Harsher penalties for running out of food

[San Fortunado]

Greetings,

Currently, having no food in your nation only decreases your income by either one third or one half and prevents you from using your soldiers, as you cannot pay upkeep. To my knowledge, there are no other penalties for running out of food. I believe that the penalties for running out of food are far too lenient, and nations without food should suffer harsher penalties, as is the case with running out of resources for power plants (improvements requiring power do not function) or money (improvements do not function, you cannot launch any attacks). Thus, I would like to propose the following penalties be implemented in addition to the current penalties:

• Resource production buildings should not function if you do not have enough food to feed all your citizens, to represent workers going on strike/being unable to work.
• Disease rate in all cities should gradually increase for each turn your nation does not have food (up to an arbitrary maximum value) to represent the effects of malnutrition on the civilian populace. This special disesase rate cannot be decreased by hospitals and can only be decreased by having enough food to feed all your citizens.
• Crime rate in all cities should gradually increase for each turn your nation does not have food (up to an arbitrary maximum value) to represent the effects of the creation of black markets for food and looting rations, so forth.

I believe these penalties will make for a richer game experience, as food becomes a more valuable resource during both peacetime and wartime and creates new mechanics around the requirement for nations to have food.

Edited December 25, 2019 by San Fortunado

[Furiosa]

I agree, the people need to live in the green place.

Why are we bringing bullets from the bulletfarm, and guzzoline from gas town when our people demand food. Bringing in manufactured goods instead of food should be halted. Angharad used to call them antiseed. Plant one and watch something die.

Edited December 25, 2019 by Furiosa
expanded point

[HARPER.txt]

111% Support Changes to Food Being Irrelevant if you don't run Commerce builds!

[Joi]

As this robotic avatar does not require food to survive, she has no place to dictate eating customs. However, we are curious to see how a more realistic "Starvation Mode" would affect Orbis' human populations.

Naturally, more people might find themselves considering transhumanist augmentation solutions, such as Robotopia's newly-patented DynaGullet stomach recycler...

On that subject, please inquire with Robotopia's Dept. of Cyber for the hottest new augs for your citizens.

[Guest Elijah Mikaelson]

I agree this change needs to happen, I think Alex needs to fix the war system first as the plane only spam is pointless and to fix the war system would then fix other issues.

[Limbuwan]

Suggestion 2 and 3 is okay but 1 is debatable for those producing food as we can feed part of our population with our own food production. Your suggestion 2 and 3 makes perfect sense if those affects are based on the shortage amount.

[San Fortunado]

12 hours ago, Limbuwan said:

Suggestion 2 and 3 is okay but 1 is debatable for those producing food as we can feed part of our population with our own food production. Your suggestion 2 and 3 makes perfect sense if those affects are based on the shortage amount.

Greetings, and thank you for your response.

We understand your concerns regarding suggestion 1. Given the fact that, to our current knowledge, you may have enough resources to pay upkeep for some, but not all of your power plants and some cities will remain powered while others will not, we concur with your assessment and believe that the following solution would resolve the issue you are experiencing:

Instead of all resource production buildings going offline, a percentage of resource production buildings (calculated by dividing the amount of food you currently have by the amount of food required to feed all citizens, rounded up) will go offline. We hope that this solution will allow us to come together for a more harmonious agreement.

Sincerely,

San Fortunado

[Guest Epi]

1

Edited February 18, 2021 by Epi

[San Fortunado]

1 hour ago, Epi said:

This just makes perma warring people even easier.

Greetings, and thank you for voicing your concerns.

While we understand your concerns about permanent war, please understand that land currently cannot be destroyed in war by any type of attack, and that farms are buildable up to 20 farms per city. Furthermore, as war continues and infrastructure levels decrease, the amount of citizens present in a nation will decrease as well. Therefore, as war goes on it is very likely for food production to remain at pre-war levels, especially for larger nations with more land and more farms, while food consumption decreases overall. Thus, I do not believe that this proposal will have any impact on alliances choosing to maintain permanent states of war.

Sincerely,

San Forutnado

Edited December 26, 2019 by San Fortunado

[durmij]

This is a terrible suggestion in the current design space. The underlining logic for the suggestion seems to be an argument for realism, but nothing else about the game is realistic on any reasonable scale. Game elements only reference realistic things, and forcing a sense of realism into one aspect breaks the games internal logic and has cascading effects.

This suggestion takes place in a game where players can already be held down indefinitely, acquiring penalties for scenarios that have no counter play. Adding penalties for those scenarios is untenable, as the balance of power is already shifted so far away from a nation losing wars.

On top of this, given the genius idea to add radiation as suppressant to food production in game, the damage from a global war would get multiplied by the factor of decreased, causing spiraling inflation as production plummets under these penalties.

I'm assuming this is a troll post, but it's a bad troll post, with arguments based off a poor understanding of both basic game design principles and a basic understanding of the current game balance. I know it's lulzy to try and bait Alex into crashing his own game, or make people angry with targeted suggestions, but if you want to accomplish either of those things, you could stand to be a bit more subtle.

[Valid User Name]

It'd make it easier to finally force an unconditional surrender in the dial-up war.

[Critters]

10 hours ago, Valid User Name said:

It'd make it easier to finally force an unconditional surrender in the dial-up war.

This guy should be leading Coalition B.