Food production not balanced well enough

Well we do know of one thing that changed for sure and that is you put people back in the gardens. 24 more people I did not have to feed last stage. I do not know what else you changed with that update but too much goes to upkeep and science.

Okay, perhaps I'm wrong about the food consumption per unit, per hour for the military units.  But taking Thor's numbers and doing a quick calculation using only cottages and maxed out archery towers, a town with 30 level 5 cottages loses 240 food an hour.  Add to that 30 level 5 archery towers and the figure goes up to 390 food per hour.  This is before accounting for corruption and research costs.

If the oil towers peak at 10 people per tower, having 30 of them at the end of Medieval takes the total consumption up to 540 an hour just for cottages and towers.  With few deer and no fruit this is an unsustainable number if you make any army at all.  At least that is how I am perceiving it. 

I assume, going into Renaissance one adds even more worker residences (up to 40?) and towers (again, up to 40?) increasing the food consumption even more.  Now, I realize that the upgraded food production buildings are intended to off-set that but if Medieval food production can't sustain an army of classical and some medieval units I'm concerned the Renaissance buildings won't solve the problem either.

Yeah actually if we do the math you can clearly see somethings's wrong...

Analysis of Food production VS food requirements (eg. for housing)

Using big O notation (which can be understood as "scales with")

Food requirements for houses are O(10*eraІ)=O(eraІ) : because you can build 10*era houses that are each O(era) population at max level

Food Production is only O(era*food_slots)=O(era), because you have 10 levels of each +10 production increase.

What this means is that food production increases linearly ( O(era) ), but food requirements for houses ( O(eraІ) ) increase in a quadratic manner.

For lower eras this is okay, but for higher eras you start to feel the difference : what is a small pain for us in medieval era has to be a huge pain for players in renaissance. Also if you plan to implement more ages later, the problem will be even greater.

Solutions

Fixing this problem : we must have the same complexity for food production and food consumption

• Either bring the food production to O(eraІ) or a pseudo eraІ (eg : it's okay to give +10 production per farm level for lower eras (prehistoric, classical), but for higher eras, each additional level could bring +20 instead of +10
• Or bring down the food requirements : a house lv 5, be it stone age, classic, or medieval, should provide the SAME amount of population (for example, 5pop). You will then go down to O(era) because each era lets you build an additional 10 houses.

Remarks

This issue of O(era) VS O(eraІ) is also happening with towers : because you can build an extra 10 towers for each age, but population requirements also increase with tower level.

As Bers mentions, it is not a problem having population for gardens, because then it is only O(era) as you just cannot build "more" farms. This is set by the number of food slots which is a constant.

For military units, well, the complexity is actually only O(era) : the military buildings of previous ages become obsolete so the total number of military units is actually O(1) (ie: basically a constant), and then increasing food requirements for units with era just brings it to O(era).

Okay, since I am math challenged, it seems, let me give an  example of what I'm talking about.  I have a town with five food plots, all of which are level 5 and 6 medieval farms.

I have a plow on that town.  When I put my 159 unit army in there the production becomes negative 194 per hour.  My army is entirely classical and stoneage with the exception of 4 swordsmen.  My witches are not even in the mix and offensive siege are not included either.  Both are somewhere else.  I have maxed archery towers but not maxed cottages yet.  At this point, if I max my cottages and add in oil towers food will be negative even without an army in town. 

Clearly, something is off.

A few Alphas ago, you suggested I put up 20 archer towers max level to avoid being wiped out. So I build 20 archer towers in each town max level. You also stressed building up houses to max amount max level to lower building time, I do that too. In A4 I had no problem with food, I had no tropical fruit in 2 hero locations and did in one Hero location. I had a nice big army and was comfortable. Now I have the towers and houses but building up the army is hard, one is feeding them the other is you need iron to build practically everything ( but that is a different issue). 

I also am a math idiot that is why I keep the husband around, oh and to spell for me. Besides other things. 

I have no idea what the problem is but could you please try to figure it out for us? We want to keep this game fun.   

