foraging too complicated

[henri51]

Foraging rules are complex and unclear. I understand that if I set a core or an army to foraging, all of its units should then forage, although they individually don't show that they are foraging. If I have a supply wagon available, the foraging units will not use it even if they are starving. This could be simplified by having foraging units over the foraging limit automatically use the supply wagon instead of starving to death.

As it is now, one has to practically go over every single division every turn and adjust its foraging.

Suppose I have the Grande Armee with 100,000 men in a province with a forage level of 50. Let us say that the army has a corps of 70,000 and one of 30,000. If I set the 70K corps to faraging, 30K of them will take starvation damage, but if I set the 30K corps to foraging, I am wasting 20K of foraging, unless I go into the 70K corps and manually set enough divisions to foraging to take up the remaining 30K of foraging. And good luck on remembering on the next move who was foraging and who was not. I waste more time on this foraging stuff than on anything else, and I am still always short of money.

A simple fix is to have divisions over the foraging limit use the supply wagons if available, and they should also be able to use the free food from the city if they own it. Right now in order to save money, I have to break up corps and send 3 divisions into the provincial city (assuming it is not already full of militia)so that they can get free support. Next move if I need them I have to order them to rejoin their corps, assuming I can remember where they were or that I took them out.

All this seems like unnecessary micro-management to me...[:-]

Henri

[dude]

You can build a Depot in a province it will supply all units in and adjacent to that province.  If there is no depot then your troops automatically forage.  If they are over the forage limit they will take some losses.  If you are not building any depots then that's why you are taking foraging losses.  Units that forage should be listed under the Supply screen as having foraged and what if any losses they took.  If they use a depot it will say "Supplied" I believe.  Losses are spread out across all units once you are over the limit.
There are some upgrades that will limit this.

[henri51]

Yes, if I don't set unit to forage, they will use the depots (if available) and bankrupt me. I didn't know that they will forage automatically, so thanks for that info. However it changes nothing with respect to my problem. Playing the French in the 1805 scenario, most of the French armies will be far over the forage limit, so generally you will have depots available for all units unless one wants to take horrendous starvation losses.

The problem is that one wants to use as few depots as possible because using them to feed the army is very expensive. Translation: set as many units on forage as possible, and use the depots for the rest, thus spending as little as possible and minimizing losses due to starvation.

As far as I know, this can only be done by means of the micro-management that I described in my previous message.

In sum, what you say is that the armies will use the depots by default, whereas it seems to me that they should forage by default and only use the depots for units that are over the forage limit. But at the present time, this has to be managed by hand at a severe cost in time when there are many units, and can lead to disastrous mistakes such as forgetting units placed in garrisons to avoid paying for their food.

Or maybe this could be added as an option, for those who don't believe that it is realistic for units to forage by default.[:'(]

Henri

Henri

[dude]

Yes you are correct, if you are going to go to that level you must micro-manage it. I generally don't like the forage results and am willing to pay the upkeep costs.  I usually save up enough money before a major war so I'll have enough money to pay for depots and troops outside of my country.  Besides with the large number of forces that are sometimes stacked together in potentially a low forage area I don't like the losses. 
 
This is partly because of my style of play... I set the draft pool to 16 months for the best morale draftees and I limit the draft size (this get to be expensive if it’s too large).  So I don’t have a lot of troops to replace foraging losses.  I prefer to limit the size of my armies to the size of the upkeep I can afford.  So it doesn’t take much micro-management on my part either… [:)]
 
I know from the mistakes I've made I'd rather have it default to use the depot than using forage... I'd rather lose the money then the troops by accident.  But options are always nice.

[Mike Parker]

I wasn't even aware you could set a unit to forage manually.
 
I agree if you can manually set it so some units forage and others use the depot then the behavior should be by default to forage and use the depot.