Cluster Wars (formerly Empyrean Challenge)

[Darth Pedro]

If you look at the turn sequence you will see that Farm production is before Food consumption. If you look at the Population page:

STOCKPILES

The Population of each Colony maintains a Stockpile of Food and of Consumer Goods separate from the Player's Storage Inventory. The Population will try to accumulate 1 Year's (4 Turns) supply of each. The full rationed amount of Food and the total paid amount of Consumer Goods are added to these Stockpiles. The Population will consume up to 25% of the Consumer Goods and Food each Turn. Food consumption will be more than 25% of the stockpile if needed to prevent Starvation; also no more than 0.25 x Food per Turn will be consumed per Population.

So...the people actually consume from the stockpile AFTER the new production is added to it at the ration rate. Since the population grows AFTER the consumption of the Food, you will appear to have less than three turns worth of food in the stockpile assuming the population is growing.

Now to test this logic with reality...

My home OPC on Turn 7 shows a total population of 243,490,521 which is rationed at 100%. This should yield a consumption of 60,872,630.25 Food. My current Food Consumption stat is 53,946,386 which multiplied x 4 comes to 215,785,544 Population at the 100% rate of 1/4 Food per Population. Something just doesn't add up here does it? My population did grow by about 2,000,000 but that doesn't account for the under-consumption does it?

My Food Produced stat is 62,500,000 which equates to my 2,500,000 Farms-1 production.

Conclusion: it appears that the 100% Ration Rate (supposedly 1/4 Food per Pop) is actually 1 food per 4.48 population or about .2232 Food per Pop instead of the anticipated .25 Food per Pop. Sound like ticket time.

Ticket Filed: 9R46BDDZT4

Response to my ticket:

Our staff has just replied to your ticket "Food Consumption Algorithm"

The food algorithm is complex. If the people's stockpile of food plus the food paid that turn divided by four is less than the total population divided by 4 then they will consume 1/4 of the food stock pile. They never consume more than 0.25 per pop unit or less the 0.0625 per pop unit. Unless the total stockpile is less than 0.0625 per pop unit. In that case they will consume it all.

Your case I would guess that the total food was 215,785,544 before consumtion.