Currently, if your troops start starving due to being in a starving region, a few of them will get wounded. Most of these wounds will heal by the next turn. If you have a healer with you, you might take one or two casualties per turn at most, from sitting in a starving region for days.
This doesn't make sense. A healer should not be any help against starvation. A unit sitting in a starving region for a week should take significant casualties.
I propose a new status for troops: "starving". This status will be similar to the wounded status, but not completely.
How they are different:
1. Wounds are only inflicted during battles, or special events like "battling peasants when trying to arrest a priest" or "ambushed while hunting". Starvation is only caused by being in a starving region. So if this feature were to be implemented, each time one of your troops would get wounded due to being in a starving region, he would become "starving" instead.
2. Healers can help your troops in recovering from the "wounded" status instead of dying, but is no help against the "starving" status.
3. Each wounded troop has a chance of recovering each turn, healer or no healer. However, starving troops will NOT recover if the unit remains in a starving region. If you stay in a starving region for a long time, expect a large percentage of your troops to be starving.
4. For realism, the "starving" status may kill troops slower than the "wounded" status. (Or is just less likely to kill each turn.)
How they are similar:
1. Just like wounded troops, starving troops do not participate in battles. Starving troops are not just hungry. They are too famished to walk, much less pick up their weapons and fight.
2. Just like wounded troops, many starving troops will slow down your travel, especially if you do not have carts with you.
3. Just like the "wounded" status, there are two ways to exit the "starving" status. Dying is one way. The other way is recovering normally, which will only happen if the unit is in a region that is not starving. In other words, if the unit is in a region that is not starving, then the starving troops will start recovering normally, just like wounded troops. A few may still die on you though, again, just like wounded troops.
What do you guys think?
Food for thought: Should these statuses stack? I'm thinking no. For simplicity's sake, maybe a wounded troop just dies if he starts starving as well. That sounds realistic to me. Also, we might want to add more fun statuses in the future. (Maybe SF units that can poison enemy troops?) Figuring out the effects of different combinations of statuses would just make it overly complicated for a game. I say if your troop is unfortunate enough to pick up more than one status, he's just dead.
