Too Little Food - Advice?

[Oldguard1970]

I am trying to get past the lack of a manual. I am in trouble with food. My stocks are dwindling!

My three cities just entered the age of Mechanization. I have formers working. I bought the cultivate improvement. Two of my cities are at the maximum allowable farmers, and the third is close to the maximum. I am at minus 7 to minus 11 food per turn for the past several turns.

Do I have to disband military units? (I'd hate to do that. The aliens attacked and pushed me to the brink. I seem safe for now, but ...)

I would welcome any advice.

[Dr. Foo]

Just some ideas:

If there is some open land nearby (with food or better bonus food) build a colonizer and settle there. If there is nothing open, invade your neighbor and take their land.

Sounds like you've outgrown the space you have and have too many citizens and not enough food. If you have a city in a crappy location that is taking but not giving anything, save your game raze the city and see if that makes a difference. Can you remove fungus yet? If not research that as soon as you can and have the formers remove it and create farms.

Or you can mod the Food XML and make it give you lots of food. [:D]

[eyegore]

Your answer is in city management. If you go in as if your playing a civ game you've missed one area Pandora plays very differently. In Pandora production is not tile based. It is job based. Each map tile around your city does not generate all the yield shown in the tile but only the amount according to how you assign your workforce. In civ you assign a worker on a tile and you get all that tile's resources, say 2 food and 1 mineral. In Pandora you either assign one population unit to be a miner there, and it will harvest the 1 mineral alone, or to be a farmer, and it will yield only the 2 food. Since resources are Global you can now truely specalize your cities. This is paired with a migration system - When your morale is low and you don’t have enough living space in your cities, your people will tend to migrate to more desirable cities - so the city with the most food tiles would be the city that should have a lower tax rate and the city where you build improvements like habitats and so forth that raise their morale, and in the other cities keep the tax higher, don't build improvements that the citizens would want...and remember to go in assign them their jobs. Also remember that within the city window you can pick the next tile the city will grow to, just select the flag so it turns green and that tile will be the next growth tile.

This is one area Pandora really trumps any of the firaxis's games, even SMAC...or for that matter any other 4x...is how much more control you have in managing your cities.

[Oldguard1970]

Thanks very much for the help. I'll go see what I can do.