How do you get more food?

[Dcethe]

I send out 2 ventures a year just foraging / hunting and raid 2-4 a year to get cows and goods yet I am just barely able to feed my people, can't afford to spend any other time exploring or gifting clans to progress the story line.

Note: I do have temples to all the dead gods, aswell as 1 to Humtak, 1 to Ursox and 1 to the milk goddess.
Do I need to scale back and forget the old gods ( is this a good idea ) or do I need to do something else
Also: feel free to spoil me and just tell me if building those temples to the dead gods do anythimg, its been 8 years in-game and so far I haven't gotten a single use out of them

[Mr. Kaneda]

I just finished my first play through on normal and struggled with food early and did really well late (5 seasons of food 1.2k herds and 150+ goods all the time) more temples like those to inillia and to dostal and whatever the sheep god is really helps

Once you produce surplus food going around selling it is extreamly profitable selling less than a seasons worth of food for almost 100 herds is amazing.

I also had a clan that I raided into the ground that I could raid whenever I wanted and suffer zero casualties so that helped supplement income

[Dcethe]

Originally posted by Mr. Kaneda:

I just finished my first play through on normal and struggled with food early and did really well late (5 seasons of food 1.2k herds and 150+ goods all the time) more temples like those to inillia and to dostal and whatever the sheep god is really helps

Once you produce surplus food going around selling it is extreamly profitable selling less than a seasons worth of food for almost 100 herds is amazing.

I also had a clan that I raided into the ground that I could raid whenever I wanted and suffer zero casualties so that helped supplement income

How many people do you have?

[Errapel]

I had a similar problem (I'm also wondering about the 'dead' gods. It feels like there MUST be a pay off eventually, because that's a lot of resources tied up in it if not. I can say that very occasionally I've gotten special bonuses from those temples, so I think it may turn out to be worth it).

A few things I found helped:
Sending heros with Renowned or higher food skill on foraging expeditions often yielded 1-2 seasons worth of food. (when you have a surplus trade it, prioritising herds!)
I tried using hunting/foraging ventures for food, but didn't find it as helpful.
I used ventures to make lots of money (trapping furs in dark season, crafting gems, trading etc... netted decent goods, particularly with skilled people leading them). I used the goods to buy herds.
Since I didn't have the population to build more than 1 or 2 new shrines, I also used goods for blessings (calf/lamb blessings when food was good, milk blessings etc... when food was getting low). It's not as good as a permanent shrine/temple, but it does help a lot.
I tend to prioritise rewards that boost food in some way, if people are well fed and surviving they're more likely to support my other endeavours.
I prioritise sending a caravan to each wheel, then each ram, then each rider village. Doing so allows you to open more trade routes (one new trade route for every full set). More trade routes meant more goods, which I could spend on more herds.
You can have a new alliance once you've visited all villages for a tribe, so after meeting all rams, riders or wheels, will net you a new alliance 'slot'. Additional alliances allow you to have more temples/shrines, so you can support more food related magic.
Spirits can be incredibly helpful. So far I have berry spirit, heron spirit, and caribou spirit (among others) that give food or help you find food. If you have a shaman on your ring, your odds of succeeding in persuading them go up (particularly if they're very skilled in magic, possibly lore, I'm not sure).
I tend to pour clan magic into fields, pastures and wilds (and try to have Ring members who worship related gods, so I can put more magic into that domain).


If anyone has tips on improving my population size, I'm all ears.

[Dcethe]

Originally posted by Errapel:

I had a similar problem (I'm also wondering about the 'dead' gods. It feels like there MUST be a pay off eventually, because that's a lot of resources tied up in it if not. I can say that very occasionally I've gotten special bonuses from those temples, so I think it may turn out to be worth it).

