MikeLemmer wrote:

• Excess Food -> More Population + Higher Happiness -> Increased Manpower

Or perhaps more realistically:

Excess Food -> Fatter Population + Higher Happiness -> Reduced Industry

Got to say that I do not really agree here. 

Getting more and more population should always mean that you get a penalty to happiness... which ultimately have to be solved by either policy or technology. 

It would be interesting to have options to say a system should no longer grow, so you can control growth. Perhaps limit it to certain political parties or government types. 

As for the "food groups" thing. What you are describing is effectively just a sector based system. While I am in favor of that, then that has more to do to avoid the "silly" over colonization penalty (I know why it is there, but it is not a good solution to that problem). 

I would rather like to see a system where you could decide if you want growth... also as population increase, as well as infrastructure, available food production areas should diminish. IE the more stuff you build, and the more people you get, the less food you will have available for production. 

Also we do have planetary specializations... which are about the only thing that is unique to planets. As well as system specializations. These two combined with some ties to the political system could put in a system so you have to be more careful about how you manage your system. 

For example if you set a planet to be food specialized it could have a modifier that would reduce the max pop by X depending on size. Also it would reduce all other FIDS on the planet. That way you would have to balance your systems way more. 

Ofc. via trade it should be possible to have food supply trains, so you can effectively create food systems that feed most of your other systems. Such a system would make war and other strategic aspects a lot more interesting. 

Definitely agree that food is way too plentiful right now.  I've yet to reach a situation where a system actually needed food improvements (also most of those improvements are pretty weak).

Your Food Groups idea is interesting.  Although keeping track of your food groups visually might be a bit challenging to get up to Amplitude standards.