I will add my feedback with RiftBorn. It's pretty hard to fight natural grow of other populations, and I allways have to only build RiftBorn pop to be sure there will be a part of them at the end on the system.

If you haven't done already please report it in the bug section.
I haven't seen it reported so I expect developers are not aware of it.

Ha, yea I noticed that last night. Also, I'm not sure if it's a bug or not, but the food converted to industry isn't  converted to dust or science when you have 3D Printing or the Science conversion going. I hope it's a bug, and that it gets fixed.

You have the same technology here also.
Just need to research it like in ES1

I really liked in ES 1 how excess food contributed to industry when you hit the pop cap. Let's make food great again.

Wow, I just read the link, the next version released is the actual "release"?   Are they not going to let us beta test the final release first?

I would like to see Food Production as the limit of population that a planet can sustain.

Then population growth would be a separate factor that could be different for each race.

And your population grows only to a level that the planet / system is able to feed.

I don't see a way to implement it in this game but it would be a nice solution.

StarCleric wrote:

So that's the solution, just take food out of the game entirely .   

Are we a post scarcity space empire now? It's an unusual request but if food doesn't have much to contribute in terms of options or strats it may not be important for the game.

The main purpose of extreme food in older 4x is it determined how high of a population your big cities can get. Jumbo cities got specialists that could produce extra industry/science/money without consuming map space. So in that way food could be indirectly transformed into useful resources.

This game doesn't have unlimited pop caps. Once a planet tops off that's it, and planets are pretty easy to top off. There's no point in expanding your food supply at max population. 

Perhaps food should be a resource more rigorously used by military forces? They say an army marches on its stomach, after all. On a simple scale it means some kind of soft cap on food demanding assets like marines or colony ships. In a more complex system it could mean long distance food logistics and harsh limits on cramming too many food hungry forces in a system.

Ok, I just finished a game no food buildings researched or built.  Now I lost (via points at turn 200), but was in second place.  It was actually fun and challenging.  My pop grew slow enough that I really had to think about where to colonize; where to migrate; and what pop types to use.  Also had to finally worry about manpower.  In addition, due to lower pop count, my money was also a bit lower, so I had to watch what I spent on (I actually went bankrupt because I just built every building at every system).

So that's the solution, just take food out of the game entirely .  

Elphealer wrote:

I will add my feedback with RiftBorn. It's pretty hard to fight natural grow of other populations, and I allways have to only build RiftBorn pop to be sure there will be a part of them at the end on the system.

Agreed, especially since the manufacturing cost per Riftborn increases with total population while the food cost per population doesn't.

Here's a nifty trick, though: pops left in the spaceport don't reproduce. So if you have 3 or less organic pops in a Level 2+ system, just stuff them all into the spaceport until you build enough Riftborn. Also, abuse the Chain Gang pop->manpower conversion. It's about the only way to keep pace with their growth.

I wonder if a "more you get pop, more the pop cost food" mechanic should be added to the whole empire in addition of each systems, in order to nerf a little bit the pop travel via space port. This also look very easy to have one planet that produce insane food and pop and send them to all your hard to populate planets. :S

MikeLemmer wrote:

I've griped about the food equations a lot, but here's some math from me digging into the equations to see what makes them tick.

...

My off-the-cuff suggestion is to reduce the Colony Base food bonus to 25-30 and increase the consumption per populace to 4-5.

30 base food would be a great value instead of 40, and maybe double de population food consumption with the current formula (so starts at 2 food per pop and gets about 4 food per pop at 18 pop).

I find it not so easy to balance, as manpower needs food (tough you have a FREE law to increase the food sent to manpower anyways..), and new colonies demand more and more food as you own more systems.

But pretty much aligned with nearly everything said here, not only it makes a pain to micro-manage population transfer between systems (some way to halt/resume population growth manually would be of great aid), also goes all the other way around in the growth concept, where usually each new pop needs more food than the previous. Here most of the time as you get more pop, you are able to to get it faster.

One day, it would be cool to do what Galactic Civilizations III is doing now - turning the Food production way down, but making Food a resource that can be sent to other planets. Doing so allows for "agriculture worlds" (Systems, in ES case) to maintain several other colonies. Slows down the early game, while making the late game less of a slog.

I've griped about the food equations a lot, but here's some math from me digging into the equations to see what makes them tick.

Consumption accounts for partial populations: Rather than consumption jumping when a new population is born, it increases gradually as the population's grown. While this means you won't (normally) fluctuate between growing and immediately starving, it also makes it harder to gauge exactly how much food a certain population consumes. I've resorted to checking the consumption of fully-populated systems to get around this.

No apparent differences between difficulty levels: 3 populace consume the same food in both Sandbox and Endless difficulties.

