Assuming all races have more or less baseline human nutritional needs, I think abstracting all food into three catagories is probably your best bet. Basic Food is wheat or the eqivalent (rice, maize, beans, cassava, potatoes etc.). It will keep people fed, although in the long term a diet of just Basic Food is going to lead to malnutrion. Basic food stores well and lasts for quite a while on its own if stored correctly. Good food is more or less everyting else. Meats, cheese, fish, fruits and vegetables are Good Food. Good Food will keep your troops happy, prevent malnutrion and allow people to function optimaly. The problem with Good Food is that on it's own it doesn't keep nearly as long as Basic Food. Unless it's processed or stored properly Good Food will spoil within a month at most. The third type of food is Booze (I supose this should also include other types of recreational drugs). Booze is required to keep any population happy. Soldiers tend to require a lot of booze.
Basic food gets rpoduced in several big chunks each year, depending on the climate (so you could have 0, 1,2,3 or 4 harvest areas) and requires that land be devoted to agriculture. Hunter-gatherer and nomadic grous would have very little basic food. Good food would be produced in much smaller quantities continously, possibly with periodic spikes representing a mass slaughter or a fish run or a fruit harvest. Booze would be produced.
In order to preserve good food you need salt. In order to manufacture booze you need food. Historically salt was a major trade good because it allowed you to preserve food, and it could also be used to make food taste better. Aside from armies, almost all food was consumed near where it was produced. Shipping grains or flour more than 100 miles was very rare. Animals could be driven to slaughter, but once slaughtered the meat didn't travel very far. Salt, of the other hand moved thousands of miles in giant caravans and had towns and road networks explicitly contructed for the production and transport of salt.
A band of twenty people should be able to survive off the land four seasons year round. A band of 100 people should be able to keep themselves alive three seaons out of the year, assuming they keep moving. Anything more than 100 and less than 10,000 should be able to live off the land, provided they are willing to strip it bare and send out foraging parties. Anything over 10,000 troops will require a supply chain or order to keep from starving. Keep in mind that surviving isn't the same as thriving. A well supplied force will always preforms better than equivalent force that's been living off the land, so while twenty people could make it through the woods with some skill with a bow and knowledge of local plants, twenty troops with a commisary wagon will move faster and fight harder.
I must say, that is all fascinating. I really like the food ideas - the thing is, I don't want the logistical side to turn into a DF clone; players don't need that, and that's then time and effort on my part moving away from what I want URR to be. On the
other hand, I think the logistical side is important for realism, and I do want to keep a major part of it in. I think a lot of it is going to be abstracted away from the player; rulers choose what foods to harvest, etc, and you only become involved if a) you are destroying the source of enemy food, or b) you come to command army/rule civ, but even in b), you will only make 'high level' decisions about food sources and the like, not specific decisions about places, workers, etc.
I have just thrown in salt as another resource that generates on the world map, though. I'll shortly add in various herds of wild animals, and get their AI to 'tether' them to particular areas, I think. Nevertheless, I really like the Basic/Good distinction; also gives some potential for managing your army's food, rewarding/punishing, morale, and things like that. Basically:
If on your own/small group, you need to find food. People in civs will be making food, and there will be wild animals too.
If in an army, whoever leads that army will handle the supply chain under the hood. If something goes wrong, you will hear about it (say, enemy army razing farms), but otherwise, food will be passed down to you.
If in charge of any reasonable force, you determine where your army gets food from, but only in terms of "Kill all deer in square x," "Raid farm on square y for wheat", "Order soldiers 1-10 to transport Basic Food from City Z to us once a month", etc, and then your minions go about it. However, I think your suggestions are pretty much the level of detail I want the under-the-hood food creation to have
Good point. These are very good ideas.
I concur!
Raising up an army of 10,000 strong would take quite a bit of time, money, and as you just mentioned, food.
This would make it more worthwhile (to you AND the environment) to raise up an elite squad of skilled fighters.
It would be interesting to see, once the game is capable of handling this sort of thing, a battle between a giant, unskilled army, and a smaller, well-trained force.
I'm getting really excited for this game's release.
Yes, definitely - a la
300 (or similar), small elite forces should be more than able to survive against many times their number of poorly equipped/trained/led foes. Thanks! I've just made a brief breakthrough tonight, actually, which'll probably get a blog mention before too long...