Grain consumption too high in 1.7

[t.latzke(Ger)]

Some things seem wrong in 1.7 and break some economic connections.

All countries consume too much grain. I used to be able to trade grain from China, but now that is no longer possible. Even England has food problems. Even when I play Japan, grain consumption increases to gigantic levels. Example a deficit of 1,000 grains. You can hardly control it either. In Turkey the deficit is almost 2,500 from the start. You only have to play for 4 years.

[Spulls]

I don't see what the problem is? Gives you a reason to actually build up farms and invest in fertilizers.

[nkm57]

I think the reason is population overbrith,when i play qing the unemployed rise dynamite drain my welfare,it was not that strong in 1.6.

[nkm57]

It was default set for qing setting.

[Miles "Tails" Prower]

Originally posted by Spulls:

I don't see what the problem is? Gives you a reason to actually build up farms and invest in fertilizers.

This.

The game was too easy before and goods and resources were FAR too abundant. The changes to the economy feel great. We simply need to be smarter about what we build.

[Miles "Tails" Prower]

Originally posted by Spulls:

I don't see what the problem is? Gives you a reason to actually build up farms and invest in fertilizers.

I think OP is forgetting:

Pre-industrialized societies generally are subsistence farmers. They only produce enough for their own family in most cases. It makes sense china won't have as much grain to export as before given their MASSIVE population. I think the system is working as intended, assuming there are no bugs or glitches occurring.

[Vellsi]

Originally posted by based and truly redpilled:

Originally posted by nkm57:

I think the reason is population overbrith,when i play qing the unemployed rise dynamite drain my welfare,it was not that strong in 1.6.

You have welfare in Qing from the beginning?

Qing start with Poor Laws enabled and in some states they have a significant amount of unemployed people. I just started a new game to see how much it costs but one spends 8.36K at game start on Welfare Payments alone. That's with Social Security at level 1. Reason of course being that Qing has many unemployed people, who will not drop back into subsistence farming because of the welfare law. Some provinces have up to 178K unemployed. Makes it vital to immediately get the unemployed people employed before working on getting the peasants to pay taxes. Of course infrastructure is limiting in these states, so it's not easy to get it all rolling.


To get back to what OP said though: On my end Qing starts with 4.92K surplus of grain on a new game on 1.7, for a total of 24.6K produced. Mind you, 22.8K of that is from Subsistence Rice Paddies. As you might know Serfdom gives +1 grain and the base output is 2 grain, so abolishing Serfdom removes one third of the grain on the market.

That will apply in similar fashion to all nations but others have vastly less population or perhaps even basic farms in place, making it easier to build up those required to compensate. As result it gets much harder on Qing to scale out of subsistence. Without Serfdom one would be missing 7.6K grain and needs to build rice farms to compensate. A single rice farm provides 40 grain (without considering any bonus and assuming one doesn't produce fruit and sugar), so that's 190 rice farms, double that in what farms (or 760 rice or wheat farms if you were to set all production methods to fruit and sugar to fuel a massive food export industry). That's logistics at a whole different scale, compared to any other nation. It also limits the option to even switch out of Serfdom, which on the other hand is necessary to advance the laws and modernize.

These 366M people Qing starts with are therefore mostly a penalty, as they can't be meaningfully employed with the measly underlying economy and they hinder the pace at which one can enact new laws without crippling the economy.


Given the numbers mentioned I'd not consider the amount of grain to be too little at start but the danger seems to be that populous nations with Serfdom and lots of subsistence farming switch out of Serfdom and then shrink the globally available grain supply by large amounts. 190 needed rice farms in Qing (without considering population growth), around 100 more in British East India and suddenly nearly 300 rice farms are missing in the world after politics work their way through nations (or 600 wheat farms if you prefer those). That's a lot of overcapacity the AI is unlikely to build before making the switch, so temporary global shortages are to be expected when Asian politics begin to shift.

[nkm57]

The AI always a mess,they keep building stuff that we dont want to build.now more worst with no direct control on game rules.
The weird is the pop will keep spaming in same spot even keep increase unemployment but other place still has lot of place for Subsistence workplace.

[t.latzke(Ger)]

Originally posted by Spulls:

I don't see what the problem is? Gives you a reason to actually build up farms and invest in fertilizers.

Try to get more grain from Japan without causing a massive increase in unemployment. Even fertilizer is not enough. When I play Japan, I can't bring the grain deficit to normal. Even if I add fertilizer and build more farms

[t.latzke(Ger)]

Originally posted by Miles "Tails" Prower:

Originally posted by Spulls:

I don't see what the problem is? Gives you a reason to actually build up farms and invest in fertilizers.

This.

The game was too easy before and goods and resources were FAR too abundant. The changes to the economy feel great. We simply need to be smarter about what we build.

Too many goods? That's a joke, is not it ? Try to trade important raw materials as a small nation.If you play Argentina, you must import grain. The same applies when they play with Turkey. Without this, the standard of living drops massively over time. Because it is impossible to produce enough grain yourself. Even with fertilizer. If I build 10 farms, the consumption increases even more.If you always felt like you were producing enough goods, the developers should adjust the difficulty settings

[Strifeboy]

Any way to make grain profitable? I always have 25% grain price and I was hoping to use my subjects as agri hubs but they don;t work them or the profitability low like around 2 profit.

[eternalsway]

I think the problem is they don't go back to be self-farmer any more? The population grow so fast that it's impossible to get them enough jobs

[Punkass Beach]

the big problem with building enough farmers means you get a lot of landowners in your country quickly

[Damedius]

I think they keep nerfing the game to appeal to the meta gamers. It is also because the game is more fun in the early game and turns into a complete slog in the late game where you have pages of construction.

I think it exposes the big problem with the game, is that it scales exponentially. Instead of constantly nerfing the early game they should work on making the late game less of a slog.

[Ole "Slim Jolo" the Hobo Hero]

Originally posted by Miles "Tails" Prower:

Originally posted by Spulls:

I don't see what the problem is? Gives you a reason to actually build up farms and invest in fertilizers.

This.

The game was too easy before and goods and resources were FAR too abundant. The changes to the economy feel great. We simply need to be smarter about what we build.

Yea, took me til 1880s as USA to finally start building enough food / grain output to start bringing price in general down and slightly starting to alter my loyalist / radical composition which had reached, uh, 10ish million at it's peak during my super over expanded/reached 1860s/70s lol, i wasn't really paying attention to standard of living stuff and was building with a fair bit of debt already and didn't really realise how dramatically expensive construction goods were getting. I ended up spending ages correcting that and meanwhile people themselves just got angrier and angrier lol (but at least Opium fresh from Vietnam and Burma was only 2 bucks)

Now expanding food as whole industries actually kinda feels better to period, especially in terms of what a revolution actually reaching a surplus is by mid game industrialisation with nitrogen fixing fertiliser and modern equipment

[VoiD]

Originally posted by Strifeboy:

Any way to make grain profitable? I always have 25% grain price and I was hoping to use my subjects as agri hubs but they don;t work them or the profitability low like around 2 profit.

It's always "profitable", but it's a cheap good, and you'd have to sell far too much of it to make an actual profit.

Grain is better used with protectionism, increasing export tariffs, to keep it within your boders, cheap grain means the poor cai raise their SoL much faster as it's often their main spending.

Exports are usually better for luxury goods in lower volumes and higher prices, like fancy clothing, furniture, or opium,

PS: If you don't tax grain exports and go around building giant 40+ size farms expect other nations to start importing all of your "excess" grain on their own, I just realized russia was taking 4k grain and france was taking 3k more as afghanistan because I built up one province as a giant grain farm and I had trade deals with them.