A few things I found helped:
Sending heros with Renowned or higher food skill on foraging expeditions often yielded 1-2 seasons worth of food. (when you have a surplus trade it, prioritising herds!)
I tried using hunting/foraging ventures for food, but didn't find it as helpful.
I used ventures to make lots of money (trapping furs in dark season, crafting gems, trading etc... netted decent goods, particularly with skilled people leading them). I used the goods to buy herds.
Since I didn't have the population to build more than 1 or 2 new shrines, I also used goods for blessings (calf/lamb blessings when food was good, milk blessings etc... when food was getting low). It's not as good as a permanent shrine/temple, but it does help a lot.
I tend to prioritise rewards that boost food in some way, if people are well fed and surviving they're more likely to support my other endeavours.
I prioritise sending a caravan to each wheel, then each ram, then each rider village. Doing so allows you to open more trade routes (one new trade route for every full set). More trade routes meant more goods, which I could spend on more herds.
You can have a new alliance once you've visited all villages for a tribe, so after meeting all rams, riders or wheels, will net you a new alliance 'slot'. Additional alliances allow you to have more temples/shrines, so you can support more food related magic.
Spirits can be incredibly helpful. So far I have berry spirit, heron spirit, and caribou spirit (among others) that give food or help you find food. If you have a shaman on your ring, your odds of succeeding in persuading them go up (particularly if they're very skilled in magic, possibly lore, I'm not sure).
I tend to pour clan magic into fields, pastures and wilds (and try to have Ring members who worship related gods, so I can put more magic into that domain).


If anyone has tips on improving my population size, I'm all ears.

The Dead gods temples can be used to help fight against the Chaos gods, so far I only got to use Ernalda's temple against Nontraya , but thats the earliers fight / battle. haven't done the fight yet because around year 10 I start a downward spiral. my newest game I put temples dedicated to hunting / foraging / milk / calf and now im making it year by year without raiding my neighbors to destruction. sorry horse stallions ; (

[Firestell]

I believe a lot of it depends on difficulty. At the hardest difficulty 2k herds plus all the temple blessings is not even remotely close to enough to sustain my clan. The various bounties you can get from story events help a lot.

The main things I noticed that helped a lot was balurga's blessing early on and Ernalda's fertile blessing after Orlanth and Ernalda heroquest, but those things run out eventually.

Havent completed the game yet but I feel like food production needs a buff. I havent noticed much of an impact going from 1700 to 2100 herds, and that feels wrong. I bet not even 3k cows would feed my clan themselves, and at that point I would have to restore pastures every other year.

[Gudcast]

having 99999 herds dosent matter i tried it lol

[Firestell]

Yeah if we had the ability to manually slaughter like in KodP, I am 100% certain we could get more a surplus by slaughtering cows for food and trading that away for more cows. This is ridiculous.

The food balance is mess.

[stun]

If we take DarkAge.lua at face value

foodTradeValue = 3, -- 1 food unit is worth this many cows
-- Tunable economic values (used more in KoDP. Also, KoDP had middlingAmountOfCows etc. but Robin didn’t do that this time.)

smallAmountOfFood = 10, -- Half a turn = 2 weeks
moderateAmountOfFood = 20, -- This is enough for a month (see foodNeededPerTurn below)
largeAmountOfFood = 40, -- This is enough for a season

foodNeededPerTurn = 20
foodProducedPerTurn = 10,This is 1 of the units on p.41 of Leuchtthurm, the amount a point of magic provides.

then we've got numbers that may or may not scale e.g. with pop. Comments seem to suggest they do not (most of these lines are identical to the StormAge.lua in the same folder, so presumably they work however they were written for that game, which might answer the question); there's also a fairly high population threshold (1200) so if you have to hit that for numbers to change then they're more or less static. Given that herds experimentally do not produce food, and food stockpiles don't naturally wax and wane with the seasons the way they would if harvest was actually simulated, I strongly suspect that things like herd size and magic investment are just flags used to poll or pass to events ('scenes', I guess).
The hyaloring culture definition has this comment

-- Note that HerdsAreScant when .herds < .population * 0.9 (585, with a nominal population of 650). And surplus is 1.5, or 975

suggesting that herds can be scant, or surplus, or neither, and aren't actually checked as a value outside of that (maybe the raw number is used for scaling pasture damage rate?). This feels like it's inline with how food stockpiles behave when berry creates food, and leads me to believe that things like milkblessing are just a raw increase to food created each turn, with higher difficulties presumably having either larger food drain or just worse events. The clan magic food options very clearly do not passively produce food, or at least a meaningful amount, since even on easy they don't change whether you hover at small or medium, and probably just buttress events in an opposite kind of way to higher difficulties (and dull pasture erosion or increase efficiency thereof in terms of animal yield per unit grazed, maybe). I'm leaning towards the event explanation, since the major land fertility bonuses seem to halt food decay (so 10+10-20, I'm presuming).

Since clanmembers are defacto vegans who chuck a hissy over eating meat and won't do it unless you're literally starving and hunting seems to be akin to playing slots in terms of it's profitability, I suppose you're supposed to observe lent through the dark age and farm for spirits with discreet food bonus effects.

