need is in shortage in the state in question
  • How much money the pop is spending on Basic Food compared to their whole buy package at base price

We’ve already covered the shortage part, so let me explain the second factor some more: At different wealth levels, pops need to buy different amounts of goods from a number of Needs. What we’re doing here is taking the total price for all those needs while considering only unmodified base prices and then comparing it to how much the Pop is actually spending on Basic Food.

Here’s an example: a pop at Wealth 9 needs to consume goods to cover for their Simple Clothing, Crude Items, Basic Food, Heating and Intoxicants needs. The total value of what they need at base price is 314. After considering market availability and all of that, food is actually very expensive though, meaning the pop is spending 220 on Basic Food. We then simply compare their real food expenses with their total base price expenses: 220 / 314 = 70%. That is a lot of money going towards food!

You might be rich enough to consume a country’s worth of Fine Art output, but you’ll be quickly reminded you can’t eat statues when food runs out
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Food Security then is a value that starts at 100% and is reduced by the two values above. If in addition to the 70% Basic Food Expense Share, food is also in a 20% shortage, the food security for the pop in question will be 100% - 70% - 20% = 10%, putting them firmly into severe starvation.

The reasons we went for this set of calculations in particular are primarily the following:
  • It means that as pops increase in Wealth, they’ll be less affected by increasing prices (due to food becoming a smaller part of the pop’s total buy package)
  • It means that the effects of starvation can become increasingly worse even after the price caps out and shortages become more severe
  • It means that there being literally no food in a state will affect rich pops as well even if they have a bunch of money, because you can’t eat money. (rich pops don’t consume basic food, but the shortage factor still affects them)

All of this leads to starvation being something that primarily affects poorer pops, but in the right (or wrong, I guess) circumstances it could also affect rich pops, or it could even affect no one. Have enough food and prices will be so low that food won’t be the primary concern even for the poorest in society. This is of course easier said than done, as getting your grain prices down to -75% price should be very hard for any reasonably large country. Still, it’s not mechanically impossible.

As part of decoupling starvation from Standard of Living we also had to update the Standard of Living icons and names for some of the levels
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Famines, a political classification​

If Starvation is what happens to your pops when they don’t have enough food, Famines are simply a political classification that comes up when enough pops are suffering from starvation. Specifically, we look at two metrics:
  • How many people in total are starving in the state in question?
  • How many people are specifically suffering from severe starvation in the state in question?
The goal here is that a famine should feel serious and encompassing. It should both affect a significant portion of the population in the state, but also be severe enough. In fact, this kind of classification is loosely modeled after real world classifications today (albeit with different values as the 19th Century had a different standard for such things).
As a primarily political classification, famines don’t have any direct effects on your pops. A bunch of Stockholm bureaucrats finally noticing that people in the Dominion of Norway are starving and calling it a famine doesn’t on its own make any difference for the poor Norwegians. Instead, a famine being declared is more of a political event. It can act as a starting point for narrative content surrounding famines and how to deal with them for instance.

Famines also act as a warning signal for the player. They tell you how long they’ve lasted, how many people are affected as well as estimations for how many deaths and unrealized births the famine has led to so you can feel extra bad for neglecting them.

When a famine is declared you can see it front and center in the new Food Security panel
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Harvest Conditions​

On top of the revised mechanics for starvation and famines, we also wanted to add some more volatility and unpredictability to the game with Harvest Conditions. These conditions are occurrences (often tied to weather, but not necessarily) that can happen to your states and primarily affect your agricultural sector. Here’s a breakdown of different aspects of harvest conditions:

An example of what a harvest condition can look like. The Effects described are further multiplied by the intensity in each specific affected state
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Effects​

While a lot of the effects will be tied to increasing or decreasing agricultural throughput, the effects are not strictly limited to agriculture. Floods and Wildfires might have drastic effects on your infrastructure for instance. Additionally, conditions are not necessarily negative: a pollinator surge could increase your fruit production or optimal sun conditions could lead to a particularly good harvest.

For Floods and Droughts we added some effects to the 3D map itself, so you can be more immersed while thinking about how you failed your country and let your people starve
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Regional limitations​

Harvest conditions happen on a state region level, but are often limited to certain parts of the world (Locust Swarms won’t happen in Northern Europe and Frosts won’t happen in Egypt for instance).

Duration, Range and Intensity​

Harvest conditions have variable durations, range and intensity. One drought might be milder and limited to just a couple of states, while another affects a large area for a long time. Intensity acts as a multiplier to the base effects conditions have.

