Hello everyone! I heard there was a bunch of M&F discussion goin on over here and thought, "I wonder what they're talking about?" so I came by.
If it's not obvious from the user name, I play Andrew Calinus, the guy that seems to have some sort of authority in the Grand Fate (which is weird, and not how it was designed, but whatever!). I also play Vanessa Calinus in Ascalon, Evelyn Calinus in Rathgar, and Anysia "Ara" Tolmiras in Hawks, as main characters.
Beyond that, I'll do my best to swing by here as I can to answer any questions I see asked that no one else has gotten the correct answer for, as well as giving some general statements on things, based on my having played the game since before it's public launch last year. For those curious, I've lost more of my life to DF and BM (Tom's previous main game) than I care to admit, so I'm not giving you numbers.
I hadn't realized what a hate-on Tom has for free accounts until I went back and looked through the message board archives for where they decided it was such a good idea that free accounts wouldn't be able to found their own realms. Some of the initial ideas would have made me walk immediately, such as free accounts being limited to 50 troops max, or unable to be assigned to any position in a realm.
This is not the first game Tom has made, and he's approached it a lot more as a commercial entity than a hobby game, in stark contrast with a number of his other projects. He wanted it to be something he could develop full time, and unfortunately, it didn't take off like he'd hoped.
Anything in regards to lords being nit picky on what you do/say right off the bat
They suck. Go find a better liege and come kick their face later when you're all powerful I say!
We were talking about how to get the food surpluses needed to build the really big cities. What I said in terms of that is definitely the correct way to look at things in the long term - you want to fire any farmer who doesn't produce at least his own feed. Sure, you could technically have more people than this in the village, but you're going to be shipping less food out to the big city.
Food production, well, most resources really, work on something of a curve for workers:production. Food is noticeable because it's the most consumed resource in the game. All estates have a specific optimum amount for farmers:food, above this they still produce more food, just with a diminishing return, while below it they produce less food as the farmers can't work that much more land. Adding one person to a city of 9000, will produce more food. It'll just be so small an amount as to not be registered. Think, like multiple zeroes after the decimal point small. The same logic applies to every resource except wealth.
As for stockpiling, food CAN be stockpiled, but I do not honestly believe it worth the time and hassle you'd have to go through to do it. Reason being, the population fluctuates based on the food income and food available. Food available fluctuates based on construction projects, militia count, training count, the number of entourage you have, the number of entourage anyone else in the region has, and, oh yeah, all those soldiers marching through your region.
Once you get a larger estate, in the 3000+ range, weird stuff starts to happen with food. Weird stuff like dedicated 40% of the population on building projects, and only having a net food loss of 190-ish.
If you export food, the population fluctuates towards it's equilibrium point where food available equals the food consumed. Likewise, if you import food, the same thing happens.
I can go more indepth on how the resource system works when I have a bit more time, if you'd all like. Or the majority of other mechanics, for that matter. For now though, I'm going to call it a night.