HOW MANY ACRES DO YOU WISH TO PLANT WITH SEED?? 589
IN YOUR 10-YEAR TERM OF OFFICE, 110 PERCENT OF THE
POPULATION STARVED PER YEAR ON THE AVERAGE, I.E. A TOTAL OF
11 PEOPLE DIED!!
YOU STARTED WITH 10 ACRES PER PERSON AND ENDED WITH
8.11 ACRES PER PERSON.
DUE TO THIS EXTREME MISMANAGEMENT YOU HAVE NOT ONLY
BEEN IMPEACHED AND THROWN OUT OF OFFICE BUT YOU HAVE
ALSO BEEN DECLARED NATIONAL FINK!!!!
SO LONG FOR NOW.
Apparently you are supposed to grow the population (??) or at least hold it steady? But that costs bushels and land, which obviously one would want to minimize, while having a large rainy day fund to mostly feed the rats with. There are useful plagues that halve your population, so luck is probably a thing? Besides learning more about Economics (really not my thing, as you may have noticed) one solution would be to write a program that figures out how to best play the game, but then you'd be copying numbers from one computer program to another, just like that nice lady in Galaxy Quest did. Why then have a human in the loop? (Some might suspect that "hand crafted coding" is turning or has turned into "industrial line coding" is turning into "a few people monitor the machines that do everything", just as the means of production has done in various places.)
Another way is to look at the source code to figure out what numbers the game wants, wherein you might learn that the population grows not by how much you feed them in excess, but by the excess stores and land. This is more marketing than biological; rats generally do not switch to extra breeding on the promise of more food.
P.S. the version of the game I found had a bug that indicates a full playthrough had never been done. The end of game subroutine fails, and the error was helpfully thrown away. This is where some Expect-based tests and the ability to set the random seed to a known value will at least let you automatically test and cover some amount of the code for not very much effort. On the other hand, there are probably more popular resource management games that get more care and attention these days.
P.P.S. the game really is not meant to be played for a large number of turns, as either you get ruined on a run of bad harvests (some would have to starve to get through those; my algorithm is stupid and always sells land to feed folks, and otherwise tries to buy as much land as affordable, which seems to be ideal play) or, less likely, you end up with absurd situations such as
$ perl automate.pl max_year 10000
IN YOUR 10000-YEAR TERM OF OFFICE, 0 PERCENT OF THE
POPULATION STARVED PER YEAR ON THE AVERAGE, I.E. A TOTAL OF
0 PEOPLE DIED!!
YOU STARTED WITH 10 ACRES PER PERSON AND ENDED WITH
1382.91 ACRES PER PERSON.
population 6060
grain 201930
acres 8380460
year 10000
A FANTASTIC PERFORMANCE!!! CHARLEMANGE, DISRAELI, AND
JEFFERSON COMBINED COULD NOT HAVE DONE BETTER!
I suspect the plague chance is based on the 10-turn game; at 0.15 odds per turn that's pretty good odds there will be at least one plague. The actual odds of a population halving plague are perhaps a bit lower than that, but then the game would need to run for longer if the players were to be exposed to that feature.