If you’re curious about what harvest conditions are active around the globe you can look it up on your Victorian era weather app of choice
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Incompatibilities and Synergies​

It wouldn’t make much sense if a drought suddenly happened in a region affected by torrential rains, so most harvest conditions have a set of other conditions they’re not compatible with. A drought will never happen in a state affected by a flood, nor will a flood happen in a state with a drought. A heatwave could lead to an increased chance of a drought happening and subsequently even a wildfire. In such a case the drought would replace the heatwave and later get replaced by the wildfire.

We’ve also made changes to some existing content so it meshes with the new Harvest Conditions and Starvation. Numbers are still WIP, but should give you an idea of where we’re taking it
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That’s it for me! Hope you enjoyed learning more about how we’re dealing with famines and other aspects of human suffering. Join us two weeks from now for the anniversary week marking two years since we launched Victoria 3! (Two years already!? Who turned on Speed 5?)
 
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Finally, if it's so easy and "a simple sine/cosine function with a yearly calculation", then nothing will be stopping you from simply modding it yourself. You could already do that now, using variables and state modifiers. If "the community" is so much on your side, your mod will get hundreds of thousands of downloads. But that would actually require some work, it's much easier to self-righteously demand and complain and ask to speak to the game's manager.

I don't think this would be moddable, but I might tackle the challenge sometime. I don't think number of downloads is a worth metric. I mentioned "the community" since I literally quoted so many posts you wouldn't read them, but I don't speak for its entirety, not even for the people I quoted, of course.

I'm trying to be helpful, not spiteful, but I was born a lawyer. I was quoted on the #68 post, by @Alexhesse, programmer and designer, whose job answering so many questions I truly thank. Since #2 post, by community manager @PDX_Pelly is yet to be updated, I tried to compile helpful questions and answers on the topic I wanted to highlight for further consideration.
 
The issue with making it look at price is that it introduces circular dependencies where price depends on consumption depends on price, etc. There are ways of solving this and we're investigating some of them, but it's a somewhat complex issue to make work well. We could for instance work with different timesteps for each of them and have them work on delayed data, but what tends to happen is you get these very unstable prices tends which continuously oscillate. So, generally, no timeline or promises here
You can prevent oscillating prices through using principles of control theory. It's difficult to explain(it's a 3 month course in university, and not one of the easy ones) but mathematically simple for a computer to execute. The main thing you need is a damper function. This is something taught to engineers, but I don't know if most programmers know how to calculate these. More generally, I can see a lot of places in victoria 3 that would benefit from damping.

Otherwise, I'm wondering if these new mechanics can simulate the great Irish famine (one of the most famous famines in the period). In the Irish famine, Ireland was exporting food while an 1/8th of it's population starved to death, so in this situation, the market prices for food in the British market would not be especially higher, but rather Irish pops would be unable to buy food. Will this be achieved by peasants being cut off from income? If so, how will it be rendered to only take place in Ireland and not the rest of the British Empire (or even Europe in general), where the potato blight also hit but didn't cause mass starvation? EG Poland also had a potato blight, and in game mechanically is similar to Ireland (mostly peasants, not stated by Russia), how will there be an outcome of Ireland starving from potato blight, while Poland is unaffected?
 
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snip

Since #2 post, by community manager @PDX_Pelly is yet to be updated, I tried to compile helpful questions and answers on the topic I wanted to highlight for further consideration.
I usually update that comment the day after a dev diary so the devs have time to answer questions, otherwise I would have to become the best oracle known to man to know everything the devs were going to say.
 
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Will y'all also be otherwise adjusting how Standard of Living effects population growth? It would be interesting to see a pop growth system where high food security and healthcare are what lead to high pop growth rates with Standard of Living being relatively unimportant but Literacy as a negative factor on birth rate specifically. This would make it align much closer to McKeown's thesis which is afaik pretty undisputed at this point. Food Security as a system in game should allow for the game to simulate how the poverty of industrialization nevertheless led to enormous booms in population thanks to the increased food security that people had.
We'll likely be making growth balance changes in general to mesh with all the new additions, but not necessarily expanding the system to the degree you're suggesting. At least not for 1.8, I'd love to make it a more robust mechanic in the future given time

Will intensely farmed states be more heavily/frequently impacted by negative conditions then ones with plenty of free land?
Certain farming PMs have been given modifiers that increase the intensity of droughts. We're generally looking at other places to integrate the system in as well, but at least farms will have some impact :)

I find it a tad weird, that every state is only affected by a single condition. The limitation of this system is probably best seen in the map, where Romania and Turkmenistan regions are on a border between heavy rain and a drought, and of course they can't coexist, so a single one has to win and exist there, both epicenters are so close, that it has to be either. There isn't really a way for the system to say, that both seem to affect this area, and they sorta cancel themselves out there, and as a result it's normal conditions.

