All troops (including the hero) eat crops from the village's granary. Crop management is key to preventing starvation.
Crop is also needed by the buildings of the village (the village population). While buildings do not suffer if you don't have enough crop, lacking production limit what you can build. See more about this in the separate article on the problems with crop.
When there is not enough crop in the granary and the village produces less than what is needed, troops will start to starve.
For the process of starvation, troops are divided into four groups. First to starve are the troops of the first group. When they are all gone, the troops from the next group starve. The process continues until there are no troops left or the village has enough crop to support them.
- Reinforcements from other players starve first
- The players own reinforcing troops
- Troops in their home village starve next
- Troops on the way, troops being forwarded, troops in traps starve last
Troops that are killed by starvation add the crop cost that it took to train the troop to the village. This can be eaten by other troops. For example, a Legionnaire would add 30 crop on death, a Trebuchet would add 90 crop on death.
But what's the order of starvation within each of those 4 groups?
Within each group, an army (for this purpose, an army is one row of units as you see in Rally Point, so e.g. one particular reinforcement batch, one particular outgoing attack, etc.) with the most troops (by amount) starves first. In case of tie, the armies take turns to starve (one unit by one unit).
Within a troop row, the troop with the highest number of troops (by amount) starve first.
In case of a tie, they starve from left to right (e.g. phalanx before swordsmen).
For example:
There is a village which has a big deficit of crop. It is reinforced by armies from 2 different villages.
Army A from one village with 6k clubs, 3k horses, 1k catapults.
Army B from another village, with 1k clubs, 8k horses.
So there are 10k troops in army A and 9k troops in army B.
First will starve 1k troops in army A. It will be 1k clubs, since they are the most numerous unit type in that group.
Then troops from both armies will have 9k units.
Then they will start to take turns in the starvation, army A will lose 2k clubs and army B 2k horses.
Army A now has 3k clubs, 3k horses, 1k catapults
Army B has 1k clubs, 6k horses.
Now the army A will be losing clubs and horses, while army B will keep losing horses, until army A has 1k clubs, 1k horses, 1k catapults and army B has 1k clubs and 1k horses.
Now the army A will be losing clubs, horses and catapults, until it only has 2k units in total.
At this point all armies will be losing all types of units, taking turns, one by one, for as long as the village will still not have enough crop to supply them.
Note: this example assumes that even though starving units are adding some crop to the granary, it's not enough to supply the rest of the army and the starvation continues.
The same logic also applies to all 4 of the groups, not only for reinforcements.
If you have two outgoing attacks, and it's their turn to starve, the same logic is applied to them to determine which unit of which attack starves first.
So, an outgoing attack and some troops of yours sitting in traps might take turns starving. If you have two outgoing attacks from the same village, both will be group 4, but the same logic as with "reinforcements from other players" is applied to determine which starves first.
Note: Oasis Starvation
Troops in an occupied oasis are counted like they would be stationed in the village itself. This means, if there are reinforcements in the oasis from the village itself, they starve with other troops in group 3 (troops in their home village), and not with the reinforcements.
Starvation in the capital with evasion active
If you have troop evasion active and the hero is set to hide:
The troops evade leaving the village. However, the hero hides within the village, which means that the hero can be the only troop in the village and therefore starve first, if there's not enough crop.
The hero’s 6 crop production is not reserved for the hero, it is added to the village pool which is why the hero can still die.
To prevent this, you could disable hero evasion - the hero will then stay with the troops. If the troops evade, the hero will evade with them.