Not sure how I missed this before, but it appears as if my troops will not gather supplies from a City/Farm if they're within its supply circle during Winter. Is this intentional?

Edit:
I did double-check they were in supply range, I tried camping them to see if that made a difference (no change), and I made sure there was food available. Also sheep still work in Winter, appears to just be Cities/Farms.

Edit of the edit:
I played with it some more, and it seems when I leave my troops out, they stop gathering food eventually during the Winter. But when I put them back in a city, then took them out again, they resumed gathering as normal.

The city has a minimum reserve capacity. If the city is below that reserve, it will not supply troops outside the city walls. But garrisoning and redeploying the troops, they essentially steal food from that reserve. I found in generally it wasn't something you usually need to worry about, since the AI was often equally out of food for their troops in winter, and thus a single peltast volley usually caused them to route.

The city has a minimum reserve capacity. If the city is below that reserve, it will not supply troops outside the city walls. But garrisoning and redeploying the troops, they essentially steal food from that reserve. I found in generally it wasn't something you usually need to worry about, since the AI was often equally out of food for their troops in winter, and thus a single peltast volley usually caused them to route.


Hmmm, that would explain it. Ugh, it just piles on. So, the question is if I set my supply request low, will the AI still transfer supplies forward since I've got a large draw even though my requested quota is low? If not, that just makes it worse. I need a large supply cash to keep my larger troop bases secured, but one small hiccup and I could lose 10-15 minutes of work (I just lost two units in the middle of summer because they weren't being supplied by the city since I redirected my supply chain around and upped the requested amount at that city, which I was going to post about but this explains why) for no reasonable reason. But, if I keep my supply request low, so the troops get supplied, but the AI doesn't forward anymore than the requested amount...

Yeah, supply chain can be challenging to manage. In the earlier betas there were some manual controls to force food to specific cities regardless of reserve level, but those were removed because they were quite buggy, never really completed, and rarely used by most beta testers. I personally used those a fair amount to get around the type of supply problems you are running into, when they worked as expected, and miss them :)

Maybe Rick/Rob/Jim can give you some better tips on managing supplies.

Yeah, supply chain can be challenging to manage. In the earlier betas there were some manual controls to force food to specific cities regardless of reserve level, but those were removed because they were quite buggy, never really completed, and rarely used by most beta testers. I personally used those a fair amount to get around the type of supply problems you are running into, when they worked as expected, and miss them :)

Maybe Rick/Rob/Jim can give you some better tips on managing supplies.

I've had problems getting supplies around as well - capturing a new city on my border, for example, and not being able to get enough food to it to feed my troops resuppliyng there. The next city over will have plenty of food - and the next ones along the chain will have thousands of the stuff - but the supply routes just can't move it fast enough. Which means border cities are constantly starved, while my central cities (like Pella) are practically buried in grain. The fact that border cities are constantly under attack doesn't help either - the supply lines spend weeks at a time blocked, farms are burned, etc etc, which slows things down even more.