No apparent differences between races: 3 Lumeris populace consume the same food as 3 UE populace.

Consumption seems to increase by some exponential formula rather than each populace consuming X food: Most of my problems researching this came from this aspect. It's hard to reverse-engineer the formula used from numbers like this:

What I can determine from this is somewhere around the 7-population mark, the consumption-increase-per-populace passes 2 food per populace, and around the 14-population it rises higher than 2 food per populace total. Given that most systems won't be able to hold 14+ population until the midgame, I feel safe going with 2-food-consumed-per-populace as a benchmark.

The Colony Base can support 18 population by itself: The colony base produces 40 Food independent of any gather on the planets. Judging by the table above, that means it can keep 3 small planets' worth of population from starving by itself. They'll (barely) grow, but they won't starve.

Most non-sterile planets produce 2 food per populace: Even supposedly harsh planets like Snow biomes will still have growth steadily increase until the 7-population mark, and maintain steady growth until about the 18-population mark, without any additional +Food improvements.

A single fertile world guarantees constant growth: A 5-population world that produces 6 Food per population will maintain a steady rate of +1 population per 7.5 turns up to 15 population, even without any Improvements. A larger fertile world will single-handedly take care of growth in most systems.

End Result: Population growth is usually explosive without any effort by the player. Perhaps the extra Food% to Manpower techs are meant to help curb it, but without them your people procreate like rabbits. I personally avoid Food improvements, instead focusing on the Happiness improvements I need to keep my overpopulated citizens happy or micromanaging populations so there's still room for my immigrants when they arrive. This seems... wrong in a game about colonizing space.

My off-the-cuff suggestion is to reduce the Colony Base food bonus to 25-30 and increase the consumption per populace to 4-5.

SuperMarloWorld wrote:

• As you said, food is fast out of control and snowballing. In late game, you can colonize planets that give great FDSI on pop with good improvements (mostly hot planets with industry : AI Labor and hazardous mining facility) , but contain no food (ash, snow, lava, etc.). But you don't need to build a lot of food improvements to fill thoses planets. I have the feeling that you need half of the food imporvements avaibles in the game to get a super food production. 

The new population export mechanic actually exasperates this. There's nothing (except travel time) stopping you from setting up a single central system as your breadbasket that can grow 1-2 pop a turn and then just exporting them all to your newest system. As long as they're Content, the Colony Base can feed 18 of them, so there isn't much reason to improve food production outside of the breadbasket system.

StarCleric wrote:

Don't get too depressed Mike.  It's an Alpha, so plenty of time for balance and tweaks for the Devs.

Is it still really Alpha, though? Judging by their Update schedule here, their next update will be Release. I was fine with waiting for them to tweak it when they were still on Update 1, but now I'm getting nervous whether they'll change anything before v1.0.

After some playtime on the Vodyani, they're the only race I really worry about food buildings for, and that's because they have half the growth rate & require 1200 food to grow a single pop. Even then, after about 3-4 pop it starts exploding.

The de-emphasis on food improvements is rather depressing, especially since it means numerous techs (and the main focus of the Environmentalist party) are nearly useless.

I'm on my second game; on my third, I'm going to try never build a food building.

 I tend to skip all the food tech. Every planet seems to grow quickly without it.

Definitely in agreement, population growth is radically out of control. Every turn I have pop growth in several different systems and I never spend a single tech or improvement on food.  That seems really broken.  On anything other than a breadbasket type world, we should have to invest to get decent growth.  I seem to average about 4 turns per pop per system, that seems extremely fast.  It might be partly due to how happiness mechanics work.  It doesn't seem very hard to have ecstatic population through all of the early-mid game.

While toning down population growth may be in the cards, how about giving more options for food based strategies. I hear slave labor is pretty expensive on the populace but can do wonders. Maybe it's time to take a page from the Druuge and put some of those excess meat wagons in the furnace? A little mass blood sacrifice might also grant favor from a dark force. It's a big universe, you never know.

Pop increase definitely needs to be turned down. Right now, I find myself not being able to properly use space ports because all of my planets are full, and if I use the pop to manpower option, a new pop has replaced them in two turns

I have personally noticed that ES2 pop mechanics are far to spam heavy. Compunded with the fact that colony ships no longer consume population, i find it is too easy to grow a system. Frankly i think its too easy to gain dust as well.

I could not agree more.  In EL and ES1, I treasured each pop increase, and could not wait to redistribute the new pop.  In this current stage of the Alpha, I feel like I'm "drowning" in pop by doing nothing at all towards growth.

And this carries over to manpower also.  When playing around with planet invasions, I just could not run out of troops/tanks/plains no matter how often I invaded.  

And again this carries over to pop transferring.  You almost never need too, because planets almost grow faster than the time to transport more pop it.