Province starvation

[yarm102]

Why do provinces starve even when you're supposedly subsidising food imports? is it like when the Russians had "problems with grain supply" in the 1930's? If so why do the rich/nomenklatura starve but the peasants in the field eat? What does subsidising food imports do apart from cost money? When you set at least 50% of your trade capacity to import food to a market, does that do anything?

Also, do food production RGO's get better at producing food when tech advances, or do you just click the expand button endlessly in the event your population expands (unless it starves lol)? Say, you discover crop rotation, can you upgrade your RGO's to that production method? Why can't they invest in better production methods as profits allow autonomously?

Why is the columbian exchange centrally managed? isn't it obvious to a peasant that potatoes and maize are as productive if not more than rye and turnips? why does the king need to tell people that? isn't it obvious to a planter in brazil, or south africa, or the carribean, or australia, that sugar cane is a profitable cash crop if you live in a flyblown, croc infested sub tropical area and can corral enough poor saps to burn and harvest the cane each year? Could you not just handle that by event? "Peasants in Kerry have decided to grow Potatoes, sire. How do you respond?". I suppose the limitation is that each location has just the one RGO, so the Columbian exchange, for example, doesn't make sense, since you can't grow new world crops in addition to old world crops unless you change the RGO of a province.

I feel like i have just enough control to watch everything burn to the ground for reasons which seem arcane and poorly signposted unless i'm a sweatlord, but not enough control to organise a fire fighting response. it's very frustrating. Imperator handles this in a much better way, IMHO.

The automation is good, but if you're going to implement presets, you may want to think about something along the lines of allowing players to set priorities for markets. In my case, where i have a highly urbanised core area, i'd like markets to import food as their first priority, import raw materials as their second priority, export surplus finished goods as their third priority. In theory all of these should be profitable, since opportunity cost means its more profitable for a city of skilled craftsmen to import food and raw materials and transform those raw materials into high margin finished goods which can be exported and sold than it is for those skilled craftsmen to grow their own food and cut their own wood, for example, even allowing for the higher prices at which the food and raw materials would be sold in that market. Intuitively, would merchants not scramble to sell goods in that market for a guaranteed profit, thus guaranteeing supply?

oh well. back to factorio.