Food production | Key elements of gameplay Stronghold: Crusader II Guide

The food rations window also shows the amount of food you produce.

Food is divided into four primary types - Apples, Cheese, Meat and Bread. Each of those buildings require different buildings to manufacture (Bread requires a group of them). Because of the importance of this resource, it's extremely important to make sure that you have a sufficient food production chain set up.

Contrary to the previous installments of the game, buildings from this group can only be built on fertile grounds, i.e. oasis. As you will soon notice, there's always not enough space in oases, which forces you to make some difficult choices: do you want to stuff your buildings close to one another and risk an uncontrollable fire, or set them apart from one another but waste the precious space.

In case of three out of four food types - apples, cheese and meat - you will only need a single building for each of them to manufacture them. Those are Apple Orchard, Dairy Farm and Pig / Sheep Farm (depending on your side). After building any of those buildings you will only have to wait a set amount of time and your peasants will automatically start producing the appropriate resources and will transport them to your Granary.

It's a different matter with bread - to bake it, you will need Wheat Farms, Mills to convert wheat into flour, and Bakeries, which in turn make the final product, bread, out of the flour. It's the most expensive solution, but it awards you with the biggest food inflow. Fortunately, there's no difference in quality between food types, as each and every one of them has the same impact on your peasants.

At the very beginning of the mission it's worth to build a couple of Apple Orchards (the closer to the Granary the better, as it will decrease the delivery time) and 1-2 Dairy Farm and Pig / Sheep Farms. You won't be able to start up food production from scratch, as it requires hundreds of pieces of wood to build the required buildings. There's an exception to this rule - if you start a mission (skirmish or a multiplayer one most probably) with thousands of gold coins, you can simply buy the wood on the market to begin bread production.

A proper food production level is crucial in achieving success, as it has the second highest influence on your popularity (taxes being the most influential). In 'late game' (when your population exceeds 100), you shouldn't worry about making meat, cheese and apples anymore - you won't be able to keep up with the consumption, and those goods can be bought on the market to get the food diversity bonus. Instead, you should focus on bread production.

• Each Mill will be able to support several Wheat Farms and will prevent a situation in which you have a huge surplus of wheat in the Stockpile while lacking any flour.
• You can build 3 to 4 Bakeries for every Wheat Farm you have, because those buildings deliver 4 pieces of wheat a time.