Food

Maximizing food income

This is the most valuable resource in the game: not only does it keep your clansmen alive, but it's required to colonize new territory. As a match progresses, the burden of food becomes greater: your clan consumes more of it (due to the larger population), and subsequent colonizations cost ever increasing amounts of it. There will often come a point where the food cost of expansion is just no longer worth it due to how high it is, and you're instead better off clutching the win. For this reason, every area you colonize needs to be a deliberate choice, and not just done automatically.There's also the option of holding a feast, which consumes a large amount of food in return for a short (1 month) boost to happiness and production. Like with colonization, the cost increases with each use, so it's wise to save for when it's going to be most effective. It's also an important way to dump food in a useful manner when faced with rats and you don't have enough silos - hold a feast (and otherwise spend as much of it as you can) right before the rats come to make the most out of what would otherwise just be wasted food.Despite all these food sinks, you don't necessarily want to overproduce it. Sure, you'll never starve if you have a clan consisting only of food producing roles, but you'll also never get anything done. There's also a cap on how much food you can store of 500 (+500 per silo built). Balancing your production so that you have enough surplus to survive winter, and colonize key areas, whilst also having a large enough workforce to progress towards victory, is at the core of the game. So let's look at the food sources.Food is primarily gained from 4 sources:: These guys produce 4 food, and are your most reliable source of basic food production. At winter this is halved (which means, on hard, the villager barely gathers enough to feed just themself), and they can only gather in areas that have either a house, your town hall, or another food building (silo/farm/etc). They only generate food when they're idle - they won't do so while building, move-ordered or fighting.You can't upgrade villager tools, so these guys don't scale as well. The advantage is that you can have as many as you want.: Hunters produce 5 food each. They're also the best scaling food source, as not only can this amount be increased by upgrades (tools/building) and silos, but the tech "Sharp Weapons" further increases their production. In terms of raw production per citizen, these are the best value. Like all other non-villager food producers, though, you can have only a limited number of them.: They only produce 4 food, the same as gatherers, but the important difference is that they continue to produce the full 4 food throughout winter. This makes them pretty useless during summer (at least without upgrades), but during winter you want to make sure all your fishing huts are fully staffed.: Seems to be the worst of the food buildings. The same stats as hunters (5 food), but with no tech to improve production beyond upgrading the building and tools. Even costs 20 wood more to build. Still better than nothing, but no reason to choose this over hunters as far as I can tell.(Heidrun also has the sheep farm building, but won't talk about that here)Given that, apart from fishermen, food production is halved throughout winter, the most effective way to minmax food income is to focus on food production during summer, and other activities during winter. For example, while your clan consumes more wood during winter, you can still produce it at full speed (outside of blizzards). So, all other things being equal, you're better off cutting less wood during summer - instead having woodcutters gather food - and then having those gatherers chop wood during winter, or mine, or study lore, or anything else.Of course, you don't want to take this to an extreme - summer is a lot longer than winter, so you don't want to spend all of it only producing food and not much else. But bare in mind the efficiency of doing this will pay off - if well balanced - over the long run. Getting a feel for how much food you need stockpiled to survive the winter is important so that you can confidently go about maximizing winter production without starvation hitting.What you absolutely want to avoid is forgoing food production during summer and then running out of food in early winter. Even if you don't lose anyone to starvation, the amount of workers you have to pull off of other important stuff (merchants, miners, lore, etc) just to break even on food means you're losing out massively in other areas compared to just munching away on a well-planned stockpile.For relatively little raw cost, silos let you squeeze out that much-needed extra food production to keep your expansion healthy. The main cost, really, is that it consumes a building slot, but there are many cases where it's worth it.First of all, silos are the only way to boost the food generation of villagers. For that reason, and considering all villagers spawn at your town hall, putting a silo in the same area as your town hall makes your villagers more effective. Try not to have villagers gathering in regions without one if one is up elsewhere - there doesn't seem to be a cap on how many villagers can be gathering in a single area, so max out the bonus.They're also worth building next to actual food sources, and with the low cost it's not so bad if you need to tear it down later on for a more important building (eg a tavern when you have nowhere else to build). An unupgraded farm with 2 workers will gain an extra 1 food from a silo, whilst a fully upgraded farm (building+tools) will gain an extra 2.1 food with 3 workers. Can't really complain for 100 wood.Your clan can actually survive surprisingly long without food, and you can use this to your advantage. The issue with starvation is that it leads to a vicious cycle and things can rapidly spiral out of control leading to mass deaths. Here's what you need to know: If you're at 0 food with a negative income, some amount of your population will start to starve. The amount that starve is based on how negative you are in food supply. On hard, each citizen (by default) requires 1.66 food. So if you are at 0 food and have -5 income, that means just 3 of your citizens are going to start to starve. Not so bad if you have a large clan. As that negative number approaches roughly the size of your clan * 1.66, though, you're looking at wide-spread starvation, which can easily become a problem.After a citizen has been starving for a little while (about a month I think), they become ill. At this point their health starts to decay and they need a healer to cure them. Ill citizens also work slower (20% slower), so widespread illness can see your carefully planned township grind to a halt, and make things very tricky. On top of that, you'll suffer massive unhappiness, which means your town hall shuts down until the problem is resololved.However, if you're careful then you can let a bit of starvation happen to essentially cut corners with food production. For example, if your clan begins to starve in the final days of winter, assuming your summer food production is solid then you aren't going to have many problems. So if you aren't stockpiling food for a particular reason (eg expansion) this can be a good move to churn out that extra bit of wood/lore/coins essentially for free. Just make sure your healers are ready to heal up any illness, and that you don't go too far into the red.This is useful for bail-outs when ♥♥♥♥ hits the fan, or if you desperately need to colonize somewhere fast. Not essential though, if you aren't focusing much on coin production.