Food - A lost Feature??

Playing the game and seeing food affecting pop growth and it's import and export and farms and all that... I always felt we were given a bit too much info for an abstract thing... I mean if a city is importing loads of food is there any way to cut it off, starve it (without sieging it for example...) Is the only effect of too little food a negative population growth... Is it actually possible to have not enough food in the game????

Then I notice a food stat in the units list that is "no longer used"...

Any opinions on whether there was going to be greater detail in this whole food production thing at some point???

I think it would be cool if you could see what cities needed imports, and which ones were super fertile and were exporting food to the rest of your settlements (which would make trade within your empire needed a lot more). THen you could basically neuter a faction by taking their heartland provinces and having their military cities starve out...

i think a cool next step in the total war series would be to add supplies and therefore supply lines to armies. Supples (food) is a major part of dealing with any army and would open up some more tactical options for generals (ie cutting off supply lines), very interesting to note that there is a food stat for units. i'm kinda hopeful now they will include something along these lines for the next game.

i read somewhere that the TW development runs - revolution then evolution

Shog - MI
MTW - VI
RTW - probably the huns?

so we can expect an expansion, but it won't have any real game developments in it (although significant play issues are likely to be addressed)

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to make supplies work i think the turn sequence would have to drop to quarterly

it would make raiding rather conquering territories much more attractive

**starts seeing in black & white**

bandits on the hill look down at the village

'best wait until they get their crops in eh?'

'aye lad, s'not like they could find half a dozen noble warriors to protect them for only a bowl of millet is it?'

I realise nothing greatly different will turn up in any expansions... I was just wondering out loud if this was something they played with in the development of RTW and if anyone had ever heard of it...

In shoggy they were going to have doctors that could heal units, and ALOT of stuff that didn't get added in, its all in the files. Shame really.

I hope the Food feature, which I take to be an abstraction of and/or relevant to an army's supplies, stays lost. There are so many other things in RTW that need fixing, tweaking and whatnot (i.e. the AI) that I feel this feature, whatever its implication, should not be revived.

I've wondered that as well. If I had to guess I'd say that food would have been used for unit upkeep, in sort of a foraging whilst in foriegn provinces kinda deal. But, it could also have been used for recruitment in a particular province, possibly designed to encourage unit production in cities that are high up the tech tree.

i thiunk food could be better as a morale gage for troops in the feild. if cut-off from supply, army must forage and brings morale down. cutting off food for and not seiging a city...but cutting off food supply to a city *IS* seiging it. i would suspect that some functions may already been written for food if they just stoped using the food stat. whish some devs could dimension that better for us.