One of the most important resources in Rising Empires is food. Food is needed to feed your ever-hungrier population. If you feed them well they will become happy and breed faster but if you don’t they’ll become angry and mean, perhaps even to the extent that they call you evil names and rebel against your rightful rule. This was discussed in the tutorial III (number three in the list below).
This is the fifth Rising Empires 2 tutorial and will discuss the food system in Rising Empires. The previous four tutorials can be found here:
Tutorial I – Playing the first turn in Rising Empires
Tutorial II – Research and technologies
Tutorial III – Loyalty, or how to keep your population happy
Tutorial IV – Corruption, or how to keep your empire together
Your towns and cities collects food from the sectors around them. It’s also possible to build special buildings that generate a fixed amount of food and if the settlement lies on a coast it’s even possible to go out fishing the sea and ocean sectors.
Cities collects food from all the sectors that is highlighted when it’s activated on the map. How much food that is collected depend on the farm level (infra-structure) and how far away the sector is from the city:
This means that sectors that lies close to the city is of more value than a sector that is far away. When improving terrain it’s always better to improve as close as possible to the settlement even if it costs more than a sector farther away. Remember that it is possible to improve the sector where the city is as well.
Elven empires work a bit differently than the other races. Elves receive double the amount of food from forests, deep forests and forest caves. Unfortunately, they only get half the amount of food from all other terrains. What to do about all those plains? Grow more forests! 😉
It’s very important to remember that no food is collected during the winter. Enough food must be collected and stored during spring, summer and autumn to feed your population during the winter.
Now we know a little about how food is collected by your towns and cities. But how does it influence your population growth?
Each civilian needs a minimum of 1 food each turn. This gives them enough strength to work and generate income but it will also slow the population growth to a minimum. By allowing your population to eat more food they will be more content with life and breed faster. 1.5 foods/civilian is required for your population to receive their basic population growth. A maximum of 2.0 foods can be consumed by each civilian in a turn and will give a bonus to your population growth.
During winter your birth rate can never be higher than standard (1.5 foods/civilian). If there is enough food stored in a settlement for the remaining winter turns each citizen will eat 1.5 foods each. If there isn’t enough food for each citizen to eat 1.5 during the rest of the winter each citizen will be given 1.0 food instead. If this is not possible, 1.0 food will be distributed to each citizen until the food supplies are empty and the remaining citizens will starve.
If your population starve their death rate will be multiplied with 7.5 (the maximum death rate during starvation is 12.5%). Be sure to avoid starvation in your settlements!
We’ll end this tutorial with a short discussion on how a settlement can improve the terrain it collects its food from.
All towns, cities and capital cities can increase the farm level in the surrounding sectors. How many turns it takes to complete improvement of a sector depend on the size of the settlement. At the start of the game your empire has the technology to increase the farm level to 1 in all improvable sectors. To increase more you need to develop the correct technologies.
Questions? Comments? Please let me know, either here by responding to this post, on the forum or by sending me an email. Good luck! 🙂