After looking over Runewars online I ordered it yesterday and I can't wait until it arrives. But I have a question about the undead faction in this game.

Do the undead really need food as a resource? Undead don't eat normal food, so why would you loose units to food shortage in the winter.

I'm just saying.

The undead food dial represents regular food for the dark knights and necromancers, brains for the reanimates, and extra tendons for the skeletons (for both their own limbs and their bow strings).

zombies eat brains. Brains come from peasants. Peasants eat food.

I'm sure you could think of a myriad reasons to justify the food bit. Perhaps even the reanimated skeletons in the Terrinoth world have to eat or re-die.

But whatever flavor you add to it, the main reason is "balance" - if the Undead didn't have to worry about food, it really would be a huge advantage for them, and they are already a powerful faction.

I know its in there for game balance and all that. I was just seeing if others thought of it like I did.

Speculating on the source of the Undead food gives us at least 5 minutes of jokes each game. It's an undocumented feature!

TK

Believe it or not this question has been asked before.

My personal favourite response was that the food dial represented fields of various plants or herds of animals whose parts were used as spell components to maintain the enchantments that animate the undead armies. Without this "food" the undead would simply become corpses after a time and die. And of course, a little real food for the few living units among them. I like the idea of skeletons conquering a hex and ripping up all the corn crops to plant fields of wolfsbane instead.

The real answer, of course, is game balance. All factions must manage three resources, X, Y and Z. Allowing one faction a free pass on X would either unbalance the game or else make things much more complicated than they really need to be. Not to mention making the hexes that provide X less useful to the undead than anyone else. Tell yourself whatever you need to in order to sleep at night, but yes the undead need to manage their food resources.

Maybe they are the kind of undead that eat.

And even if they aren't, I see exactly two types of undeads: archers and, well, cannon fodder. There is no reason to assume that the Necromancers roam the land and kill and then reanimate every peasant, merchant and cleric they find just to turn their whole land into "undead". ^^

Stefan said:

I agree.

If they did that would make it practically impossible for the other three races to reclaim territory lost to the undead. Even if their armies could force out the undead occupation, there'd be no standing population to work the fields, mine the ore or jack the lumber! The living factions wouldn't be able to repopulate quickly enough to make use of the lost resources in the relatively short time span of the game.

That, of course, raises the question of why the undead aren't doing exactly that. I'm going to go with "because they're evil and if they killed all the peasants then they wouldn't have anyone to be evil to. " I enjoy applying logic to boardgames as an intellectual exercise, but man, there are definitely limits...

I figured it was to support the lavish lifestyle of the faction leaders.