"Damn, that was way too close."
Lying in the huge, empty swimming pool within his palace, Lu Yan floated on the water like a corpse.
He relived the harrowing events from before.
He had turned a Civilization game on easy difficulty into a nightmare-difficulty run. Luckily, it had not reached hell difficulty.
He had reflected on it for many days.
Today, he reached a conclusion: a large population was the way forward.
For ordinary people, fewer people was a good thing. But for someone standing above them all, a large population could only be beneficial.
What if there was not enough land? Expand outward.
What if there was not enough food? Cultivate improved strains, farm intensively, reduce waste, take control of agriculture and the food industry, guarantee minimum allocations...
Every other commodity could be left to the laws of the market. Food alone was an exception, because it was the most essential of necessities.
He recalled the measures taken across the various continents. Even places like Miken and the Western Continent, which followed free-market regulation, did not dare leave food entirely unchecked.
Miken even had food vouchers.
Food. Still food.
He decided that most of his divine power still had to be invested in improving food production.
New crop varieties, new cultivation methods...
The only problem was that technology was restricted to before the twentieth century. That made things difficult, since many fertilizers and pesticides were products of the twentieth century and beyond.
Fortunately, tractors and harvesters only required nineteenth-century technology.
Cars already existed in the nineteenth century. With cars, tractors and harvesters could be made. With those two things, a small number of people could cultivate vast tracts of land and increase the food support ratio.
At a yield of five hundred jin per mu, one person farming ten