Similarly if a devastating monsoon strucks your shore it might be strong enough to affect a lot of your country, but there was already a nice amount of bees in one state, and that just exists as a impenetrable wall, that monsoon can't get through, because there already is a condition there. It's especially visible when a particularly strong condition encounters a weak one, as the weak one will resist all effects, because only one can be present here at a time.
Let me clarify a bit: states can 100% be affected by more than one condition. For instance you could have torrential rains and extreme winds in a state. Or floods and a heatwave. How it works is that HCs have scripted incompatibilities, so for instance pollinator surges are incompatible with pretty much everything. This both means that they won't spawn on top of a wildfire for instance, but also that the wildfire would override and remove the pollinator surge. Similarly a heatwave will be overridden by a drought which will be overridden by a wildfire. The system is specifically made so "weak" conditions are replaced by "strong" ones to avoid the behavior you're describing.

For droughts and floods specifically though I made them incompatible with each other due to issues we found during playtesting. Primarily the issue was that when we just let HCs stack freely, you could get a flood, drought and wildfire in the same state giving that state a truckload of negative modifiers and it just didn't feel fun. Then we introduced the incompatibilities and on a case by case looked at which ones made sense to be able to happen at the same time (e.g. locust swarms and heatwaves), which should block each other (e.g. droughts and floods mutually block each other) and which should replace some other ones (e.g. torrential rains are replaced by floods).

As many have pointed out, there definitely is a background for floods happening right after a drought or even happen in a part of a region suffering from a drought. The reason I still made them incompatible is it felt better gameplay-wise. Having floods override droughts just made droughts feel like less punchy in a way. Instead I felt it was better to let them each standout on their own, even if it sacrifices some IRL scenarios that could happen otherwise.

Can I make people starve less by taking away their dining chairs? N-No, hold on, I seriously mean it.

If a poor pop spends majority of their money satisfying their food need, then they are starving, but if I close all the furniture factories, only plant fancy trees, and switch all clothes production to handkerchiefs for the bourgeoisie, will they now have to pay so much for everything else, that their food need will drop to like 20%, and they'll forget they were hungry, or is it always base price?
Others have already mentioned it, but we look at the buy package at base cost specifically so price fluctuations in chairs don't directly affect starvation. There is some effect in that higher overall prices means lower wealth which can affect it, but that should relatively minor.

I really like the different harvest conditions, especially the negative modifiers like wildfires and droughts. I wonder how possible it would be to simulate global warming with such a system?
Are there any plans to tie the harvest conditions to global or local pollution, in the short or long term? Without a full weather system, it seems like a basic proxy for the impact industrialization has on the climate, in both the clearly negative (more frequent torrential rain and droughts) and sometimes positive (say, developed farms in the Rocky Mountains decreasing the chance of locust swarms in the United States and eventually driving them to extinction).
We've made it so high pollution values increase the intensity of a number of harvest conditions :) It's locally based ofc, but I can see a mod extending that to be global, it's just not something we're looking at doing ourselves due to the time period and all that.

Suggestion:

At the cost of Bureaucracy and Money, the government "subsidises" all (basic) food purchases. If it's at a per-state granularity, then there'd be an authority cost too. If it's a country-wide thing, then I imagine a button on the Budget page that can only be pushed following a law being passed to unlock it.

The effect is that Basic Food Expense Share is gone from the food security equation (since the government is footing all food costs). For extra detail, distinguish (as separate laws) between "government subsidies whatever the normal buy orders would be" vs "government first 'sets' all buy orders to be the same for all pops regardless of SoL then subsidises them". In other words, will the rich get more rations or not (and how dissatisfied will the rich be in the latter case)?
We did discuss consumption subsidies during ideation for this feature, but it's overall a really complex thing to tackle well and would require touching on a lot of systems, so for scope reasons we couldn't go forward with it. It's something we have in mind though and might explore in the future if the opportunity comes up

Very cool Update!
Will the Weather effects/Harvest events affect the existing state modifiers?
For example replacing the agriculture bonus of some rivers with a higher chance of a yearly "good flood" event that gives agriculture bonus?
They currently don't affect / are affected by State Traits, but it's a neat idea! I'll look into if we can integrate them there some more.

Theres a lot about just food in here, will there be any plans for weather conditions to effect other RGOs and industries such as earthquakes harming mining operations or bad storms raising the mortality of fishermen and whalers?
The focus is generally on harvests, right. But we do have some conditions that affect mining/logging/resource extraction. We didn't include any that affect industries though as I wanted to keep it fairly close to the rural sector at least. For modding purposes the system supports any modifiers you throw at it though, so if people want it to affect industry, that's trivial to do.

