2 fish, a red wine, a high quality meat... "Your people are starving." I cook it all for the morning, evening, and night. "Your people are starving." So, how do you feed them? The game says" have food in inventory", but that is apparently a lie. And even then, you make like 5 coins every time you work as a scribe and the food vanishes faster than you can buy it. I feel like the entire food structure is highly broken and needs to be removed or completely overhauled.
You need to have low/medium/high quality food in your inventory. Each person in your villa (you, Livia, servants, tutors, bulls...) eats 2 food items every day (if they haven't eaten day before, it's more). This can grow up very fast, if you don't have a good food management and you bring a lot of people in. You need to upgrade your kitchen, to cook food faster. Always have household servant or Cornelia to cook food for you. You can have farms to grow food, instead of buying it. The food is basically a limiter to how many people you can support in your house. It is a management game, after all.
Early game strategy is to have 1-2 servants in training (optimally one that can help with food, like household or farm servant) and develop farms as soon as possible. Later game strategy is to have 4-6 farms, farm servant to work on them, cook to cook food and other 2-3 servants in training with tutors.
Also, you need to raise in ranks, before bringing more people in. You cannot support a large household as a scribe. You need to be at least a quaestor.
You... you don't make enough money to afford that early on. I'm still in the tutorial with the training of the first female. The scribe job is my only available source of currency at around $3 a job for a total of $12 a day. By your calculations I would require 6 food a day to feed me, the slave, and the starter NPC that says she helps with training. That would cost more than I can make each day to afford the ingredients. Especially considering if I had the ingredients I couldn't afford to waste the time cooking them because I'd not make the money to buy more. On top of that, the very first 'quest' you have us get is one to purchase the most expensive food item. You probably should make a note in the quest to save this for later, as I killed my funds buying one piece because the hunger system is never even mentioned in the tutorial until you get a pop-up that people are starving. You DEFINITELY need to have a mention of the hunger system; preferably even before the purchase of the slave. It would have made me start with a cheaper slave to pool my starter funds better for food.
I'll check back on this game in a few months. Currently, I uninstalled it as it just seems like, in its current state, it will be a stressful nightmare of a highly unfair and unbalanced management game.
As a scriba, you earn 6-7 denarii per period. Already cooked food cost $18 for 6 portions. So to buy finished food, you have to work for at least 3 periods out of 4. If you buy grain and cook it, it costs $10 for 6 portions. So you need to work only 2 periods, but it has to been cooked. However, you can offset this by utilizing your servants. Household servant can cook food for the entire villa. Work servant can earn small income at the warehouse ($12-$16 per day). Pit fighter can earn decent income if you bet on her and she wins (up to $40 per day, but it is very hard). Brothel servant can earn more than work servant, but needs libido training first. If you have a decent brothel servant, you don't have to work at all, she will cover all expenses ($20-$24 per day). If you complete a first quest for Livia, you will get a first farm basically for free, which will help with food too. You also have some food and money at the start.
This is to simulate the hard beginning of any business. It is very well doable in many ways, but you have to plan. I have tested it many times and I was able to always start the business with these conditions.
Hunger system is mentioned in a kitchen tutorial, that pops up when you first enter kitchen. It also describes how food works.
That last part is exactly the issue. I never walked to the kitchen. Why would I have any need to if I am unaware of there being a hunger system and the tutorial thus far only tells me about working at my office and training the slave? You buy the slave, the tutorial says take her home. Then, you talk to your servant who says she can help train the slave but never has a command to do so (and whenever the slave is being trained there is a different NPC doing it in her room and the one we are discussing now is wandering the house at the same time). That same NPC also teaches you about the scribe job and then that is it, at that point, you have a quest to buy five high quality meat and a red wine for her, and then the bottom of the screen says to train and sell your slave. So, the typical player is going to focus on the training of the slave and the acquisition of the meat and wine as nothing says to go explore the house for more tutorials or anything about the food system.
Also, if I'm supposed to get paid 6 or 7 rather than 3 each time I do the scribe job, I wasn't getting it. I got at most 5 and only twice. The rest of the times it was giving me 3. Be it a glitch or whatever, IDK, but I stand by my statement. I'd take a screenshot, but as I said I uninstalled already. Best of luck on the game, though. Sincerely. The concept seems really good and I hope it goes well for you.