Full Version: [Guide] How To Deal With Negative Food Production

[Guide] How To Deal With Negative Food Production

One common thing new players complain about is negative food production.  Here is a simple, if not quick, step-by-step guide to solving this problem and avoiding it in the future without the use of any game coins.

First, an explanation of why your food production is negative.  There are two stats on your castle known as loyalty and resentment, shown here:
[attach]1898[/attach]
Loyalty (in black text) less than 100 will lower your net production values, which can be displayed (in green, below) by mousing over one of your productions, like so:
[attach]1903[/attach]
This lowering will not cause as much of a problem in most resources, as you will just get less of them per hour.  However, food has an upkeep (in blue, above) based on the population of your town and number of troops at it, which is taken out of the amount given to you per hour.  If loyalty falls to where your net food production is less than this upkeep, you will have a negative food production.

Loyalty will either rise or fall until it is equal to 100 minus the sum of your resentment (in red text, see first picture above) and tax rate (see below).  Thus, loyalty = 100 - resentment - tax rate.  So the two causes of low loyalty are a high tax rate and high resentment.  To bring loyalty up you will need to fix one or both of these issues.

Now, the process.

Step 1: Set your tax rate to zero.  Your tax rate in a castle is shown here:
[attach]1900[/attach]
To set it to zero, click on your town hall, click on tax rate (in red, below), type zero in the Tax Rate box (in blue, below), and then confirm (in green, below).
[attach]1901[/attach]
Over time, this will allow your loyalty to rise such that resentment is the only thing you will need to get rid of.  If your resentment is already at zero, you are done!

Step 2 (usually optional): Raise your loyalty using Praying until your food production is positive.  To do this, click your town hall, click the Loyalty button (in red, below), select Praying off the dropdown menu (in blue, below), and click confirm.
[attach]1902[/attach]
Praying raises your loyalty by five points, costs gold, and can be done every fifteen minutes.  Its cost is determined by how advanced your castle is.  For most new players the cost is entirely reasonable, but for veterans it can be extremely expensive.  If you cannot afford to use Praying enough times to turn your food production positive, or do not wish to, do not worry.  This step is not necessary unless your resentment is [i]extremely[/i] high.  You can merely wait until changing your taxes raises your loyalty enough to turn your food production positive.

Step 3: After a while your food production should be positive once again, but we aren't done yet.  We need to fix the underlying issue of the sum of your desired tax rate and resentment being too high.  So, once you have enough food, use Disaster Relief to lower your resentment down to zero.  To do this, click your town hall, click the Loyalty button, select Disaster Relief off of the dropdown menu, and click confirm.  Disaster Relief will lower your resentment by five points and costs food.  While it seems counter-intuitive to [i]use[/i] food when food production is your issue, lowering your resentment will allow you to reset your tax rate and is a better strategy in the long run.

Step 4: Wait until your loyalty rises to 100 minus your desired tax rate.  Once it is, reset your tax rate to its desired value and continue play.  Congratulations, you have successfully dealt with negative food production!  To avoid this problem in the future, do not use Levy any more, as it is what increases resentment.

EDIT: Changed second picture as watermark was in the way.  It also now shows food and explains where to see the upkeep value.

Great guide Baka, was hoping one would just use one of the non alchemical  elements to make it much easier tho.

two additional hints and tips for this:

If your resentment is too high and you have a lot of troops, it might be that even with 0% tax you won't get to a positive food production. In this case it might be better to increase tax in order to get more gold for praying and buying food.
Which way is better depends on your castle size and numbers, so you have to decide for yourself.

If you go the way to purchase food from market (at 1 gold each, do not pay more) then you should check the transport time and be online to use the purchased food to reduce resentment first before its used up by negative production. This is because resentment has a direct effect on production in addition to reducing loyalty.


And if you are careful, you can use levy to exchange excess food into other resources - I wrote a guide on this here in this section.

zzz loyalty/resentment = 100/0
but still have -10k food production output....
the best solution for big army is move them to a food castle - terrain = 1 1 1 15.

I was wondering what are the effects of negative food production?  Do you lose the troops that you have?

If you have negative food production, your food will go down instead of up.  After it reaches zero, units will die until your production evens out to non-negative again.

thanks lifebaka that's a great guide...