You can prevent oscillating prices through using principles of control theory. It's difficult to explain(it's a 3 month course in university, and not one of the easy ones) but mathematically simple for a computer to execute. The main thing you need is a damper function. This is something taught to engineers, but I don't know if most programmers know how to calculate these. More generally, I can see a lot of places in victoria 3 that would benefit from damping.

Otherwise, I'm wondering if these new mechanics can simulate the great Irish famine (one of the most famous famines in the period). In the Irish famine, Ireland was exporting food while an 1/8th of it's population starved to death, so in this situation, the market prices for food in the British market would not be especially higher, but rather Irish pops would be unable to buy food. Will this be achieved by peasants being cut off from income? If so, how will it be rendered to only take place in Ireland and not the rest of the British Empire (or even Europe in general), where the potato blight also hit but didn't cause mass starvation? EG Poland also had a potato blight, and in game mechanically is similar to Ireland (mostly peasants, not stated by Russia), how will there be an outcome of Ireland starving from potato blight, while Poland is unaffected?
Oh, I'm aware, I've actually taken control theory myself at university. And yes, different kinds of dampening functions is what we'd need to do, it's just that it adds extra complexity to it, so it's not just a matter of hooking in prices. Additionally, even if we have a solution on paper, we also need to integrate it with all systems and particularly with UX. It's definitely something I'd like to explore, but there's always opportunity cost with other things we want to do to consider.

As for the Irish famine, I wouldn't say this will model it perfectly as there's a lot of special circumstances going on there we can't model properly. Depending on how you're willing to look at it you can get somewhat similar situations though.

[omitted for brevity]

From what I can see you're suggest a different way of doing things and with a much larger scope (a fully blown climate/weather system). While those are interesting it's not what we set out to do here. I'd love to expand this to do all that, but as with all things, scope is limited and sometimes we need to take things one step at a time. We're definitely looking at all feedback that is sent our way though and looking at if it's interesting and how we can integrate it, now or in the future.

One point I'd like to mention specifically is goods substitution: we are aware of player concerns with this and looking at things we can do with it. It is a pretty complex issue though (see comment above for some context) and not something we can solve overnight.

As for the list of posts you collected, I feel like I have answered a lot of those either in the dev diary or in other comments, but I'll also mention that many of them are not really concerns with the system as a whole and more suggestions for how we could take it further or tweaks we can make to existing content to integrate them more. Generally though, us specifically responding to something is not required for the feedback to be received, we do read all the comments that come up here and think about what we want to do with their suggestions.
 
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I understand it is a complex problem to solve, but there is already a bit of pingponging of prices due to production changing relative to prices, it just tends towards equilibrium when maximum employment is hit. I suspect it would be possible to do something like only revaluate buy packages when the price per utility is 10% different or something, though obviously the team has a lot greater knowledge of what is happening under the hood to understand whether it is feasible. It seems that it would be worth solving now since this is a prime application of it, and it could help make trade work more elegantly in a future trade rebalance/rework.
Early in my career I worked with a database that had a column name misspelled as "descirption" that had been left in since it was developed by two guys in a closet in the 80s. As references to it proliferated the number of places it had to get fixed became unwieldy. Now that system has many thousands of users who have to remember to purposely misspell the column name every time because it was decided it was too complex to fix. I don't work in that industry any more so that's a problem for past Monk.


That would probably help the symptom at least a bit.


The Price Based Goods Substitution Lobby would probably be more than happy to help figure out an elegant mathematical solution to this. Especially if it were moddable, I'm fairly certain that the community could hit upon a good balance for how this would work that could be incorporated back into the base game.
With local goods this would solve the worst offenders of very odd situations- I don’t understand how they have implemented this already with MAPI. National sell orders substitution makes zero sense and seems like a simple change
 
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I really hope potatoes are separated. I'm currently reading Charles Mann's 1493 and the devs should read it if they're not convinced, because it has a long section about the effect of the humble potato on 19th century history. It's much more than just the Great Famine.

TBH I wouldn't want the devs investing much more effort in this areas. Maybe it's worthwhile if you are playing on an exceptionally large screen or a very small country (Krakow!), but most of the time I have to be zoomed out in order to see essential information, so these detailed graphics at the highest zoom level are invisible and useless to me.


These both seem like very good ideas to me, but they look like a lot of work, so they are best saved for patch cycles in the distant future. I think the game has bigger areas they need attention first, in particular naval warfare and a Cabinet system.

