food shortage

[adamcs]

What can I do against food shortage? Anything else apart from buying food every month?

[06 Maestro]

The first step is to ensure you are maximizing food production in the provinces best suited for that task. Some provinces can barely produce any food, assigning labor in agriculture in those locations is not efficient. There are other provinces that are very productive in food production-utilize those to the maximum. Just start your development dialog and take it to each province and toy with the sliders a bit. It's a bit tedious the first time, but then you'll know which ones are best suited.

If that does not correct the deficiency you can lower taxes. When you get below 10% you will see a bonus in production in multiple items. The lower your taxes, the higher the bonus-it can be a significant amount.

Increasing national moral will also provide a boost in production about the same amount that lower taxes will. This may be troublesome as the provinces that provide luxuries may be the same provinces that provide food at a good ratio for the labor-you need to balance it out.

If you are still having shortages after trying the above-go to war. There's nothing like a good war to take care of excess population. Actually, you can eliminate excess manpower by starving your units. You can force march units while on forage orders in inhospitable provinces. Replacements will be drafted from various provinces thus eliminating population. Just increase your draft rate and set the army to 100% strength-and march those units through the mountains-they will take losses. Losses from any source will have an effect on your national moral-so keep an eye on that.

Waste due to too many provinces in your nation without the 5 court exclusion will reduce all production (2% per province over 30). This is a longer term fix to production, but should be implemented if you are suffering from any waste. Depending on what country you are playing; this may take years to accomplish-but it needs to be done and the sooner the better.

[Anthropoid]

Roads allow populations to grow, and thus they need more food too. Thus balancing production of roads with farms is often important.

[Kingmaker]

HiHi

Just in case you ain't seen it adamcs, check out BJs excellent 'Advanced Economy Guide', all sorts of useful stuff in there.
tm.asp?m=2169151

All the Best
Peter

[adamcs]

Thank you Maestro, I think these are very useful pieces of advice.

Although I tried to eliminate excess manpower by starving out the nation, but it didn't work for me. More than half the population died, I lost two wars, and my army got very small by the end. And still had food shortage. So that was the moment when I came here[:D]
I am not sure that the war is a good idea when food shortage, the national moral went down so rapidly, basically 2 turns and it was stg like -500 from 1000, and that obviously forced me to surrender immediately whoever declared war on me.
So I'm gonna try the other things you mentioned. I've had an impression that it is not the kind of problem one can solve within 1 or 2 turns.

Thanks again.

[06 Maestro]

ORIGINAL: adamcs

Thank you Maestro, I think these are very useful pieces of advice.

You're welcome

I am not sure that the war is a good idea when food shortage, the national moral went down so rapidly, basically 2 turns and it was stg like -500 from 1000, and that obviously forced me to surrender immediately whoever declared war on me.

Ouch-that happens. There is one other thing that may help under these circumstances. There is a military "upgrade" which gives a boost in moral. I've never tried it, but I assume it is for national moral. Under your current circumstances, it will (I think) give a rapid increase of hundreds of moral points. As you have no doubt noticed, negative moral does not help in production productivity.

BTW, I don't think you can "starve" the nation, as in loosing population. But you can eliminate man power through attrittion in military units-which in turn will result in more drafted men from the provinces. It sounds like you really don't need to reduce your population though-the problem is the National Moral being in the gutter.