how to deal with food shortage?

[misterprimus]

I have a food shortage currently in this game. I have been following other people's advice on how to deal with worker shortages and the advice was to stick to private farms and hydroponics, but I don't have enough of the former and have not researched the latter yet. Note this is on Epic (slowest) research speed.

Can someone advise me on how to deal with the food shortage without incurring worker shortage issues, as well as providing advise regarding anything else I'm obviously doing wrong?
https://filebin.net/z1nl08w9viie7cw7/w13.se1?t=t6jd8d3q

[zgrssd]

I can not look into the savegame right now, but generally you make do with a single farm in the SHQs zone.

[GuardsmanGary]

Pretty much your entire food deficit is from Hagenholt requesting emergency food to feed the city while the private farm there is repaired/upgraded. Once that's fixed your food loss is only down to a trickle.

There's a few things you could do:
Switch your applied science council to cross-fertilization to boost the production open farming.
Switch out the governor of Polytop for Libby Zaran who is currently sitting in the reserve pool. They have a higher agriculture skill value which will further boost the production of farms.
Change the priority of your economic council to focus almost exclusively on discovery until you discover hydroponics
Buy food on the market. You've got a decent amount of money, enough to buy all the food available on the market every turn for a while. Once the price of food starts climbing hold off on buying for a turn or two if your stocks allow.
Talk to the mainframe AI in Polytop and see if you can get a lucky hydroponics discovery
Build your own farm to tide you over until hydroponics is researched. Polytop has ~20k free population that could work the fields.
Nationalize the private farm in Polytop. It's costing 39k population but if you nationalize it it will only need 21k population. Yes, the total food production will be reduced (~2700 vs ~2000), but it's producing more private food than the population needs. Just make sure to change the zone orders to allow emergency food while the private economy builds its own farms. After a few turns the private food stock will diminish but they only need 900 or so food a turn which is more than covered by the production.

[zgrssd]

Switch out the governor of Polytop for Libby Zaran who is currently sitting in the reserve pool. They have a higher agriculture skill value which will further boost the production of farms.

Regarding how the Skill translates to more production. Both the Council Tasks and the Governor production bonuses use the same basic rules for the bonus:
Relations add a +/- 50%, depending on how high or low
Skill only applies a +1% for each point above 100

As a result skill never has a negative impact on production, but also only a very small positive one.
Relations are what maters the most.

[GuardsmanGary]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

Switch out the governor of Polytop for Libby Zaran who is currently sitting in the reserve pool. They have a higher agriculture skill value which will further boost the production of farms.

Regarding how the Skill translates to more production. Both the Council Tasks and the Governor production bonuses use the same basic rules for the bonus:
Relations add a +/- 50%, depending on how high or low
Skill only applies a +1% for each point above 100

As a result skill never has a negative impact on production, but also only a very small positive one.
Relations are what maters the most.

And putting Libby in charge put her relations at 96 or 97 while also providing a greater on average skill bonus compared to the current governor. Give her a very affordable bonus to get that last 3% and you've guaranteed to have improved the food output of the city. The current governor and Libby will provide the same relations bonus but Libby will provide a greater skill bonus, therefore Libby is the better choice in this situation.

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: GuardsmanGary

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

Switch out the governor of Polytop for Libby Zaran who is currently sitting in the reserve pool. They have a higher agriculture skill value which will further boost the production of farms.

Regarding how the Skill translates to more production. Both the Council Tasks and the Governor production bonuses use the same basic rules for the bonus:
Relations add a +/- 50%, depending on how high or low
Skill only applies a +1% for each point above 100

As a result skill never has a negative impact on production, but also only a very small positive one.
Relations are what maters the most.

And putting Libby in charge put her relations at 96 or 97 while also providing a greater on average skill bonus compared to the current governor. Give her a very affordable bonus to get that last 3% and you've guaranteed to have improved the food output of the city. The current governor and Libby will provide the same relations bonus but Libby will provide a greater skill bonus, therefore Libby is the better choice in this situation.

I was not arguing if the change was viable. I was just making sure he knew the rules properly so he can make decisions like that in the future.

[misterprimus]

I haven't even been thinking about leader skill besides looking at the level (I->V). I've had my hands full merely getting leaders that like me and strategem-retiring the ones that don't. Only recently have I scored some real gems like level III+ leaders that feel strongly in favor of my meritocracy/mind/commerce alignment. Does it make sense (in general, in other games) to simply get the best leaders you can find (level V) and just boosting their relations to 100 with salary boosts?

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: misterprimus

I haven't even been thinking about leader skill besides looking at the level (I->V). I've had my hands full merely getting leaders that like me and strategem-retiring the ones that don't. Only recently have I scored some real gems like level III+ leaders that feel strongly in favor of my meritocracy/mind/commerce alignment. Does it make sense (in general, in other games) to simply get the best leaders you can find (level V) and just boosting their relations to 100 with salary boosts?

High capacity is all about long term usability. It means they are quick to learn.
Usually the have pretty good attributes as well, which helps with getting a high skill cap and a decent total relatively quickly. But still, it is a longterm goal. Short term a happy Cap I is better then any Cap V.