A question of starvation

In all these years of playing, I've never before had to deal with a crop-failure (! I know - stay lucky!) so I am somewhat unfamiliar with the mechanics of the impact. However, I am sure almost everyone else out there has experience and views to spare... Principally, if the short-fall is defined as X thousand tons of greain and you manage to acquire and distribute Y thousand tons (where Y is less than X) does that actually reduce the impact? Measurably? And what exactly is the imapct - loss of population, reduction of EH? How severe? Any other remedies?

The Revenant wrote:In all these years of playing, I've never before had to deal with a crop-failure (! I know - stay lucky!) so I am somewhat unfamiliar with the mechanics of the impact.  However, I am sure almost everyone else out there has experience and views to spare...  Principally, if the short-fall is defined as X thousand tons of greain and you manage to acquire and distribute Y thousand tons (where Y is less than X) does that actually reduce the impact?  Measurably?  And what exactly is the imapct - loss of population, reduction of EH?  How severe?  Any other remedies?

If you have never had a crop failure before you have been lucky! Since a famine is by common opinion one of the worst things which can happen to a position:

- A famine will reduce your population which will then have a forever impact of both number of recruits and tax income as the base is now smaller. In the short to medium term a famine also tends to wreck your economic health and trade income.

Note even if you can not avoid a famine it still helps to reduce your grain shortage as much as possible as this will reduce the reduction in your population and make the nasty effects of the famine less serious.

Some common in game tactics to reduce your grain shortage include:

a) Order a cull of wild animals
b) If you have trade investments in fishing or whaling convert these from providing you with a trade income to providing you with food instead (you may need to pay for salting and transport of fish inland).
c) Use your diplomatic service to buy food abroad. PC positions with a good harvest are normally your first port of call but you can also seek to buy salted fish and meat on open market from NPC positions esp if they are listed as having a good harvest.

Other possible options which have possible side effects other than cost are:

d) Via Church order everyone to fast one day a week or some other method to ration food. While I believe this may save lives it also tends to make you unpopular with Nobles.
e) Spend £300,000 (per £1m of population converted) to introduce potatoes and use the seed grain saved as food. Danger with this is that if you have another failed harvest a potatoe famine is much worse than a grain one.

Hope the above pointers are of some use.

The Revenant wrote:In all these years of playing, I've never before had to deal with a crop-failure (! I know - stay lucky!) so I am somewhat unfamiliar with the mechanics of the impact.  However, I am sure almost everyone else out there has experience and views to spare...  Principally, if the short-fall is defined as X thousand tons of grain and you manage to acquire and distribute Y thousand tons (where Y is less than X) does that actually reduce the impact?  Measurably?  And what exactly is the impact - loss of population, reduction of EH?  How severe?  Any other remedies?

You are very lucky!

Stuart has covered the main things you can do, but not the quantitative side.  I think I went into my calculations for this on another thread, but can't remember which one.

Since I don't know what position you play nor its population, nor the grain shortfall, difficult to provide generic answers.  However, the first piece of advice is "don't panic" ... harvest shortfalls are normal in 1700.  You will also tend to find that there are positions who will have a harvest surplus and if you can buy from them that is by far the simplest in terms of avoiding impact on your position longer term.

From your income sheet you should find your population figure which will be different to that normally given at startup.  It is also useful to know whether you have a normal harvest failure or a catastrophic harvest failure, since one is twice as bad as the other.  Catastrophic harvest failure really does need everything throwing at it because the loss in population can be crippling as Stuart says.  For normal harvest failure then unless you are running a huge position, then you probably don't need that much grain to mitigate the worst effects.

If we assume your population is 1M, then you normally need 100K tons of grain to feed them.  For normal harvest failure I would expect you to need to find 100K tons; catastrophic can be twice this.  If you do nothing then 'normal' harvest failure means your commoners population will shrink by around 5%.  In itself this is not a major economic problem, since normally commoners don't pay as much tax as nobles; EH will drop by 2 and the tax take will be reduced.  But this is not really the knock-out blow that players often think it is.  Population tends to rise by 5% every 5 years anyway so even with the 'do nothing' strategy, you will probably get some of your losses back.  This is not a recommendation to 'do nothing', but it is worth keeping it in context.

So, assuming you need 100,000 tons, I would be very surprised if one of the larger nations in the game does not have say 20K tons in their reserve that they wouldn't sell you or give to you.  That reduces it to 80K tons.

Cull of wild animals provides meat - 1 ton of meat is the equivalent to 2 tons of grain.  This is a quick 'self-help', but depends on whether your country has an abundant stock of wild animals (heavily forested areas produce higher amounts of wild animals than deserts ... can't be precise since this is just an order you make and then it is taken off your shortfall.  If you 'ask advisors' first then you are a month behind and every month counts when meeting the shortfall and trying to limit economic damage.  Even the smallest countries can expect to get 10K tons of meat = 20K grain, so the shortfall is now 60K tons.

