Hello and welcome to another dev diary! I’m Alex and today I bring you famine, starvation, ruin and disast– I mean, happy Thursday!
Back in dev diary #126 we mentioned how for 1.8 we’re looking at how the availability of food affects the people in your country. Up until now, if food prices were high, that would lead to Pops dropping in Wealth. As a consequence of that, Pops would become unhappy and have their birth and mortality rates change. In extreme cases they would drop below Standard of Living 5, which would mark them as Starving and make their mortality rate be higher than the birthrate, resulting in the Pop’s population decreasing over time.
This is fine, but it created some problems we wanted to tackle. For one, Pop Needs don’t have shortages, so when the price caps out at +75%, that’s it. Food is always available, it just gets expensive. Another issue is that the starving status is directly tied to what Standard of Living the Pop has, meaning that regardless of why Standard of Living drops below 5, the pop is marked as Starving. Even if food is essentially free and the actual issue is that clothes are expensive. Lastly, the effects of starvation don’t scale as much as they probably should, so even at SoL 1, Pops can live on quite a while.
With all that in mind, there’s three main features we’ve added to flesh out this aspect of the game:
- Starvation
- Famines
- Harvest Conditions
Below we’ll go into each of them in detail. Everything mentioned in this dev diary will be made available for free when update 1.8 arrives later this year.
Starvation, now ✨dynamic✨
As mentioned, up until now starvation has been a fixed status tied to specific SoL levels. In 1.8, all pops will have a metric for Food Security instead, which measures to what degree that Pop has access to sufficient and nutritious food. If a Pop’s Food Security gets too low, it will first be considered to be in a state of Mild Starvation. Here, Pops will start getting some penalties to their birth rate and mortality. If Food Security drops even lower, this status will change to Severe Starvation, where the Pops’ population starts decreasing fast. To be clear, both Mild and Severe Starvation penalties get progressively worse as Food Security drops, so it’s not a hard threshold where suddenly the full effects are applied.
You can now at a glance tell how much you are forgetting to feed your population while building another workshop. The map mode shows for each state if there are a lot of Pops starving there (proportional to total state population) as well as if they are mostly suffering from mild or severe starvation
Now you must be wondering: “Okay, but what actually is Food Security? How is it measured?” We’ll get there, don’t worry, first I need to talk about Pop Needs though.
If you’ve spent some time with the game, you know that the way Pop Consumption works is that at different Wealth levels Pops need to satisfy certain Needs. These Needs can be things like Basic Food or Simple Clothing for poorer Pops or Luxury Food and Drinks for richer Pops. Each of these needs can be satisfied through a set of different goods. In the case of Basic Food, it can be satisfied by consuming different amounts of Grain, Fish, Meat, Fruit or Groceries.
Basic Food Shortages
As mentioned, shortages currently only affect buildings while Pops are completely unaffected. In fact, we even only mark goods as having shortages at all if they are consumed by buildings.
In 1.8 that is changing somewhat: we’re introducing shortages for goods in the Basic Food Pop Need category. The calculation for if a good is in shortage is the same as before: if the number of buy orders exceeds the number of sell orders by too much it’s considered a shortage, so no surprises there.
What is somewhat different is that we’re also adding a shortage value to the Basic Food Pop Need itself. This is calculated essentially as the average shortage value for the goods in the Pop Need weighted over how much Pops are actually consuming each good. In other words, if 90% of your Pops’ food consumption is Grain and 10% is Fish, a Grain shortage will have a much stronger impact than a Fish shortage.
Nothing has really changed here, but I needed to break up the wall of text and wanted to remind you that this tooltip is in the game
I’m sure some of you will be wondering if this means other Pop Needs will also be getting shortages - and the answer is no (for now at least). Contrary to building shortages where we can just add throughput penalties if goods are in shortage, for Pop Needs we need to consider what role the goods play to be able to determine what penalties a shortage in those Needs would entail. For now, we’re only doing this for Basic Food (with the penalty being Starvation, more details below), but having a defined way of dealing with and calculating shortages for pop consumption definitely opens the door for other Needs having shortages in the future (maybe heating or clothing, for instance?).
To help you keep track of the starvation levels in your country, we’re introducing a new panel which quickly shows you how many people in your country are starving and if you have any famines or shortages active. Additionally it also gives you information about active harvest conditions that might be affecting your states and what proportion of total basic food pop consumption each good has.
Food Security
With the background of how Basic Food Shortages are set up, we can finally go into the details on how Food Security works. As mentioned above, this is the metric we use to determine whether a pop is starving and how strong the effects are. Food Security is a value between 0 and 100%, where at 0% the pop is in a state of severe starvation and at 100% the pop has full and easy access to all the food it requires.
What determines a Pop’s food security is mainly a combination of two factors:
- How much the Basic Food Pop Need is in shortage in the state in question
- How much money the pop is spending on Basic Food compared to their whole buy package at base price
We’ve already covered the shortage part, so let me explain the second factor some more: At different wealth levels, pops need to buy different amounts of goods from a number of Needs. What we’re doing here is taking the total price for all those needs while considering only unmodified base prices and then comparing it to how much the Pop is actually spending on Basic Food.
