In practicality there was also another solution in the ancient world. If you're going conquering you're probably going somewhere with people to conquer. Those people probably have food. Just take theirs.

The underlying blog post goes into details on that, too. It is covered in "foraging" https://acoup.blog/2022/08/12/collections-logistics-how-did-...

It's called foraging, it's what practically everyone did. It's a nasty business and you can't do it to the same people twice, because it typically involved killing and enslaving that people.

https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-...

>> "Just take theirs"

That "Just" word is carrying a very heavy load . . .

(The people whose food you are planning to forage will be objecting, likely with weapons)

More likely they are fleeing since they are largely unarmed peasants, who can’t stand up to trained, armed, and armored soldiers.

And when they flee they take some of their food supplies with them and hide the rest. Foraging army might be able to find some of it, but rarely all. Also, if you are in enemy territory it is entirely possible to completely miss some remote village. It's not like they have a satellite map.

>>And when they flee they take some of their food supplies with them and hide the rest

YUP!

And beyond that, what they can't take or hide, they may very well burn to slow down the advance

Just because you have advance spies and they report existing supplies, you just cannot count on having those available when the full infantry arrives.

Burning cropland behind retreating troops is the tactic used to deal with "just taking theirs".

as long as you are near the shore-line, I can see that working. Though you might also need to be near a port; loading/offloading is less efficient without infrastructure.

However, there may be other uses for the port, which suggests most of the good ports will have cities built around them.

So yes, as long as you constrain your march to the area around friendly cities, boats work great

> as long as you are near the shore-line

Look at Bronze / early Iron age Mediterranean empires. They stuck to the shorelines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Carthage#/media/File:C...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Greek_Co...

They started moving inroad after they started making roads.

You don't really need much infrastructure when you don't use containers for your boats.

The blog posts by Devereaux (acoup blog) that spurred this on, are specifically about over-land logistics. Boats, of course, avoid this problem entirely -- assuming all of your targets are coastal or by rivers!