January Battle – Feeding Excelopolis (V)

TASK 

You are a chief of a tribe of nomads. Your tribe has recently discovered some advanced agricultural technologies and decided to settle down and found a city. You name the city Excelopolis.
You want to forecast how fast will the population of your city grow based on 140 different scenarios listed below. Each scenario provides different land fertility assumptions.

Key rules for the case:
– Excelopolis is founded at the beginning of Year 1. The new era starts for your people!
– The initial size of your city’s population is 1 unit.
– The land around Excelopolis is represented by Excel cells (see table below). The city itself is located in cell D4. The table shows an example of land fertility distribution.
– Note that land fertility values in each game usually differ from the table example.

Land cultivation:
– Every unit of population can cultivate 1 cell of land around the city (so, initially, your people will be cultivating only 1 cell).
– Different cells have different fertility – each of them can give you from 2 to 5 units of food. You will be using the most fertile cells first.
– For example, if there are three people, they will each cultivate one cell, starting with the most fertile cell. Thus, in this case, the three people will cultivate the three most fertile cells
– At the Varsity level, you can’t cultivate land that is more than 2 cells away from the city. As a result, the maximum amount of land your people can cultivate is 25 cells.
– However, while the city is small, i.e. 6 population units or less, it can only use the 9 cells near the city (C3 to E5).
– After you have reached the population size threshold (7), you can stop using the less fertile fields and move production to more fertile fields.
– You are not even obliged to use the cell D4 below Excelopolis if it is less fertile than other cells.

Food storage, consumption and city growth:
– Every year 1 unit of your population eats 2 units of food. Assume they do it at the end of the year and don’t need to eat during the year.
– The remaining units of food produced during the year are added to the food stock in a warehouse.
– If at the end of a year the amount of food in the warehouse is 10x the current number of populations units (or more) – 2 things happen:
– At the beginning of the next year your population grows by 1 and you can cultivate 1 extra cell of land.
– The 10x units of food stored in the warehouse are used for growth and the warehouse now is empty or almost empty.