The Appian Way

Distribution

Arguably the toughest mission in the whole of the Caesar III career is Lugdunum. The main reason for this is that it is the first city where distributing food and goods is a serious problem. I have recently replayed Lugdunum a couple of times, with the twin aims of maximising Prosperity and the number of houses at or above Grand Insulae. My two most successful attempts can be seen in the Downloads section. However, these attempts reminded me once more just how much of a challenge distributing food and goods can be, so I thought a few tips might come in handy. Here goes...

The source of a great deal of distribution problems comes from those troublesome Market Ladies. In fact, they cause so much trouble that I have devoted an entire page to explaining their multifarious predilections. The most important messages from that page are to keep supplies of everything your markets will need close at hand, and to make sure you have enough markets for your housing. Hopefully, by the time you've finished reading this, you'll have a better idea how to!

Food Distribution

In order to successfully feed your population, you need to be producing enough food for them. Now you could rely on your Chief Advisor to tell you whether or not you are, but that is not always reliable. The Chief Advisor reports food production as the amount of food entering granaries in a given month. Fluctuation can occur in this number from one month to the next, especially if some of your granaries are full. A much more reliable method is to calculate how much food you are producing, and then work out how many people you can feed with it. Full details of these calculations are included in my article on Feeding Folks, but the important numbers are summarised below:

¹Wheat farms in Central and Desert provinces (but NOT Northern provinces) produce twice as much food as any other farm.
²The exact amount of food produced by a fishing wharf varies with the distance to the fishing ground from the wharf. In very favourable circumstances you can feed over 600 people with a single wharf, and obviously, in very unfavourable circumstances, 150 may be nearer the mark. Nevertheless, 300 is a good rule-of-thumb.

You should bear in mind that the numbers quoted (except for wharfs) represent the absolute maximum number of people you can feed with these buildings. It's often worth factoring in a bit of margin for error.

Having produced the food, the next link in the distribution chain is the granary. In order to maximise the productivity of your food sources, you need to build granaries close by (this is particularly important with wharves). However, as discussed on the Market Ladies page, you also need to keep supplies of food close to your main housing areas. On some maps it is possible to build large areas of housing near the food sources, while on others, the most obvious examples being Lugdunum and Sarmizgetusa, it clearly isn't. Where you cannot build next to your farms/wharves, then you need to employ granary special orders to move that food around. Set the granaries near your farms/wharves to 'accept' food, and the granaries near the housing to 'get' food. There must be a road connection between the 'accepting' and 'getting' granaries. If your housing is a very long way away from the food sources, then you may need to employ several 'getting' granaries. Under those circumstances, you should ensure that there is one 'accepting' granary near the food sources for every three 'getting' granaries (to avoid wasted trips by the granary cartpushers).

You will notice that I have made no mention of importing food. That is because it is seldom useful. 40 Cartloads of imported food will feed only 666 people, so importing food will not feed many of your hungry populace. Furthermore, the logistics of importing food are quite complex. You need to build at least one warehouse to accept the imported food. The warehouse cartpusher then delivers the food, one cartload at a time, to the nearest granary accepting that food type. It takes a horribly long time. The only career mission where you may want to import food is Tarsus, and only then to provide the variety necessary for your patrician housing.

The one thing I haven't yet mentioned is how to deal with multiple food types. The reason is that I try to avoid supplying multiple food types wherever possible. The main reason is one of efficiency: except where fishing is available, or in Northern provinces, feeding everyone wheat takes half as many farms, and hence employees. Distributing several food types also creates a lot of extra hassle with your market ladies, since they will not rest until they have exhaustive stocks of every available food type. In general, it is far more aggravation than it is worth to supply more than one food type.

The glaring exception to this rule is patrician housing. Then it really is worth your while. If you intend to build patrician housing, then I recommend that you build a disconnected township of patrician housing, with its own self-contained food supply. By disconnected I mean that there must be absolutely no road connection between this part of the city and the rest of the city. Although this will not be possible on every map, it will be achievable on the majority of career and custom maps. Disconnecting the patrician housing also allows you to limit the consumption of non-food items by only making them available to the upper classes (more on this below).

Goods Distribution

There are essentially two approaches to domestic goods distribution, both of which have their merits. But before I get into a discussion of such matters, I would like to present a little more game data. While food is consumed on a per person basis, non-food items are consumed on a per house basis. This means that 200 drunken patricians in a Luxury Palace consume as much pottery as 19 hard-working citizens in a Large Casa. Quite why that is the case is another matter... Furthermore, when a house is first supplied with a particular item, a certain amount of that item is 'lost'. In other words, it takes a lot more supplies to stock a house originally than it does to maintain that stock. It is therefore in your best interests to ensure that once a house is stocked with goods, it never runs out.

The following table summarises the consumption (per month) , and the necessary initial supply amounts, of non-food goods:

^*Palaces stock and consume twice as much wine as villas. This is the effect of them requiring access to two types of wine. They do not to be restocked with wine when they first evolve.

When we take this information, together with the fact that each workshop, be it pottery, furniture, oil, or wine, produces 4.8 cartloads of goods per year. Since each cartload is 100 units, that equates to enough goods for 20 houses (in the case of palaces and wine, enough for ten palaces). In order to minimise goods consumption, I try to ensure that all houses I supply goods to are evolved to at least large insulae, but this is not strictly necessary.

Now we move on to the two methods of supplying goods to housing. The first is to build localised industries near each of your housing areas, thus providing the necessary goods in situ. This approach only works well if the raw materials are available by import or in several places on the map. You can also use this approach if you are importing finished goods, but I would not recommend it.

The approach I tend to use is to have centralised industries producing goods, and warehouses 'getting' the relevant goods near all the housing areas. The advantage of this approach is that you can build the absolute minimum number of workshops necessary for your cities. It is also compatible with building disconnected cities, because warehouse cartpushers 'getting' goods do not need roads. In fact, they do their job better if there is no road connection between their warehouse and their destination, because they will cut across country, saving a great deal of time.

This website was created by Mark Snow a.k.a. Caesar Alan. Most of the information presented here was gleaned from a number of other websites. Where possible I have credited my sources. You are free to use any of the information here, provided you acknowledge your source!