Ok so I’ve put almost 70 hours into this game with multiple restarts. LOVE this game man. Kudos to the developers. You got something that will be better than Anno if things keep going like this thru tier 4/5 (or whether that even happens crossing g my fingers). Soooo the food situation. Constantly running out of food leaving me building more food output buildings and farms. I accept more immigrants for regular production then food runs low again. Constant cycle. I know that’s one of the challenges of the game, seriously how in god’s name do you stock up on more than a couple months of food at tier 2 or 3. I’ve got pretty good fertility and feel I’m managing that well but it’s starting to break the game for me. If this is a common thing it needs to be addressed in future patches.
Build slowly. Increase population slowly… In my second play through I have never dropped below 5 months food supply and normall sit between 7-12. In my first play I grew the population too fast and was constantly in a food crisis. Fishing, hunting are all good plus I micromanage 3 or 4 gatherers for a 100 population.
Write your game difficulty becouse it’s important.
Medium/middle
I’ve got a similar problem, I get constantly the message that I’ve run out of food. While their is a large amount of food even after the crops are taken from the field.
In my second play through (map seed 1DB7F24E400) I get the message every time, if I get five month of food, then suddenly 4 months worth spoils. I did solve it with preserving (smoking, etc.) the food if possible, but as soon as I’ve got four or five months worth the rats come visiting. After the ratcatcher was set-up, the villagers where still complaining about a food shortage, but they let the food spoil in the storage (that is placed close by.)
My settings where all in the middle (except for raiders, I lowered that one.) The map I took from the hard environment (I don’t know the sizes, because I’ve re rolled the map a couple time.
That message starts to get annoying, because it goes easy for five times in a minute.
you need to smoke all your meat … its critical… you also need root cellars for your greens… you will always get some spoilage but it should be easilly manageable… one smoker can handle a hunter and a couple of fisherman easilly.
I’ve been in spots where I’ve got 24 months of food on hand with 9 spoil over the next 12, going into winter.
I think because the game is sped so nicely it’s easy to get carried away and build to many new “resource” and Service buildings.
Take note of your Laborer number. If it’s orange then your town isn’t working as efficiently as possible. In this game, the general laborers seem to make a huge impact on game play.
Which map are you playing on? I started on Lowland Lakes for my first crack at the game since its the “easy” option. The lowest my food ever got was 2 months worth at the start of year 2.
My gameplay focus has been on making sure I am always supplying more food than my current demand, since I know that immigrants/babies will happen and eventually I will hit my production capacity.
I’ve been playing on speed 1 the entire time and I am on somewhere between year 25-30 (cant remember right at the moment) with a population of 216 right smack in the middle of T3 and on their way to T4. The lowest my food gets over the winter on average would be no more than 9 or 10 months. For my population I have 11 active fields (and 4 more coming online), 10 fisherman, 4 hunters (with room for 6 more), 6 smokehouses, a 6-cow herd with a cheesemaker, and 8 foragers for supplemental food on top of everything. There may be more capacity I am forgetting right at the moment, but the point I am getting at is my town is overflowing in food throughout the year.
Since I started with a food focus, I never really had to worry about it and I have said yes to every immigrant group that has been thrown my way. After all they are better than babies since you get a villager who is ready to work right away, and typically does all of the labor/building work no one else will do (foreign policy makers take note)
Short story long, my guess is that you are anticipating your current food needs while you play, but not your future needs which is why you keep running into a bottleneck. For instance, I am working on my industrial expansion right at the moment, with three foundries for printing cash/iron, the blacksmith for tools, mills for flour, etc. The only reason I am doing this is because I opted to expand my fields and fishing first, as well as build roads into an area west of my village for those extra hunters I talked about. If I only focused on my industrial expansion without taking into account the food situation, I would probably find myself in a situation similar to yours where eventually I am fighting to get enough food for winter.
I aim to take this village into the 300-400 range, and I plan on doing that by roughly doubling my current food production capacity over the next 10 game years. While 25% of my workforce will be dedicated strictly to food production, it will make it so the other 75% never have to worry about starving and can focus on making shoes and other sundries.
If well positioned to minimize travel time one smoker can do about 400-420 meat per year from what I’ve seen. I wish they would provide upgrades to this building to allow more workers. I get to where I have 10 or more of them just to keep up.
Is it actually possible to starve in this game? Like I know that sounds like a horrible gaemer type comment designed to put people down but what I mean is I have survived at least 2 winters with 0 food in the food bar for the entire season. I think people were just like, eating fish as soon as it was caught or something.
I’m playing pacifist in a wonderland of natural resources. I have four smokers at least, a dozen of fishers, hunters, gatherers, crops, arborists(?), and hives but at some point the message about low food started and is in all the time
But the villagers kept leaving food and all kind of resources on the ground everywhere! Even at the front door of the food storage buildings, although there is space in them
In a previous game, some villagers got angry and left, taking with them a lot of supplies!
By the way, during winter lakes froze so there’s no fishing during cold months
Due to this, after a certain population, I stopped allowing more immigration
It is possible. Once some raiders invaded from my farmer’s field direction (my main source of food was agriculture) and the farmers did not work for that year. I had 0 food (in the top ui element) for more than 7 months and people started to die of starvation.
You can continue fishing in winter as they can just fish through ice holes (though not visually shown), you just have to make sure not to overfish, so I only do it every other year or when food is quite low.
Ah, ok, I guess on pacifist mode it’s something you’d have to try hard to trigger. I think a lot of the difficulty systems are tied into the combat because I always put diseases and settlement on higher levels but they just don’t really do anything because an unthreatened town is inherently easier to manage.
Some great ideas. Thanks everyone.
I took a look how many people I have working on food to figure out the percentage based on my overall population. Not including grocers, I have 55 villagers in food production. For a population of 216, that works out to 25.4%
I wonder what your current ratio of food workers to overall population is. My current hypothesis is that you want at least 20% of your population dedicated to food production at any given time, although you could probably get away with something between 15-20% if you’re ok with cutting your food budget close each year.
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