Starving Garrison

[KnightNI]

so my 2 castles are maxed out with upgrades and my 1 city is maxed out. all 3 garrisons have 200 soldiers roughly and all 3 places are starving.... i cant get the food to go up no matter what i do, ive been guarding the villages and villagers for days but the food supply is always negative. i tried having my companions roam the area but they keep recruiting more troops than they can hold which causes their good troops to desert while the recruits stay..... so i disbanded them immediately.

so, anyway to get positive food without have 0 troops in the garrison?

 

[Tintenkobold]

Play with beta branch. It's fixed there already. Don't know if it's in the main branch as well, I don't use it since it's broken too often. Beta is fine, devs reacted fast until 25th April (not a single update since, don't know what's going on)

 

[paladinx333]

I am not experiencing this in 1.2.1. I was pleasantly surprised as this was a major pain in my last playthrough.

How are the connected villages? If the villages connected to your castle or town are all raided into the ground, the villagers won't be bringing in any food. If the connected villages are unhealthy the castle or town will have food and prosperity problems. The effects of being raided seem to last for a long time. Even after the village has seemly recovered, the numbers won't be back to normal for a while.

 

[drallim33]

so, anyway to get positive food without have 0 troops in the garrison?

Short answer is no. Economy is broken and towns/castles will just keep growing until they run out of food. This eventually happens no matter what.

Garrisons in castles are less likely to starve to death because they don't rely on food from the market. But you will still end up with an empty granary.

So best strategy is to put elite troops in castles, and put large numbers of low level troops in towns, since they are not safe.

 

[froggyluv]

Theres a Granary mod as well

 

[Duchess Rosé of Suno]

if we had Garrison patrols in the base game that would help balance the Peasents getting yanked by Bandits so they can reach.
Been using Hire patrols (AI can use it too) and my garrisons are able to stay alive as more food makes it into towns now

 

[kweassa]

Short answer is no. Economy is broken and towns/castles will just keep growing until they run out of food. This eventually happens no matter what.

Nothing "broken" about it, contrary to popular belief.

Garrisons in castles are less likely to starve to death because they don't rely on food from the market. But you will still end up with an empty granary. So best strategy is to put elite troops in castles, and put large numbers of low level troops in towns, since they are not safe.

I think it's a fundamentally wrong approach.

The most basic approach would be to first assessing whether a castle needs so many garrisons in the first place, or not -- and in many cases, upon the playing styles and strategic situations people are in, you really don't need that many garrisons in the first place, because:

(1) most efficient way of defense in wars, is to intercept enemy armies on the field, and most players prefer this as well
(2) no matter how much garrison you have, an enemy army of certain size will always capture it in the end
(3) therefore, town/castles troops don't do much more than discouraging enemy army of lesser than 300 men from attempting sieges
(4) despite such limited role in actual wars, garrisons consume food and cost wages

Considering all of the above, and then think about it.

When having 250 militia/250 garrison, or just 250 militia, doesn't make any difference in stopping a 500+ sized enemy army from capturing the town/castle, does it make sense to put so much garrison into towns and castles in the first place?

The answer is: "NO."

Practically speaking, your garrison troops, play a role in keeping security levels, receive nominal training over a long period of time, does not immediately contribute to your battle at hand -- this means, garrisons are basically your reserves. The guys in the benches in your ball game.

You field the best players in your current team, and have the reserves in benches -- not the other way around.

What you do is gradually increase the garrison in small numbers, with lowly tier 1~2 troops, up to the point your current food supply can handle. So if there's a small stretch of food shortage you lose a few low-tier troops. The garrison doesn't contribute to your immediate fight at hand -- but they also cost lower, since they're low tier reserves. All the time your main party of elites are fighting, the garrison reserves will receive passive training.

When you lose some numbers in your main party and need to quickly fill the ranks, you can go back to the castles and towns and fill up with some tier2~3 troops. And then refill the garrison with recruits.

That's, what you do with garrisons in the game. Putting elite troops in garrisons are a waste of money, with unnecessary dangers of them being lost in stretches of food shortages.

In other words, you guys are doing it backwards.

