[Question] Food bonus from a town to surrounding towns

I was thinking about this a little more and instead of sharing the food ala E:WoM would it instead be possible to make a building linking two cities by a trade route where one city lost food but gained gildar and the other the reverse?  Oh and potentially make this improvement non unique for the originating food city such that it could link with multiple cities?

Can't think of a way to do this based on proximity.

Oh, please add this and trade routes as well as a lot of toher trading and other resources?

You could try doing it as a faction-wide food bonus, like the grocer line of town buildings has. If you wanted it to be half of the village's food, you would make it so that you have some structure (say, Feudal Manor, or some such) that produces X food per grain locally, and X faction food per grain. This, unfortunately, would apply to everything in your faction, though, so it might not be quite what you want. If you wanted to add a money bonus, then you'd either add a percentage bonus to money production or a flat money bonus (or both, if you wanted).

Alternatively, you might see if there's a way to create a trade caravan-like unit that goes between your town and a neighboring town which provides X food per grain, or Y grain, or something along those lines, but I have do not believe this is possible.

Hmm is is possible to link this to trade routes in that when a trade route is attached to a city it unlocks the ability to build a trade guild.  In Towns the trade guild reduces total grain available by one say and then increases gildar production by a certain amount.  Then in citadels and conclaves their version would be the opposite reduces gildar by the same amount but increases the base grain by one per trade route to a town.  As noted by Heavenfall I have no idea if there is a way to tag a trade route as coming from a specific type of city.  So this may not be possible but a wishlist item for the future.

The work around mentioned above might work for small towns might work.  Making a global resource like a food export which also reduces a towns base grain value but increases the towns gildar production and then the same food export is consumed by the opposite building that also consumes gildar produced in the town.  The problem you run into here is that if you build more buildings that consume your global resource that are producing it you have a chance to have a negative global resource value which does bad things in the game.

I am not entirely sure (didn't try), but I thought of this, too.

Add two buildings- one add a global resource, say transportable food.

The second requires the global resource to be built (could be possible via spell if it's impossible to give buildings a construction cost), and reduce the amount you have by 1.

In a way, you could do this as a system for units, too. Units could require wages in this new resource (need to be tested! could be done as a trait, worst case), so you have to make sure to have surplus both for units and transport, ala MoM style.

Still has the potential for huge problems in game if you have a negative global resource.  I don't know how to sold the negative global resource problem except for a script to run in game demolishing improvements that run on said resource, but I don't know how to add that, or if its even possible.

I liked the original Elemental way. The 'every city for itself' mechanic used not just by Fallen Enchantress, but pretty much all 4X games, irks me. It's not as if a game loses anything by having ways for an empire to move food around and end up with Rome living off Egyptian agriculture. Hell, it adds to strategy, by making it worthwhile to set up strongholds and resource exploitation settlements in otherwise rubbish areas (like a city sitting in perfect position to dominate as a trade hub, but has to import much of its food), and opens up opportunities for war! Setting up a trade system moving food around, which greatly increases your economic might (when done properly, one would assume), comes with the caveat of being vulnerable to raiding and has to be actively protected. Good luck turtling all that.

I have something a bit similar to this for one of the faction in my mod... what I did was create 2 improvements: a food exporter that reduces the amount of grain in the city by 1, and generates 10 gold for it, and a food importer that increases grain by 1 at the cost of 10 gold. Basically, you use gold to mediate this transaction, think of it as exporting to a world market and importing from it (I have it requiring high level economics tech).

Note that the generated gold is affected by tax, but the cost isn't (treated as maintenance), so you'll often be losing gold when you do this (if the gold ratio is the same).

at one point very very early in development I seem to recall having to ship the ore you mined in one city to another city etc. But you had to manually set up these trade routes.   It was deemed "unfun" by brad (back in the vanila wom days) and killed.   That said,  theoretically that ability should still be there somewhere.

I have been pondering this while studying for finals and may have found a way to sort of implement this and a few other changes some other people have made in the forums.  A change to the outpost system by making them hamlets that could potentially upgrade to villages but no farther.  Within each hamlet/village you could add some of the upgrades outposts normally have but also add things like additional farming and maybe a small garrison, both of which would have to be researched.  

This makes it a minor settlement that can't expand beyond a village as its totally dependent on the home city its attached to.  With this implemented you could then lower the food bonus the techs give.  Possibly make it that the settlements give a single grain increase per upgraded hamlet/village.  You would also have to increase the distance between outposts to compensate for the additional benefits maybe to 5 or 6 so you wouldn't get too many by a single city.  

Also this brings up a good question, is there a way to flag a city as an outpost as well so that you can't build an outpost right next to a city within the min outpost distance?