I'm not convinced about this, because as you say, they are "subject-esque" governments. Being de jure independent, even though they were de facto dominated by foreigners, is important to the Banana Republic status. And a key point is that they were controlled by corporate, not state, interests. That's something that it should be possible to simulate very accurately through V3's Companies feature. So I think making them formal subjects would be an abstraction too far in this game. And if in-game subject status is applied to Banana Republics, then it should also be applied to the British informal empire in Argentina and the Yangtze valley, which would be even more controversial.

But radicals are being reworked in this patch cycle; see the last two Dev Diaries.

The game's economy has no concept of stockpiling goods and that is fundamental to its design. So I greatly doubt this would happen. I can see it's a major departure from reality, but I don't want the devs investing a lot of effort into rewriting the economy system if it can be avoided.
Honestly as long as I don’t see the Great Powers being called banana republics then I’m fine, it’s just weird for that specific tier of countries
 
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Will there be an addition of a stock for resources? granary buildings and such?

even in ck3 there is a concept of them so i presume its not that difficult

also on the topic of stocks of resources that mechanic could also be implemented to the weapons and munitions industry so you dont crash your economy when you mobilize

not to mention that you can crash market with massive resource dumps :)
 
No epidemic system, no. Potatoes are still modeled as the general grain good and the Potatoes PM, but we are looking into potentially changing that later on. Just need to figure out how we want it to play with the other systems.

If you make a potato good please just call it "tubers" and include the distribution of crops like cassava/Yuca, taro, yam, sweet potato and others. All of these are important food sources beyond grains across the tropics

Also shouldn't starvation pump migration?
 
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If you make a potato good please just call it "tubers" and include the distribution of crops like cassava/Yuca, taro, yam, sweet potato and others. All of these are important food sources beyond grains across the tropics

Also shouldn't starvation pump migration?
But potatoes don't just grow in the tropics, which is what makes them so useful. They grow in relatively poor soil that wouldn't be economic for wheat and other temperate cereals. A separate category of Tropical Tubers might be justified too.
 
Will high food availability conversely increase pop growth more than it already does? It seems less developed countries in vic 3 struggle with pop growth even when food is very cheap. I'd like it so that food supply has a higher impact on pop growth rather than just being another standard of living modifier.
 
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But potatoes don't just grow in the tropics, which is what makes them so useful. They grow in relatively poor soil that wouldn't be economic for wheat and other temperate cereals. A separate category of Tropical Tubers might be justified too.
What's the idea here? Is it a new good "tubers" or is it a new "tubers" farm or a production method for existing farms?

I think it'd be cool if "grain" got split into several carbohydrate crops and I would definitely check what kind of diet my pops are eating, but I'm not sure if I'd enjoy microing new crops. Coffee/Tea already feel like a non- choice.
 
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The advantage of potatoes of course is that they can be harvested (almost) year round and provide most of the nutrients a person needs (if supplemented with a little milk). Hence their popularity in Ireland where they became the subsistence crop that labourers could grow on their own plot of conacre, while they harvested cashcrops for the landlord.
 
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Oh, I'm aware, I've actually taken control theory myself at university. And yes, different kinds of dampening functions is what we'd need to do, it's just that it adds extra complexity to it, so it's not just a matter of hooking in prices. Additionally, even if we have a solution on paper, we also need to integrate it with all systems and particularly with UX. It's definitely something I'd like to explore, but there's always opportunity cost with other things we want to do to consider.

As for the Irish famine, I wouldn't say this will model it perfectly as there's a lot of special circumstances going on there we can't model properly. Depending on how you're willing to look at it you can get somewhat similar situations though.

I can understand this. One problem about representing the Irish situation is how to represent the Irish cottier class. These weren't tenant farmers who sold produce to pay rent to a landlord. These were labourers who rented a small 1 acre plot of land (where they grew spuds) and paid for it by working as labourers on their landlord's larger estates. No money was actually involved so they were virtually subsistent. Not sure how you represent that in a simulation where free labourers generally get cash for their work unless there's a way for pops to be remunerated with goods rather than gold (food/potatoes in this instance).
 
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Will the +75% cap be removed with this refounded mechanic ?
It seems a bit arbitrary that prices are capped at some level, when historically speaking food price inflation was sometimes severe, as it was in 1789-1793 in Paris due to intense stress on both harvest and transportation, leading in the end to riots and revolution.
 
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Will we be able to discriminate the primary Culture / Religion of a nation?
I have an idea to create Jewish Ethiopia and would like to know if that would be possible somehow.

thanks.