 

[kweassa]

(ps) TL;DR version

In other words, no sense in putting in hundreds of mid~high tier troops in castles and towns that cost thousands of gold in wages doing nothing but staying at a stationary point, receiving small tidbits of training that would realistically never level them up... not to mention the hundreds of garrison that overwhelms your food supply and simply cause them to go AWOL and evaporate away due to starvation.

Instead, what you should be doing is putting in low-grade tier-1, tier-2 troops as garrison, first numbering in maybe 20 of them.. and than gradually increasing them to maybe 30... 40.. 50 or so at max. Of course, if the food can handle more, then you should put in more.

What happens then, during the many years your main party and army fights around Calradia, your modest-sized low-tier garrison troops will cost considerably less money, get trained to at least late-tier2 stage or tier3, and ready to be deployed.

At some point, your army WILL receive some large casualties -- most likely scenario is your infantry will probably gradually wear down to lower numbers, because they're most often in direct combat. At that point, when you get the time, you go back to the castles and towns and pick up the tier2~3 troops to fill in the holes, and then fight with them a few times will bring them up to tier4 replacements. Then you get more recruits and fill them up as new garrisons.

The town/castle garrisons, are your reserves and training grounds. Realistically, no amount of garrison will stop a determined attacker. Even if the enemy has to rely on multiple sieges, they will come back each time and wear down garrison with bombardment, and then assault it. To stop this, you have to destroy their army in the field.

 

[drallim33]

It makes sense to put your elite troops in a castle instead of a town because they are much more likely to starve in a town. All it takes is for a friendly army to pass by and buy all the food from the town and you will lose a chunk of garrison. Some towns are just constantly slowly bleeding small numbers of garrison all the time due to the broken market economy. This can never happen in a castle.

So you put the expendable troops that you are less sad to lose in a town and the veteran ones in a castle.

 

[Maximuuus]

Food supply is broken in towns and in castle... If it's not broken, it's very bad.

Same issue without mod : no garrisons in half castles and towns... That sucks because AI have 800 units in towns when I can sometimes only have 150 garrisons...
Maybe AI hire new units and fill garrisons everytime, but AI cheat and their parties aren't as useless as our, so it's easy for it.

 

[Mama Luke]

Nothing "broken" about it, contrary to popular belief.

(1) most efficient way of defense in wars, is to intercept enemy armies on the field, and most players prefer this as well
(2) no matter how much garrison you have, an enemy army of certain size will always capture it in the end
(3) therefore, town/castles troops don't do much more than discouraging enemy army of lesser than 300 men from attempting sieges
(4) despite such limited role in actual wars, garrisons consume food and cost wages

So let's say I'm playing as a vassal of Vlandia and Derthert decided to give me Kranirog Castle up north and Ortysia down south. How am I supposed to defend these fiefs? I can't intercept every enemy army on the field when my fiefs are too far apart from each other like this. And even if they weren't, I'd have to patrol around my fiefs all the time and do nothing else since we're almost always at war.
One of the devs recently said that AI knows the weakest garrions of their enemy and they prioritize attacking it. They have no sense of border whatsoever. So if I keep my garrisons understaffed they'll always attack me because my fellow lords in Vlandia always keep their garrisons full.
What i do, I just attack looters on the field, some of them yield without a fight and offer to join me. I take them and dump them to garrisons so my fiefs won't appear as weak. And if they starve to death who cares. But what else can be done?

1. Give factions a sense of their borders. Make castles at strategic points mean something so we know where to defend and make our preperations accordingly.
2. Make settlement food production and buildings scale with prosperity. They're giving flat bonuses right now regardless of population. Should be more population = more production.
3. Decrease the garrison support limit and level the field for everyone. Garrisons can support up to 570 people right now which just isn't true. If food production can't cover 570 people then it's not really supported. Make the numbers reflect this reality.

 

[KnightNI]

ive been protecting my villages and food seems to be going back up, only problems i have now are sometimes the farmers decide to go to another town or castle instead of mine and deliver foor there :/ dont understand the logic behind that. other issue is i dont know how to bring the prosperity of villages up, theyve been "poor" for over a month and it doesnt seem to matter if i buy stuff or sell stuff to them for no profit