When you raise levies, your armies start out with their Food Capacity maxed out, but legions don’t. This is especially glaring with the Diadochi, who start out with established legions who for some reason have not stored any grain.
Why don’t legions start with full food?
- Thread starter Spartakusbund
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Presumably so that you can't magically refill your legion's food supply by disbanding and re-hiring supply trains.
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Maybe supply trains (or perhaps all units) should take food from the province's food stores, whether you're raising levies or building legions. It'd give the player a really good reason to pay attention to Province Food beyond pop growth.
I still think legions you get at the start of the game should start with full food, either way.
Levies do exactly that, so theres no reason for me why adding a Supply Train to a Legion would not do the same. I'd also like to see a unit for units to immediately fill their Food Cap from Owned Provinces (argument to be had over Occupied Provinces) without having to wait to restock.
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At that point you may as well remove army food entirely. Even if it was only owned territory you would never run out of food.
Sure if food is so abundant like now that every province always has 100s of excess, then yeah it is effectively limitless. It's essentially impossible to run out of food now of course, as you just pop back into some controlled territory too, the only difference being you then have to wait there for a few months.
Which is an enormous difference.
You may as well say "money is effectively unlimited too, you just have to wait long enough without spending any".
Well no, there's no delay in spending money, you have a bucket of money and you can spend it instantly.
In this situation you have a bucket of food (stored per province) and you transfer it between different holders (from Province storage to Army storage). This is already a thing: if you raise a Levy, the instant transfer happens then.
The equivalent issue with money would be if everyone always had 1000s of gold all the time, and the game limited you from using it by saying you can only spend 5 of it per month. We'd all be questioning why we had that setup.
Except you don't have a stock of army supply, you have food in your provinces. The former is vastly more valuable than the later. The fact that levies receive full supply instantly is entirely irrelevant to this discussion (it's a necessary consequence of the way levies work). There is a reason why you're not supposed to be able to re-raise levies during war time.
More to the point though: Time during war is the most valuable resource in the game, both for tactical reasons (time for the enemy to turn the war against you) and for strategic reasons (time for other enemies to declare war on you, and most importantly, time for loyalty, stability, etc. to decay). The idea that having to wait for your troops to resupply is not a meaningful cost is blatantly absurd.
I don't get the point you're maing here, so apologies. We very much do have an army supply...hence you can compare the two things. The Cap values per-unit are way too high relative to their consumption, which allows armies to spend far too much time away from supply bases for my liking, but that's a different question.
It is absolutely not a necessary consequence. Levies could spawn in the same way that new Cohorts spawn for a Legion, and have to stand around for months performing the same gathering that a Legion unit would do; or remain in areas where they can access Provincial Food (ie Controlled Territory) to avoid any risk of running out of supply. That would be a perfectly valid design choice, in line with that of Legions now, but not one I'd prefer.
There is, but it isn't due to Food, it's due to Manpower. Raising Levies doesn't give you free food, but it does give you free Manpower for some reason.
I don't remember anyone saying enforced waiting is a meaningless cost, so I don't know where you got that idea from. No matter what you do with food that will always be something to deal with through morale. It isn't like there's much of that right now, the only way to run out of food is to beseige enemy territory for a very long time without capturing their Provincial Capital.
As above, it's a fine design choice, just not the one I'd go with. I feel that having lower food capacity with each unit/supply train VS consumption would be a reasonable way to force units to have to enter territories where they control the food supply more frequently. This would keep up the issue of supply during seiges, which is a rarity at the moment. Likewise, as the current balance renders food system as a whole utterly pointless through oversupply, if this was fixed then you would find Provinces running out of food much more frequently, when would make the choice between instant food collection and over-time food collection much less critical.