Resources

Food

Food is the resource that grows cities and keeps an army standing.

Income

• City base 2 (per city)
• Fertile land — while inside a region
• Horse pasture — while inside a region; it yields less, but it is the prerequisite for the Raider (The production queue)
• Farm

Food income is not affected by the population multiplier; the multiplier applies only to production.

Spending

Every unit costs 1 food of upkeep per turn. The value is on each unit's stat block too, and the whole roster sits side by side on The production queue.

Where it goes

Unlike the other two resources, food does not sit in a global pool. Net food (income − upkeep) is written each turn into the store of a single city — it is never split. The figure on your bar is the sum of all city stores. When a city's store reaches population × 4, its population goes up by 1.

You choose the recipient: the growth focus button in the city panel makes that city the focus and net food flows there. With no focus set the rule falls back to the default — the least populous eligible city, ties broken by city id order. That ordering is a contract, not cosmetics: the same seed and the same command sequence must produce the same match, so the recipient resolves identically on every replay.

A city cannot receive food in two cases: while it is in revolt (Victory conditions) and once its population reaches its cap. The second one follows from the mechanic itself: a city at the cap no longer grows, so food written into its store would never turn into population. The cap's base is 5; the Farm, the Almshouse, Healing and Cavalry each open it by a step (Cities and population).

On a turn where no city is eligible (all at the cap or in revolt) the surplus food is written into your empire's granary. The granary holds at most 20 food; anything above that is lost. When a city that can take food appears again, the granary feeds it — only up to its growth threshold, the rest waits in the granary. The city panel names that turn's actual recipient — or says the food went to the granary — and how full the granary is; if that turn's surplus does not fit, it says so the same turn.

The same recipient rule covers one-off food as well: a Ruins reward is written into that city's store too, not into your purse. With no eligible recipient the reward goes to the granary, and is lost only if the granary is full — exactly the same behaviour as surplus income, because the rule lives in one place.

The focus belongs to you, not to the city: lose the focused city and the rule falls back on its own. The same holds while the focused city is in revolt or at the population cap — but your focus is not erased: once the revolt ends, or once the city loses population (a conquest drops it by 1), it applies again. So leaving a fully grown capital as your focus does not throw your food away; the rule quietly falls back on those turns.

The numbers on this page are read from the game’s balance tables.