Quote Originally Posted by BBQ_Sauce View Post
Also prevents anyone from building a big enough army to attack anyone that has full forts

Probably the biggest army you could hold in one city without NPC farming would be at max a 200k negative upkeep. With 10 cities, you probably wouldn't even have enough food to consolidate the whole thing and send it out as one unit.

And then you'd be selling all your lumber and iron to pay for food and you wouldn't be able to build any more troops.
I build a good 28k-30k Archers a day, in one city, and I never 'farm' but one NPC a day for food. I attack them for experience, but I only raid one lvl 10 NPC.
I make over 1 mil lumber an hour, buy what iron I need, and then use the rest of my excess lumber-money to buy food. I have over 2mil/hour upkeep. I do fine.