Once a city gets big enough to need multiple markets, it gets harder to ensure that said markets have a balanced variety of goods. You can improve goods distribution with clever use of warehouses and quotas (keep one with a cap of 0 near the production buildings, and another with a minimum quota near the marketplace) and it almost works, but sooner or later the whole chain falls apart at the endpoint because market workers never stop stocking legumes/root vegetables/etc. Eventually the market fills up completely and runs out of room for other food, which makes high-tier housing a lot harder to get than it should be.
Expanding the quota system to markets is honestly all it would take to solve long distance supply chains.
You can put a root cellar next to market and disable storing food in the market. Grocers still would deliver food to the houses from root cellars. But be aware that minimum quotas in root cellars will create a lot of work for your laborers.
…market workers never stop stocking legumes/root vegetables/etc. Eventually the market fills up completely and runs out of room for other food
If the market fills up completely, the villagers aren’t consuming it. Markets can only stock what’s in storage, so it seems you are producing too much legumes/root vegetables and it’s filling up the markets. If after harvesting you have 8-10 months supply of food in storage that’s just about right, 12 is borderline too much, anything more is definitely too much.
I suggest you change some fields to do only maintenance and clover and let the markets and storage empty out a bit. Then if the supplty gets too low, less than 6 months, slowly change fields back to regular production to bring it up to a balanced level.
I didn’t know they would stock out of other storage buildings, this is probably the best overall solution. It keeps laborers busy, sure, but by the time I’m at this level of surplus even the basic resource gathering is mostly being done by specialists.
As far as overproducing legumes, yeah I could try to scale back the production a bit, but that would take some pretty involved math to know exactly how much of each crop a field produces every year, balanced against expected spoilage rage, plus having to recalculate soil fertility because that’s one of the main reasons to plant them to begin with.
You could do a lot of math but in the end there are just too many variables in this game such as soil condition, fertility, and droughts to name a few. That being said, it is possible to come up with rotations that more or less balance the amount of beans, greens, and root veggies so any one of them doesn’t dominate. People have published all sorts of farming schemes, and at the risk of people saying how bad it is I’ll give you mine. Take it for what it’s worth.
So I make all my fields 5 by 5 with 1 farmer each. 9 fields are grouped 3 by 3 and I look at them as 3 rows of 3 farms each. You get a lot of greens compared to the others so only 3 out of the 9 fields are heavy on greens (I like leeks).
The first and third rows (6 fields) are heavy on beans and root veggies with these rotations:
1
Turnip
Maintenance
Clover
2
Peas
Clover
Turnip
3
Beans
Carrots
The middle row is heavy on greens:
1
Turnip
Maintenance
Clover
2
Leeks
Clover
3
Clover
Leeks
I came up with these by trial and error and they’ve been successful. Of course, you want to stagger the rotations in each row, so that at any time field 1 has rotation 1 first, field 2 has rotation 1 second, and field 3 has rotation 1 third.
Another option, ( math free ) is to hide the beans in the trading post until you need them ! If they are in the trading post, they don’t take up any storage space and your market can’t reach them. I do this all the time with beans and greens when a large amount comes in at harvest. Once you see that the current amount at the market gets distributed to houses and the quantity goes down, then you can transfer some back into circulation from the trading post. ( also works for other foods and does not seem to suffer spoilage ).
Technically it might. Not positive on that part. maybe one of the more experienced players can answer for us ?
But if my screen says that I have 4 months of food saved, and I know that I have 300 each of meat, fish, beans and greens hidden in the trading post then I know I am doing better than that. But I only pull it to the trading post when I have too much, so not really worrying about how many months at that point.
