Lord of Ultima: Food Management

A big part of Lord of Ultima is food. If you do not feed those troops, they will unfortunately desert. You have two choices to make:

• Make enough food within a city.
• Ship in food as required, from a food city or warehouse city.

The trade off is that if you build more mills/farms to make a city self sufficient, you sacrifice troop training speed/army size as you get to build fewer military buildings/barracks. So, the main question is, do you endeavor to make your military cities food positive?

The resounding answer is yes! As the number of cities in your empire grows, you will find one of the big limiting factors in being successful in Lord of Ultima is time. Therefore, any strategy to reduce your city management time should be welcome. You do not want to be constantly shipping food around. This is within reason of course, as some troops eat so much, and in making those military cities food positive, you have to sacrifice too much.

Here is what I do in practice:

• All non-castled support military cities are food positive. This is generally easy to do with 2 x food clusters, assuming you have decent lake placement.
• For castled military cities:-
• Land based offensive forces such as knights, mages, etc: 3 x food clusters. This is not enough to make them food positive (no way in hell with knights!), but I do not want to sacrifice too much. I do want to put in some food production so as to give me some time between food shipments. If I want more troops, I just build more of such cities.
• Naval based forces, ie, shipyards: I do not put any food production in at all, and just ship all food in. The reason being is that each of my shipyards are protected by a cluster of 4 other military cities. I cannot just build more shipyard cities as easily as knight cities, as I need to build the 4 other military support cities also. Therefore, in a shipyard, I do not want to sacrifice any troop training speed/army size.
• Defensive forces such as rangers: 3 x food clusters. You will find you can get food positivity with such.

NB: A food cluster is the classic mill and 4 farms deployment, around/next to lakes (when possible).

• Lord of Ultima is an online web browser based strategy game. More information can be found at my Lord of Ultima Coverage page.
• If you wish to jump straight in, you can sign up at http://www.lordofultima.com/en/ref/2300431315.
• As best described by the creators of the game:
  "Lord of Ultima is EA’s first game in the free Strategy MMO genre and is completely playable in a web browser. Developed by EA’s Phenomic studio, the game’s creator Volker Wertich (the genius behind strategy classics such as the Settlers) takes this genre to the next level. Lord of Ultima features deep strategic gameplay and multiple social features including an advanced trading system, alliance features, online chat, and forums. At launch it will be available in English and German language.
  
  
  Set in the legendary Ultima universe, the game takes you to the new world of Caledonia, formed from the remains of Sosaria which was shattered into countless islands. You start your journey with a humble village which you grow over time into a mighty and prosperous capital. On your path to glory you will have to expand your power by creating additional cities, exploring new continents and forging a vast empire. You must master the art of diplomacy and trade as well as the military activities of spying, plundering, attacking and sieging enemy cities to finally become the mighty and feared Lord of Ultima."