If you do nothing at this point then you will probably lose 3% of your commoners population (normally 78% of the total) which is 23,400 people.  In relative terms this is a rounding error ... so your population becomes 976,600 ... does it really matter economically, I suggest not.  Morally, of course, it is different ... rulers want to make sure their population survives, so what else to try:

Fishing ... yes, you can buy all the fish from your fishing investment which clobbers your trade investment in fishing so it is quite an expensive way of doing it.  Alternatively you can simply order your merchants to use £xyz to buy fish from nations that do have a large fishing fleet and use that to meet the grain shortage.  For small amounts (and 60K is a small amount), that should probably do it at minimal cost.  Is it worth borrowing from nobles if you don't have the cash ... possibly if the amounts are small.  Or you borrow more and use the difference to invest in your own fishing fleet as an insurance against next time.

All sorted.

Of course if you are playing a nation with a larger population then the scale involved becomes much more difficult.

To give you some comparative figures for England G7, 4 shortages are recorded:

17,500 people died of famine in 1705 - clearly the then player was reasonably successful in mitigating the worst impact.  Estimated population at the time was c.8M so he must have found 625K tons of grain or equivalent and almost managed to feed everyone.

495,260 people died of famine in 1706 - this was while the position was inactive (or having been hit by this scale of a catastrophic failure just after a normal failure, the player quit).  Population drop was dramatic as it usually is if famine hits inactive positions.

75% of wild animals culled 1710 - from memory, this was a normal famine; grain was obtained from 3rd parties, fish from large fishing investments and I only needed to cull a few of the wild animals to meet the shortfall.  No population loss.

2,500 people died of famine in Lincolnshire in 1711.  This was a sneaky one due to enemy spy action who seized the grain stocks.  I actually had grain reserves, but they timed it to happen just on the month it was calculated so there was nothing I could do.

The point is that when I took over England was bankrupt, being invaded by a strong coalition, government was barely functioning and units were deserting, but I still managed to deal with a famine.

There is usually a way if you keep looking for it and think creatively.

On the positive side countries with larger populations also have a larger harvest surplus so after a few years they tend to build up reserves to mitigate the worst effects. It is a killer if you have a famine in the early years of the game, but it also acts to prevent those with a booming economy (EH9-10) from racing ahead too far.

Thanks everyone for thoughts and shared knowledge. Now that the famine has actually hit and I've taken an inital loss of population, my question now is, will it be an on-going loss, or is this it, the final total? Any point in distributing food that was gathered-in too late and is now in store? (Sigh).

If you didn't manage to get the supplies before the deadline and have now taken the EH and population loss, then yes it is too late to do anything more. I think it is a one-off, although you might be able to mitigate the economic effect by reducing taxes on commoners?

I hope you managed to get some food in time.

Obvious question - having obtained the food, you did order that it was to be used to offset the grain shortage? If not then it would have just been kept in reserve.

Yes, I just left it too long, should have issued the extra-feeding order the month before... Thanks for the concern. The next thing to decide is just what to do with the gathered carcasses - not needed for saving from starvation, but (relatively) quickly going off... "Life' is just full of "opportunities"
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The Revenant wrote:Yes, I just left it too long, should have issued the extra-feeding order the month before...  Thanks for the concern.  The next thing to decide is just what to do with the gathered carcasses - not needed for saving from starvation, but (relatively) quickly going off...  "Life' is just full of "opportunities"
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If you want to store meat carcasses - best to spend some money to get them salted, BBQ and spiced (Navy style) and stored in a ware house or a cold store.

Salted beef and the like was pretty much staple rations for the English Royal Navy on long voyages due to length of time it lasted. Though many said it was more like leather than beef and needed to be soaked in water for days before it could be cooked and eat.

Salt Cod from the New Foundland Banks was originally exported to the Sugar Islands in the West Indies to feed slave workers and cut down on the amount of land on the Islands needed to grow food rather than cash crops like Sugar. Salt Cod and peas remains a very popular dish in the West Indies to this day and is well worth eating if you go to the West Indies or a West Indian themed eating place in the UK.

Given option of salted beef or salt cod and peas think British Slaves did better in terms of rations if nothing else than the British Navy. But perhaps even salted beef tastes ok if washed down with enough Navy Rum?

Buccaniers in the West Indies got their name from a style of smoking or BBQ meat or fish which then had spices rubbed into it to make it last. Assume end product bit like a modern beef jerkey or Biltong. Which all modern day South Africans love, while every one else things its gone off meat in their fridge. It anyone marries a South African in future please do not throw out their specially obtained and expensive Biltong thinking its gone off - as South Africans tend to sulk like a Scot who returns home to find their Haggis thrown out just before Burns night or so I have been told.

In game terms its probably cheaper to order meat to be salted rather than spiced.