I fully support this. I had this issue on the 25p map - infra and industry maxed in every grain prov I owned, and STILL not enough production to feed even population - let alone an army, as soon as your size was bigger than 4 or five times your core (estimated). It was the reason I stopped playing that map, even though I really like the concept of it.

Perhaps an improvement that only affects Food production called something like "advanced Farm" could be implemented which gives a boost to production of grain only. Make it only available after infrastructure and factory is maxed out.

In this way it would specifically only be used for late game when nations get to large. I understand this may affect balance, but feeling the food pinch late in game has become the norm.

The topic of this thread is not restricted to Beta user Frontline Pioneers, and it should be moved to the Suggestions/Criticism section of the Forum.

This topic really deserves a full airing and attention from experienced players who understand the challenge of food production and the details of the distance-morale game dynamic on the larger maps, including the 100-player world map, the 50-player Pacific map, and the 25-player historical map.

Moreover, Freezy and the other members of the development/programming team need to participate and start addressing the feedback from those players who really understand these problems ---- and aren't just whining rookies who don't know how to budget their consumables, stabilize province morale, or maximize their resource production. This problem has been festering for close to a year, and as far as I can tell has not received any amount of serious attention from the development/programming staff.

@K.Rokossovski: Can you move this thread to the more appropriate Forum section?

thats nothing, i've had this problem on the 100p map

Even with proper management, grain can be a problem. If you are unlucky enough to be near the edge of a map, it can be even worse becaue of morale factor. If your country has a water boundary, there often isn't much you can do until you get a more land based area where you could adjust position of your capital. So, non-core food x .25 x distant provinces with low morale help some but not much. Units, upgrades and population all use up food. Yes, I've gone the upgrade every food province to LV5 industrial and L3 infrastructure route too. Yes, you can build fortifications on remote food provinces later in the game too. Any improvements to your food provinces are limited by the resources you have to build them. Grain isn't in a vacuum. You need other resources to build the improvements. Distance from capital plus being at war with a bunch of countries can starve your country.
Building infantry units takes 500 food.
You expand, the new provinces eat food.
Infantry units eat 90 food a day.
You have barracks, they eat food. (I think that is mostly to keep players from spamming a lot of barracks.)

I think increasing non-core production from 25% to 30% would go a long way towards addressing the problem. Players would still have to manage their food and other resources.

I don't think that is the case. Water or neutral doesn't penalize the morale. Enemy or your own low morale provs decrease morale. For example, it's pretty easy to keep the morale up on an island because there are no penalties.

It goes by distance to capital for morale. If you are in say a US country or Canada, provinces on other side of map will take a big hit to morale for distance.

My general thoughts on this is that perhaps there should be some adjustments to food consumption/production for more distant lands. On the other hand there should be some penalty, since as your empire expands it becomes more vulnerable the more and further lands are from your home. As it is, your opponent has the same dilemma, so winning the resource management game is part of the strategy. Strategically building forts is the obvious thing to do. Still it can be a bit demoralizing to have your empire stalled so some adjustments might be good for the game.

Even playing Greater Finland, after conquering a lot of provinces, I had to move my capitol south to reduce the distance to capital of my conquered provinces.

Lawrence, since you were talking about boundaries and water I assumed you were referring to neighbor penalties, which are critical. I think most of us understand the distance from capital penalty well.

I think the core problem is that production is at 25% for non-core, but population eats at 100%. This creates a natural imbalance, that gets worse as your empire gets bigger (relative to your core), simply because conquered lands cannot feed themselves no matter how much IC's and infra you build there.

The solution might be as simple as reducing the food required for non-core population to 25% also.

Personally Its my opinion that food management is to the point that it takes away from the game. I use all the tricks .. and I mean all of them. ( the list is long ) to keep on the positive side of food production because as we all know if you go past the negative 200 area moral goes out the window... and then territories revolt in large numbers and the snowball effects are insane. I used to think well Ill just have enough food on hand so even if Im in the negative it wont matter ... HA thats so wrong .... dont get sucked into the negative food downward spiral. seriously It has potential to seriously kick you in the gut. always stay in the positive... but Its this constant battle and endlessly upgrading food production that takes away from a great game.. at the end of the game for me it takes up about 80-90 % of my resources and I can only spend 10-20 % on units to fight with .. and I think its probably closer to 5 % You become a super Farmer... with a war going on in the back ground. and Thats not the spirit of this game at all. The spirit of this game is planning and implementing war with units to accomplish victory.. not having 90 % or more of your energy and time making more food. I understand that there has to be some Food management but the way it is now is grossly out of proportion to the amount of time and energy the countries involved in WW 1 and II spent regarding food and food related issues. I would like to see a reduction of the huge burden players now face to satisfy the present food requirements. I think it would make the game much more enjoyable.. does anyone enjoy becoming a Farmer..... does anyone enjoy spending 30 minutes every day upgrading all their food territories ? is it fun to build 25 fortifications every day to keep moral up.... I dont think so.. maybe some do ..I doubt it.

I notice my opponents magically trade 100,000 food for $1. Any idea how that works?

If you deal with a human counterpart and both agree to it, this is fine. In fact this is a gift, not a trade.

So for days 30 to 60 on a 100 player map I found that I needed to be continuously building Industrial Complexes on food provinces. Typically starting 5 to 7 L1 industrial complexes a week on captured food producting provinces and building them all the way up to level 5. There never seems to be enough oil to build Infrastructure on those captured provinces, so I just go with the industrial complexes.

So the lesson here is that the RARES are needed for building L1 Industrial complexes. My suggestion is to maximize rare material production early in order to maintain food production later.

Currently playing 25p map as Australia, all barracks disabled and I'm currently -100grain/h.

Aswell I'm having huge issue with my population growth!
I have 40k+ population which consumes tons of goods and grain aswell, and I'm in huge problems since I can't create upgrades as fast as the population is growing...