Starving Dragon Pass

From: outis02 <uly_at_...>
Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:30:41 -0000

In one of my last games sometime ago, I ran into a very strange situation. It was a long game on hard difficulty, but I had managed quite well for the most part. Except for the first few years, my food production had been very stable, and usually had a comfortable surplus. With very delicate pop tweaking and aggressive diplo+trading, I even managed to build every single shrine and some temples. I delayed the tribe building process for a very long time. But when I started the negotiations, I already had universally good relation outside of the Colymar and late arrival clans. With that, I managed to form a huge clan with 10 clans.

But problems started right after the formation of the new tribe. Immediately after the tribe making, I had a bad harvest drove the clan dangerously close to starvation. I immediately traded for as much food as I could, which kept us fed through the winter. In the subsequent years, I pumped points into harvest magic, toggled on all food-related blessings, cut down my weaponthane size and favour thralls over carls, and generally do all I could to maximise food output and minimise consumption. But for years on end, I continue to struggle, dipping into starvation once or twice every year or so.

What's worse, it became increasingly difficult to trade for food, most of the time I'm simply told that there's no food to trade. Puzzled, I opened up the save file with my templates, and found that, indeed, it wasn't just me, almost every clan in Dragon Pass was starving! (Notably excepting the duck clan and a few late arrivals.)

Taken up by other engagement, I haven't had time to see this game through. But I still wonder, what happened? This situation lasted for at least a 10 years, probably more, and though there were a few occasional good years, the starvation was systematic on the whole.

During this time, I noticed that harvest magic (I always put 2 points) NEVER work when the omen suggest a good harvest--i.e. I always get the "harvest was good, but could have been better, harvest magic had no effect" message. I'm not sure if this was the case before this depression. I also notice that, even on a good year, the food production never reached the projected output. I typically had the projected output of 1200 bushels, but only produced 800 bushels and consumed 1000.

So, again, what happened? Is there a scripted difficulty level increase upon tribe formation? Is there some kind of tribal mechanic that's draining the food output? I do have "plant spice" as one of the concessions in tribe making, but was that having such a huge impact as to cause pandemic starvation?

Has anyone else had similar experience?