Provincial food and -25% Wealth

[Sharpe_116]

I tried to do a forum search for anything similar to this but I couldn't find anything. I apologize in advance if I simply missed it

Has anyone done the math to see if its still viable to build breadbasket provinces? I know having negative provincial food supply results in a -25% wealth debuff, but is it possible to create a money producing province that produces a higher income with that debuff than one that uses up some slots for food buildings to avoid the debuff?

[Bramborough]

I haven't calc'd it out. But I'm not sure such provincial specialization would be worth doing. Partly because some of the food structures pay relatively better in Attila than they did in R2. The Attila fishing port, as just one example, produces 50% of the commerce income of its trading port counterpart, whereas the R2 fishing port paid 25% or even less (depending on tier). The food-vs-income tradeoff isn't quite as stark as it was before. Since food buildings (at least some of them) produce not-great-but-decent coin on their own, that puts you in the position of using industry/commerce buildings in the freed slots to not only overcome the 25% penalty, but also make up for the not-insignificant money that the food slots would have provided.

The other factor is public order; commerce and industry buildings typically have bigger public order penalties than same-tier agricultural buildings. Which means you'll have to dedicate more slots to public order than you otherwise would.

So, this isn't a province-wide setup, I'm not pretending it proves anything. Just a simple example to illustrate my thoughts on it:

In a hypothetical ERE minor settlement, let's assume we have 2 slots available (the other slot having been taken by sanitation). In case A, a food-self-sufficient setup, and in case B, a food-deficit setup. We'll assume Meagre fertility and enough sanitation to support either build:

Case A:
Tier IV Cattle: 500 base income, +150 fertility-level income, 50 food, +20 fertility-level food, -5 public order.
Tier IV Leather Industry: 1650 industrial income, + 15% ag/husbandry bonus, -10 public order.

Total: 2397 income, -15 public order, 70 food

Case B:
Tier IV Leather Industry: 1650 industrial income, -10 public order, no ag/husbandry bonus because there's no such buildings in this food-deficit build
Tier IV Builder-line Industry: 1650 industrial income, -10 public order, -5% construction cost bonus (helpful if province still developing, but doesn't directly affect each-turn income).
-25% income / -3 PO penalty because of food deficit.

Total: 2475 income, -23 public order, 0 food.

I don't know about you, but I think I'm okay with letting go of that extra 78 denari in order not to have to find ways to deal with the additional -8 public order.

Notes on the ERE buildings I used in the example:
1. The cattle line is the "middle-of-the-road" food building; if I'd used the sheep line, the income disparity would almost certainly have favored Case A...but I didn't do that because cattle produces more food at lower fertility levels, and that's probably what you'd have to wind up going with at least in mid/late campaign.
2. It may look like I skewed the example a bit with the Leather line's agricultural/husbandry wealth bonus, but in fact there's only the two town-industry choices in this line: as already noted, the Builder line construction cost buff may be helpful while the province is still developing, but doesn't directly affect income.

Anyhoo, maybe not the full-blown province-wide analysis you were looking for, but hope it helps.

[Sharpe_116]

Thats really a shame =(. One of the things in Rome 2 I found enjoyable was creating specialized provinces. Now in Attila every province looks pretty much exactly the same

[Bramborough]

The interesting thing is that I've read other folks say exactly the opposite in other TWC threads; that they found R2 much blander, and the current system more subtle and complex.

I think there's some truth to both viewpoints. It was much easier to specialize a food, economic, or military province in R2...but within those broad categories, the actual builds were pretty obvious. While Attila provinces will be broadly more similar to each other, there's more wrinkles with ports no longer offering an extra "bonus" slot, sanitation, religious building pros/cons, and region-specific resource buildings. So each province winds up being a slightly different puzzle to solve.

[Sharpe_116]

I personally while playing the ERE thought up a cookie cutter building scheme that I applied to every single province.

Provincial Capital:
- 1 Food building, either port or food market
- 1 Governor's palace for happiness + culture money
- 1 Religious building for religion and happiness
- 1 Sanitation building
- 1 city center money building, usually wine emporium.

In the towns:
- 2 Food buildings, either port&cattle, or cattle&sheep.
- In 1 of the 2 towns I build a sanitation building, in the other I build an industrial money building, usually the one with +income from animal husbandry.
- If one of the towns has a natural resource I simply build the resource building instead of the industrial building.

I use this scheme for absolutely every single province in my empire, with no variation, with the exception of a military province. I dont know if its the best scheme but It's the best min maxing scheme i could personally come up with. The point is all my provinces are carbon copies and it makes me sad =(

[Bramborough]

Can't argue with that...I pretty much do the same thing as ERE. There's a few variations you could do (occasional trade port instead of fish, not building a church in every province, or going with industry instead of commerce in that last capital slot). But yeah, that structure works, and such variations I mentioned will probably only produce modest differences, not transform the province into something fundamentally different. (In my defense, I did say "slightly different puzzle"...)