Quote Originally Posted by Zarky View Post
I'd like to question the most important part.
There are some factors you need to consider. In order to have anything more than 2-3 food surplus and still be able to ward off your enemies in every direction you'll need a big number of provinces, some with big food consuming castles.
Assuming you have 40 provinces, 1 food surplus would give you total of 40 town wealth per turn divided over all those provinces, slightly reduced by tax level. For this effect to become better than upgrading a market you'd need to give it a number of turns. so it really becomes a trade off between how fast you want the money, and it's actually better to have some provinces making much more income than others so that you can place your Metsukes there increasing tax rate.
It's true that at some point in the game you will probably end up with a large food surplus thus it becoming the largest single source of town growth, but by any means it is not the most important.

I rest my case.
If I had 40 provinces I would probably have something like a 60 food surplus. Having played a few campaigns without building any Market upgrades whatsoever, I easily have a +15 food surplus at around 20 provinces, and that's with hardly any farm upgrades, as well as the odd captured Castle or Stronghold. Upgrading the fortress in any more than 1-2 provinces is also a mistake.

+15 town growth from Global Food Surplus is more than any other source of town growth. And that's holding less than 25% of the map. As the game goes on, the advantage of the food surplus will only stack higher and higher, especially if I researched better farms.