Food Imports

**Mikail Mengsk** · June 04, 2008, 05:45 AM

Why a city that produces a lot of food by itself should import tons of food??? Many rich cities with good farm level had a lot of ghrain imports and this lifted enormously the population growth!

**beatoangelico** · June 04, 2008, 07:01 AM

because the grain resource sucks and produces these silly effects

**Mikail Mengsk** · June 04, 2008, 12:17 PM

Damn! How could i avoid that???

**beatoangelico** · June 04, 2008, 01:58 PM

without some modding (that is, delete the standard grain resource) you can't

**Mikail Mengsk** · June 04, 2008, 02:31 PM

Ok, just deleting it? But will I lose some income?

**TKainZero** · June 05, 2008, 02:45 AM

My soulution to this problem is this...

NEVER build farms... it seems to work...

I only sometimes build farms in the VERY small cites, the cites that go below 1% growth rate at like 5000 pop...

Dont build Farms... thier not worth it...

ther then that... your scewed... mabye build lots of soilders to counter the growth...

**Jamey** · June 07, 2008, 05:13 PM

Originally Posted by TkainZero

My soulution to this problem is this...

NEVER build farms... it seems to work...

Sadly, there are areas of the map where not building farms just doesn't matter. Check out the number of grain resources around the Black Sea, for example. In that area, I've seen 9% growth on a Minor City with 25,000 population (barbarian faction, so you don't get to build beyond Minor City).

**TKainZero** · June 10, 2008, 05:36 AM

Originally Posted by Jamey

Sadly, there are areas of the map where not building farms just doesn't matter. Check out the number of grain resources around the Black Sea, for example. In that area, I've seen 9% growth on a Minor City with 25,000 population (barbarian faction, so you don't get to build beyond Minor City).

I am experiecing this now...

I am trying to build a Black Sea Society, and its not going to work... every city has like 8-10% growth rate on the Black see... i would have to spam units like crazy not to have chaos errupt...

Not building farms works when you play as the romans though...

**Quinn Inuit** · June 05, 2008, 06:59 AM

Easiest thing to do is swap the grain resource with an unused one like pigs or dogs and then change the description and icon so it looks like grain again. That's what I did in the ExRM, and population is no longer such an issue. I'm really annoyed that they haven't fixed the grain bug. I think someone at CA just put a + sign where he should have put a -.

**beatoangelico** · June 05, 2008, 10:30 AM

I think that the "import grain" feature is some kind of legacy code that was originally created to simulate the import of grain from Sicily and Egypt to Rome (probably together with map_trade_routes.tga). Then everything was scrapped but the effects of grain remained.

**Quinn Inuit** · June 10, 2008, 07:07 AM

Or you can just play TIC or the ExRM. I think we dealt with grain in the same way.

The problem is that cities that import grain were supposed to get a population bonus, but they accidentally gave it to cities that export grain. So what I did was swap the grain and dogs resources, then change dogs so it looked like grain. No more population growth. It's fairly easy to implement on any mod, too. Just change descr_sm_resources, descr_strat, and the campaign map description file (don't remember its name ATM).

shameless self-promotion: If you want a fun Black Sea game, try the ExRM. I did a lot of research in that area and redid the map a bit, adding a province.

**Danielson** · June 17, 2008, 02:37 PM

What I do, is when my cities grow out of control, I let them rebel, then take it back and sack them. Earns me a few denari and brings the population back under control. Make sure you have a big army ready to overtake the huge rebel army, though.

**6Bagheera9** · November 13, 2012, 12:03 AM

Originally Posted by Quinn Inuit

Or you can just play TIC or the ExRM. I think we dealt with grain in the same way.

The problem is that cities that import grain were supposed to get a population bonus, but they accidentally gave it to cities that export grain. So what I did was swap the grain and dogs resources, then change dogs so it looked like grain. No more population growth. It's fairly easy to implement on any mod, too. Just change descr_sm_resources, descr_strat, and the campaign map description file (don't remember its name ATM).

shameless self-promotion: If you want a fun Black Sea game, try the ExRM. I did a lot of research in that area and redid the map a bit, adding a province.

You might call this a necro, but I just did this manually on RTR PE 1.9 and it works. No more break-neck population growth and you still get the trade value. Just swap the images of dogs for those of grain in descr_sm_resources, change the trade value of dogs to 2, and edit out the grain entry. Then in descr_strat replace every instance of the word 'grain' with 'dogs' in the resource section. The word dogs will now appear when you hold the cursor over the grain icons. CA should have really fixed this in 1.5.