The Food Spoilage Rule in Strategic Primer

Very early in the current campaign of Strategic Primer (after only the second turn), as a first check on the game-balance problem of population growth and food production reinforcing each other, I announced that food would be subject to spoilage (and go to waste) if not eaten or otherwise consumed promptly enough.

By the time the rule went into effect, two turns later, most players had begun to develop ways of preserving food, and the problem the new rule addressed also began to abate as players put their increased population to work in activities other than food production.

As a consequence, I’ve only had occasion to invoke the food-spoilage rule a handful of times over the more than ten turns since it went into effect. In each case, the circumstances were clear-cut enough that I felt an ad hoc ruling sufficed. But I’d still like to develop a more systematic system for this.

Different kinds of food will have to be handled differently, of course, but for most things a simple “use-by date” model in which all items older than a certain (food-specific) age are simply thrown out seems overzealous: a food item that always “keeps” for several years is not likely to go bad on the first day past its “use-by” date! Instead, some proportion of the overaged food should spoil each turn, or almost-equivalently each overaged item should have an (increasing-with-age) chance of spoiling each turn.

If food spoils, it is no longer fit for consumption by anyone the player is responsible for, and is effectively removed from the food supply as if it had been consumed—though players might still find some use for it. Whether the effects end there may depend on several factors.

First, what does “spoiling” mean for this kind of food? Some foodstuffs may be mainly afflicted by some kind of self-limiting spoilage, but in most cases it means some sort of infection or infestation.

Thus, a second factor on the effects of spoilage is how the food is stored: if not caught in time, spoilage will most likely spread, and how far it can spread depends on whether the food is stored in small containers, large barrels, or one big pile.

Third, when and how is the spoilage caught? If workers proactively check (the relevant parts of) the food supply early and often, spoilage can be caught early, costing the player only the item that initially spoiled; if not, it may only be discovered when the food is slated to be eaten (or processed for preservation), and it will likely have spread.

Fourth, what are the physical effects of this kind of spoilage? Many ways that food spoils generate heat, in some kinds of food eventually to such a degree that it can pose a danger of fire. Some food-infesting organisms can also spread beyond food to other materials, potentially weakening the building in which the crop was stored, damaging textiles, and so on.

There are three main ways that players can prevent spoilage. The first, of course, is consumption: have workers eat the food before it spoils. But this will not suffice by itself.

The second way players can prevent spoilage is preservation. There are many ways of preserving food that can be invented: drying, canning, pickling, fermentation, and probably many more. Each of these both “resets the clock,” as a preserved food item’s age is reckoned from when the preservation process finished, and increases the minimum age at which it can spoil (in the game’s simplified model) significantly. Preservation has costs, however, even beyond the labor investment and other (not-yet-tracked) resource costs. The main cost is that in the game-world, which presently measures food solely by weight, as well as in our world, preservation necessarily produces a smaller “amount” of food than it takes as its input. That loss may be increased, to represent the detection of minor spoilage in the process of preparation, but I haven’t decided that yet.

A third way that players can limit spoilage is by slowing it down, by keeping food cool, cold, or frozen. Unlike preservation, this doesn’t “reset the clock,” but it does significantly lengthen the window of time before food starts to go bad. How well this can work depends in part on the kind of food, but a more significant factor is how cold the food is kept. There is a definite limit to the possible effectiveness of some technologies, and using them well could take a paradigm shift. These technologies also have their own costs, ranging from merely set-up costs and increased time requirements to get food from the store to whole new resources.

If your stockpile of stored food is growing, players, think about how to prevent food from spoiling!

• Game Mechanics