Running specialist villages at a Grain Deficit (Advanced Guide) [by Rastus]

You have seen the screenshots of armies with 15k of attack infantry no doubt, well, this is how it is done. Bear in mind it is not simple and requires regular use of gold to exchange iron/wood/clay into crop in the specialist villages concerned. It also demands regular gameplay - you cannot take 2 days off for the weekend but will need to log in regularily to prevent very costly troop starvation.

Simple Independant Crop Deficit Operation

In it's simplest form, it just requires a single village with well developed warehouse, granary and strong production. You can sustain a negative crop production indefinately by logging in an converting other resources to crop at regular intervals.

For example, nob_au's village of Pheonix has 80,000 warehouse/granary capacity and the following production:

• Lumber: 1250 per hour
• Clay: 1250 per hour
• Iron: 1250 per hour
• Crop: -2113 per hour

Note the net balance of resources is still positive, ie, +3750 - 2133 = +1617 resources per hour. This means it can still sustain itself independantly with regular exchanges of iron/wood/clay for crop. It does not need any outside resources shipped in, which is good for Pheonix as it is a remote village too far to ship resources to.

Since the granary capacity is 80K and the crop deficit is -2133 per hour, NOB_au (or sitter) has to convert other resources to crop at least once every 36 hours. To minimise the cost, conversions are made when the crop levels get low and always take the balance up to 80K. You can decrease the amount of transactions needed by increasing the granary/warehouse capacity further as well. This is not done in Pheonix as the population is being kept delibrately low to make it less appealing to potential village thiefs.

Advanced Dependant Deficit operation

This is referred to as 'dependant' as it requires frequent deliveries of resources from other villages. In effect the village is dependant on feeder villages to allow it to operate at much larger crop deficits. This is how I will be running Amaterasu, and that is why it has 3 Ganaries (240,000 crop capacity) and 2 Warehouses (160,000 resource capacity).

Amaterasu is surrounded by 10 feeder villagers which can send bulk amount of resources in which are housed temporarily in Amaterasu's warehouse and then converted into crop using gold, of which it can store 240,000 capacity.

This means if I want to make one transaction per day, I can run Amaterasu at a deficit of -10,000 crop per hour (over 24 hours this equals the 240,000 capacity of the granary) as long as the feeder villages have no problems sending this amount in. Each feeder village makes approx 3600 resources per hour so this alone will use all the iron/wood/clay from 3 feeder villages. Crop in feeder villages is not counted as this supports their own defense troops.

This is a lot of messing around but what this means is that Amatarasu can run indefinately at -10,000 crop capacity per hour with a single gold transaction per day. As Amaterasu is already a 15 crop capital with level 12 crop feilds, this means she can support just under 20,000 crop worth of troops.

This is how people build devastating attack forces containing over 15,000 attack infantry with artillery.

***** Note - eventually Rastus had 7 level 20 granaries in his 15 cropper capital and had a 60K crop per hour army based out of it - which needed gold resource transactions twice a day.