errr....Sim Farm?
http://www.abandonia.com/games/45/download/SimFarm.htm
Sim ant did more with the food dynamics for me between the two.
I would also like to recommend two RTSes. First one being Swarog, there's really only one food source in the game, but seeing as the only real way of beating your enemy is through zerging him with a huge (inbred- literally!) population planting and harvesting those turnips becomes a game in itself. Particularly during the later stages when forces are stacked up against you.
As for that bit about inbreeding. There's no real population cap I've ever encountered in the game, housing is merely for aesthetic and for limited building and breeding purposes. You increase your population by selecting a male villager, telling him to go into a hut, and a female village, telling her to go into the same hut, and then a baby pops out after two complete a ritual in which they loudly incite the demons through loud, gutteral cries both random and sharp. You keep doing this. Building more huts merely allow you to have more breeding couples. I don't see why these reasonable people can't just do their summoning rituals in the open.
As you population spirals out of control, food then becomes a huge problem if you're not converting the majority of the men into soldiers, sending them to their deaths, and after that, send the women to their deaths as well. Quite literally, you're going to come across situations where your entire screen would fill up with these bloody turnips. In fact, producing enough food to sustain any sizable population is more of a battle than those raids your enemy sends to you.
The second game I would recommend is Warrior Kings: Battles. Food plays a big part, but nonetheless there are other important resources as well. The big part that food plays in this game is the mechanics demanding that every standing soldier needs to draw food from the stockpiles in order not to wither away to 1 hp.
From this situation arises several issues. Would you build up a big defensive force or raiding party and stagnate your food generation as the more troops you have the less food each farmer brings in? Or would you rather forestall a build up of large forces so you can build up your food stockpile, and then, at the very end, with your multiple barracks, stables, and summoning pentagrams/churches/technofactories crank out a massive force that crushes your enemies. This last option is a little reminiscent of real world logistical issues. In most cases, preservation of forces is done due to the supplies needed to sustain said force in full combat. For example, a panzer army at the battle of the Kursk might have 3 days, 15 hours, and 12 minutes of estimated full out fighting time. Similarly, taking the latter option of not only suddenly shunting out a huge army, but also killing all your villagers to top off your population limit with soldiers gives you a limited window in which you have a limited amount of time before your entire army starts to starve. If your opponent is able to hold you off with his own non-maximized forces with his own stockpile ready, you're going to be in for a very hard fight. Unfortunately this only seems to happen when in multiplayer games as the AI doesn't seem to be capable of such strategic planning and logistical wizardry, though it is quite smart from the times I've played against it. Static defences are usually not a good defence against the harder generals.
The second food management issue is the fact that you don't really have the food in your stockpile, that is to say, the main universal stockpile you see in starcraft red alert and the like, until your caravans that carry the food and the resources reaches your home base, or similar secondary manor. Like in Rise of Nations, you're going to need to build villages around the map near resources points as a staging area for your peasants to put the extracted resources into to be brought away by caravan down the chain. For the huge armies in the late game, the farming area around your manor isn't going to be enough. This should be all the more striking since there aren't any walls in this game aside from elevations. Which is to say, that in general, most of the map is irrigable barring rare outcrops of ice and rock.
Needless to say, these caravans are quite vulnerable. And given how much land you need to sustain a large force, the distances of the farming villages alone is going to be immense. Not only can you target these caravans, but you can kill its drivers and substitute your own and haul away the loot to your own base. While food may not be a valuable target, certain gold hauling carts are. If the payload is of a good size, you can likely fund one of the late game upgrades with the raid alone.
Author
Topic: Looking for a strategyish games with an emphasis on food management! (Read 3212 times)