How does Machu Picchu work?

[The Konrad]

Why is the amount exported amount so small?
Because Machoman's Pichu city is producing 2604 units of Food, eating 1280, while my other cities only have +24 Food from Machu Picchu. That's nice and all, but pretty meh in comparison to the utterly broken 50% it actually says in the tooltip.

[SteelHeart]

Does the Machu Picchu city have +48 positive food? For the food achievements it seems that I needed a surplus of food so it might just be going off the surplus.

[The Konrad]

Nope, "output" is in the thousand.

Machos' City:

Output: 1323 (One is missing, but that's okay, probably a fraction rounded down)
Gains: 2604
Losses: 1280

[The Konrad]

Why did I take the time to make an incredible Foodpowahaus and Larder of my Empire, with Angor Wat etc. just for mediocre +24 food in each city. Hamurabi is sorely disappointed.

[Aluminum Elite Master]

My guess is that Machu Pichu only takes the food gain from assigned farmers, not the total food gain, to apply the bonus.

In other words: you may have 2604 gain and 1280 loss of food total. But in theory only a small fraction might be from farmer's themselves, as the farmer's districts, exploitations on tiles, and other bonuses could be making up most of that 2604.

What I am saying is that I think the game has a lot of issues with the in-game text. It wouldn't surprise me if it's only applying food gains from your farmers (pop assigned to green farm slots), not from the total food gain in the city. But Machu's text is very basic, and it makes it sound like it's 50% of all food in the city.

A good test might be re-load the save, unassign all pop from farming (so it's at zero pop in the green slots), and see if the Machu bonus goes to zero.

Just my theory there. But lot's of things in the game's text are unclear.

[Aluminum Elite Master]

One other point deserving it's own post:

How big is your empire?

If you have 1323 output, that could mean 650-ish food (due to 50% bonus).

From there, if you had 30-ish cities, it would possibly make sense if the game divided the 650 equally on every city to come out with 24 boost. Keep in mind, it's a boost on all other cities. So if you have some ridiculous amount of cities, that could be what is going on here as well.

TL;DR - I have no idea how the game actually calculates out the food boost, so a lot of scenarios are possible. The text doesn't necessarily represent the actual calculations in the background.

[The Konrad]

Originally posted by Aluminum Elite Master:

[...]
If you have 1323 output, that could mean 650-ish food (due to 50% bonus).

[...]

All good ideas, but no.

I only have one city (the newest I founded) which gets + 24 Extra Food. All other cities don't have any info on Machu Picchu Food Gain.

Originally posted by Aluminum Elite Master:

[...]
TL;DR - I have no idea how the game actually calculates out the food boost, so a lot of scenarios are possible. The text doesn't necessarily represent the actual calculations in the background.

Basically this.

Making this a bug which baited me to build a pretty useless wonder.


I feel cheated, I want my production back and use it to build something useful.

[Astasia]

It doesn't work, it's bugged. The food output doesn't make any sense and it only ever applies to one other city.