Of course I know the 24 people is not the problem. You said nothing had changed, I was just saying something did change, that is the example I know for sure but sees to me the same update that added those people made the problem much worse for me than can be accounted for by just those people.

I also want to add that food has really been an issue through many stages. Even the Fruit last stage only made the difference if you had it on every town. I am sure if you did a search for food on the forum you will find many threads that have that common theme.

well the archer towers only take 4 food each so that is not it"

The archer towers are taking most of my food, it is 1 food per level. So your suggestion of 20 towers is not a great idea any more.  

It's one food per person in the tower as I understand it.   5 people per tower=5 food per hour per tower. 

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

Yeah towers only get 1 pop point every 2 levels... Well stone age and classical ones do anyway. Its been a while since alpha 4 so I forgot if medieval towers got 1 pop point a level or not.

And I still stand by my idea of a special building to reduce food lost to corruption or something along that line of thought :|

I mean they already made a renaissance building just to reduce culture lost to corruption so why not a food one :shrug:

My assumptions:

1. Increased usage of houses and towers
2. Abscence of tropical fruit which were quite helpful in A4

Anything else?

Am I right that the town population consumes one unit of food per person in the town per hour?  I think you are correct in that it boils down to population increase, somewhere.  Some of the buildings are high population, true, but in A3 when we could only build classical buildings and had no tropical fruit, I was still able to maintain the towns without plows on every one of them with maxed out classical buildings (military, etc) and production.  It became a problem last time but the fruit was helpful as were the windmill and watermill (much better if you can have both of course), but I still used plows all the time.  Of course some of the medieval buildings have a lot of people in them. . ..

So, yeah, definitely towers and houses for a start.

It became a problem last time but the fruit was helpful as were the windmill and watermill (much better if you can have both of course)

I would suggest that maybe you could remove the restrictions of the windmill, because building a city next to a mountain is a very big constraint. The watermill actually makes sense because coastal towns will require extra food (because they can build water buildings), but restricting the windmill to only 

I am not very fond of introducing new strategic resources with food bonus. Given how critical food is, that would just give some players a lot more advantage than others. For other resources like Iron, Stone and wood it feels okay, but giving extra food to some players would make it worse... We know there would be players lucky enough to have a big territory and many of those resources while others no (although I must admit that would add more depth to the war aspect because we'd want to control those geostrategic resources :D)

Well all my towns have about 90'ish more food production. So that helps,  Thanks for the changes devs :)

I'm finding the difference in food negligible at best.  As an example, i have one town that has 5 food plots, 4 lvl 9 med farms, 1 lvl 10 farm, 20 lvl 3 or higher cottages, 20 lvl 5 archer towers, and the food production is only 248 per hour after research and corruption (domain has 4 towns).  I can't recall the exact number of food in this town prior to the update, but it wasn't much different than it is now.  (Note: there are no units in this town atm, and clearly, it's not a town i can keep them in for long because it would put food production in the negative numbers).

I'm with startouf on the windmill issue. I never settle towns right next to mountains because stone is rarely, if ever, a limiting factor, and more stone means fewer other resources. So now I just discovered windmills, and none of my towns can build one. I also have no rivers in my domain, so I won't be able to build water mills.

Maybe the restrictions on windmills could at least be relaxed a little? For example, you need to have mountains in the 3x3 (or even 5x5) block around your town?

So I believe there have been little progress on that. Bers reducing pop did help, but just a little.

I was leveling up recently, and remembered there are actually two unimplemented perks in the charisma/food category : "Satiety" and "A great Feast". Is it possible to actually implement those perks so they could help solve the food problem ? I was thinking about something like (ideas)

• +10%/+20% food in ALL cities,
• Reduce food consumption by ALL towns population by x% (and honestly 50% would be a nice deal)
• Corruption does not affect food production
• An additional big +% to food production in town which houses the hero

I still suggest my Army Logistics Center/Food Management Center idea's. As self-promoting as it might seem (>_>)