Posts: 3822
Joined: 16 Sep 2007, 22:00
KaM Skill Level: Skilled
ICQ: 269127056
Website: http://lewin.hodgman.id.au
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Location: Australia
Food in the upcoming release
It bothered me that most people never bothered with food production in multiplayer, or if they did it was just to make a butcher to process the "byproduct" of making leather. I remembered that in KaM TSK/TPR food was an important aspect of your economy, so I decided to measure the amount of health units start with in TPR to see how it compared to the Remake. The previous value was guessed. I found that in TPR, units started their with about 12 minutes less condition than the Remake, so I changed the Remake to match this, and thought to myself: "There we go, now food will be a bit more important in the Remake."
Please note that the only change made was the initial condition when the unit begins his life at the start of the mission or from the school/barracks, the time between eating and amount of condition food restores was not changed.
Well 12 minutes doesn't sound like that much, and it only effects units the first time they eat so I didn't think it would make such a big different. The first replay I watched from the release candidate most players' villages were out of food. In the second game people were more aware of it and went for food production early (rather than ignoring it) which worked better, but it will still a struggle to get enough food to feed your people.
Part of the problem here is that multiplayer maps don't start with a lot of food. In TSK most of the campaign missions have 100-300 food in the storehouse at the start, where as most of our multiplayer missions have 60-120. With such a low amount of food you really need to prioritize food production right at the start or your village will die out. I think multiplayer maps should have an average of about 150 food at the start, I'll be making an announcement about required changes for map makers soon.
With this change players' build orders will need to fit in food early on. I remember when playing the campaigns food was usually the first thing you worried about after building the sawmill. Games will probably become a bit longer (although it's still possible to have a large army after 60 minutes peacetime in the games I've seen), and some players' tactics like rushing for iron and ignoring food won't work because your economy will die. We will no doubt get complaints about this when the release goes public. I still believe this is a good change because it now matches original Knights and Merchants, and food will become part of the game again instead of being ignored in multiplayer, which made me sad.
What do you think?