Here’s an example: a pop at Wealth 9 needs to consume goods to cover for their Simple Clothing, Crude Items, Basic Food, Heating and Intoxicants needs. The total value of what they need at base price is 314. After considering market availability and all of that, food is actually very expensive though, meaning the pop is spending 220 on Basic Food. We then simply compare their real food expenses with their total base price expenses: 220 / 314 = 70%. That is a lot of money going towards food!
You might be rich enough to consume a country’s worth of Fine Art output, but you’ll be quickly reminded you can’t eat statues when food runs out
Food Security then is a value that starts at 100% and is reduced by the two values above. If in addition to the 70% Basic Food Expense Share, food is also in a 20% shortage, the food security for the pop in question will be 100% - 70% - 20% = 10%, putting them firmly into severe starvation.
The reasons we went for this set of calculations in particular are primarily the following:
- It means that as pops increase in Wealth, they’ll be less affected by increasing prices (due to food becoming a smaller part of the pop’s total buy package)
- It means that the effects of starvation can become increasingly worse even after the price caps out and shortages become more severe
- It means that there being literally no food in a state will affect rich pops as well even if they have a bunch of money, because you can’t eat money. (rich pops don’t consume basic food, but the shortage factor still affects them)
All of this leads to starvation being something that primarily affects poorer pops, but in the right (or wrong, I guess) circumstances it could also affect rich pops, or it could even affect no one. Have enough food and prices will be so low that food won’t be the primary concern even for the poorest in society. This is of course easier said than done, as getting your grain prices down to -75% price should be very hard for any reasonably large country. Still, it’s not mechanically impossible.
As part of decoupling starvation from Standard of Living we also had to update the Standard of Living icons and names for some of the levels
Famines, a political classification
If Starvation is what happens to your pops when they don’t have enough food, Famines are simply a political classification that comes up when enough pops are suffering from starvation. Specifically, we look at two metrics:
- How many people in total are starving in the state in question?
- How many people are specifically suffering from severe starvation in the state in question?
The goal here is that a famine should feel serious and encompassing. It should both affect a significant portion of the population in the state, but also be severe enough. In fact, this kind of classification is loosely modeled after real world classifications today (albeit with different values as the 19th Century had a different standard for such things).
As a primarily political classification, famines don’t have any direct effects on your pops. A bunch of Stockholm bureaucrats finally noticing that people in the Dominion of Norway are starving and calling it a famine doesn’t on its own make any difference for the poor Norwegians. Instead, a famine being declared is more of a political event. It can act as a starting point for narrative content surrounding famines and how to deal with them for instance.
Famines also act as a warning signal for the player. They tell you how long they’ve lasted, how many people are affected as well as estimations for how many deaths and unrealized births the famine has led to so you can feel extra bad for neglecting them.
When a famine is declared you can see it front and center in the new Food Security panel
Harvest Conditions
On top of the revised mechanics for starvation and famines, we also wanted to add some more volatility and unpredictability to the game with Harvest Conditions. These conditions are occurrences (often tied to weather, but not necessarily) that can happen to your states and primarily affect your agricultural sector. Here’s a breakdown of different aspects of harvest conditions:
An example of what a harvest condition can look like. The Effects described are further multiplied by the intensity in each specific affected state
Effects
While a lot of the effects will be tied to increasing or decreasing agricultural throughput, the effects are not strictly limited to agriculture. Floods and Wildfires might have drastic effects on your infrastructure for instance. Additionally, conditions are not necessarily negative: a pollinator surge could increase your fruit production or optimal sun conditions could lead to a particularly good harvest.
For Floods and Droughts we added some effects to the 3D map itself, so you can be more immersed while thinking about how you failed your country and let your people starve
Regional limitations
Harvest conditions happen on a state region level, but are often limited to certain parts of the world (Locust Swarms won’t happen in Northern Europe and Frosts won’t happen in Egypt for instance).
Duration, Range and Intensity
Harvest conditions have variable durations, range and intensity. One drought might be milder and limited to just a couple of states, while another affects a large area for a long time. Intensity acts as a multiplier to the base effects conditions have.
If you’re curious about what harvest conditions are active around the globe you can look it up on your Victorian era weather app of choice
Incompatibilities and Synergies
It wouldn’t make much sense if a drought suddenly happened in a region affected by torrential rains, so most harvest conditions have a set of other conditions they’re not compatible with. A drought will never happen in a state affected by a flood, nor will a flood happen in a state with a drought. A heatwave could lead to an increased chance of a drought happening and subsequently even a wildfire. In such a case the drought would replace the heatwave and later get replaced by the wildfire.
We’ve also made changes to some existing content so it meshes with the new Harvest Conditions and Starvation. Numbers are still WIP, but should give you an idea of where we’re taking it
That’s it for me! Hope you enjoyed learning more about how we’re dealing with famines and other aspects of human suffering. Join us two weeks from now for the anniversary week marking two years since we launched Victoria 3! (Two years already!? Who turned on Speed 5?)