Food consumption getting out of control

[DreadZep]

I am into around round 160 and have several about 5 metro citys and several other smaller cities over roughly 1/4 of the map... my food consumption seems to just be going thru the roof though I cant figure out why. I have mass built farms to the point where a good portion of the map is being covered with farms yet the consumption just increases exponentially every round no matter how many farms I build or upgrade. what am I doing wrong or right here?

[ulzgoroth]

You'll probably have to actually get some information to answer that!

For a very first pass, check the tooltip when you mouse over your food stock. It should give some idea of where it's being sent, IIRC.

There's almost certainly more in one or more reports. Not sure which one to point you at though.

[DreadZep]

End of last round stock: 16k
Sent to Zones: 10K
Items present for delivery to units: 5k
Sent to units: 600
delivered from zones: 6.4k
Consumed by troops in SHQ: 24
Consumed by colonists and recruits: 640
Lost to max storage: 0

Yea I dont get it, so much food being sent to zones and it just keeps growing

[Dampfnudel]

Do you have bottlenecks in the logistic system? Are your farms filled with workers? Has your private sector access to its own farms? Do you convert food to fuel? Does your planet allow open farming without penalties? (It sounds like you use open farming).

[ulzgoroth]

Okay, if lots of food is being sent to zones, that either means you're needing to feed lots of people, or you're making lots of biofuel.

If you're making biofuel, hopefully you know about that. So I'll assume you're feeding lots of people.

If you're feeding people out of central reserves, that means that some of your zones aren't producing the food they need locally. (If they were, it would be produced and consumed without being passed through SHQ.)

One thing that could explain this is the farms you mass built, if they're open farms. Farms take a lot of labor. You're responsible for providing food to workers. Domed farms are usually reliable production (unless you run out of water or workers), but open farms can have their productivity depend on the regional climate and seasonal variation. If you're going into a non-productive season for your farms, while employing loads of workers to staff those farms, that could look like this perhaps.

(If you've got Emergency Food set for your zones you could possibly be feeding the population rather than the workers. IDK whether that would look different on the tooltip. That should usually happen only if there's a lack of food available from traders, which you might want to check.)

[DreadZep]

Ah yes, it is all open farms and it does appear to be some sort of seasonal change going on. My water supply is fluctuating pretty dramatically as well. I had actually wondered about that as upgrading them seeing how many workers were needed. Makes sense now, those farms are basically covering the map but not actually producing very much

[ulzgoroth]

One possible way to mitigate the problem would be mothballing many of the least productive farms and firing the workers, until a productive season comes around again. (Set the zones to a policy that allows firing, if they aren't already.) Once they're population rather than workers they can probably come up with their own food.

(There might be some problem with this plan, I've never actually used open farms. Seems realistic though.)

[DreadZep]

Thank you for help guys. its late in the game and taking quite a long time between rounds at this point, so I think ill just start a new play thru and say lesson learned.

[DreadZep]

Actually I had this same problem when starting a new game using only agri domes and turns out the problem was administrative strain penalty with 90% reduction to productivity. this was happening because every time I would conquer a new zone i wasnt redrawing the boundaries, so I ended up with my initial starting zone growing massively and each city being a tiny chunk within that big zone, which as you can imagine was causing all sorts of penalties

[maerchen]

I had this happen to me, too. Admin strain can kill all your productivity.

The Z hotkey is a critical tool.