[david]

I don’t think I understand the logic of slaughtering (say) 10 cows to get 12 food that you could then sell to get 12 cows. That sounds like perpetual motion.


Large enough herds do provide more food (both milk and meat), and the stockpile absolutely changes each season! The harvest comes in in Earth Season, so Fire Season is often hungry.

Most pre-industrial herders prioritize herd size. The game is abstract so you don’t need to worry about the details of slaughtering young bulls or keeping enough oxen to plow the fields.

[Kalrotix]

Originally posted by david:

I don’t think I understand the logic of slaughtering (say) 10 cows to get 12 food that you could then sell to get 12 cows. That sounds like perpetual motion.


Large enough herds do provide more food (both milk and meat), and the stockpile absolutely changes each season! The harvest comes in in Earth Season, so Fire Season is often hungry.

Most pre-industrial herders prioritize herd size. The game is abstract so you don’t need to worry about the details of slaughtering young bulls or keeping enough oxen to plow the fields.

I think it's more that we don't really understand how food is suppose to work in the game. If even herds of 1700 to 2100 don't produce surplus for a pop of less than 1000 then it's difficult to understand what to do to finaly be a little clear about that problem.

[Firestell]

Originally posted by david:

I don’t think I understand the logic of slaughtering (say) 10 cows to get 12 food that you could then sell to get 12 cows. That sounds like perpetual motion.


Large enough herds do provide more food (both milk and meat), and the stockpile absolutely changes each season! The harvest comes in in Earth Season, so Fire Season is often hungry.

Most pre-industrial herders prioritize herd size. The game is abstract so you don’t need to worry about the details of slaughtering young bulls or keeping enough oxen to plow the fields.

I dont understand it either! But thats is how it feels like the mechanic would work in game (if we were allowed to manually slaughter cows). Which as we all agree, is absurd.

When i have time to test it I will purposelly starve myself and count the number of cows slaughtered and the equivalent food gain, just to check if the math works out.

Given that I have already traded a season's worth of food for more than 100 cows, I'm willing to bet the profit of going from cows to food to cows would be enormous.

Just to make it clear, I am not hating on you guys work, I love this series, but the food balance in this game feels wrong to me.

[GuineaPrince]

I don't mind the cutoff of herds to food being vague. You have many cow, many cow good. More cow better. The cows aren't giving decimal demarcation of product, you get what they give season to season.

Insofar as how 2 more food, I find spirits are better than using ventures in most situations. Get yourself a good cluster and you can produce more bountiful food sources for a while, make your cows produce more, etc. That way you can spare your ventures for other needs that year, and you get a little extra source of food while you work on getting your regular sources more productive and get stable enough to get sacred time rituals and shrines set up.

[stun]

Originally posted by GuineaPrince:

I don't mind the cutoff of herds to food being vague. You have many cow, many cow good. More cow better

Except, experimental evidence suggests that it's not. It's flagrantly not actually, it's actively bad because field damage does seem to scale whereas benefits do not in any way whatsoever.

Originally posted by david:

Large enough herds do provide more food (both milk and meat)

So we've got soft word-of-god confirmation that you want exactly 1.5x clan population cattle (plus a buffer for sacrifice and misadventures).
It really doesn't feel like there's a difference in seasons, earth season would have to blow you way past the low food threshold if it was actually doing a meaningful portion of the lifting for the other 80% of the year with no harvest. And fire season, of course, usually feels like the time you have the most food and resources.

[Chimpandre]

i had far more than 1.5x clan population in herds + spammed berry twice a year + buffed by treasure hunting and even then i did not have food for a small ( 600 ) clan late game.

hell my whole economy relied on stealing infinite cows from a clan i had a feud with ( since clans seem to have infinite swords and cows/zero influence from raiding ), sacrificing then and taking the mood penalty.

i can only imagine how bad it would be without berry

[Firestell]

Originally posted by Chimpandre:

i had far more than 1.5x clan population in herds + spammed berry twice a year + buffed by treasure hunting and even then i did not have food for a small ( 600 ) clan late game.

hell my whole economy relied on stealing infinite cows from a clan i had a feud with ( since clans seem to have infinite swords and cows/zero influence from raiding ), sacrificing then and taking the mood penalty.

i can only imagine how bad it would be without berry

I think that is the point. Having more cows than 1.5x population does nothing besides wreck your pastures faster.