Hi,

I will try to evaluate food looking at current game design and current elements. Lest see what is food, the sources and what purpose it has:

Uses:

- Food is needed to keep population and population gain on empire systems.

- Each system has a 300 food treshold (Volyani as exception has 1200), when food stock reaches the threshold, food stock is reset and one population is gained. The threshold never changes.

- There's a 10% food conversion to manpower by default, can be raised with laws and buildings.

- On planet colonization effort, a source system will lost 40% of this food production (pure production, not counting food upkeep) and will create a logistics ship every two turns that will carry that cuantity to the target planet to be colonized.

- Late game, there's a building that convert excess food on maxed pop systems into industry. This building need a Era 5 research to be built.

- In the cononization process, colony has a +5 food and the food value of one pop worth for the colonized planet.

Sources:

- Any colonized planet has a base value of +40 food.

- Food gained per population on planets has a base range from 8 (fertile planets and temperate planets) to zero (some sterile and gass planets) depending on planet type.

- There are some laws that affect food, also some population has food values as default gains or special planet type gains.

- Some hero skills can also rise food in many ways (percentage, planet/planet type based, static numbers based on hero level...).

- Food upkeep from population has a complex formula that is POWER((POP x 300), 1.25) / 300 * 1.25. As reference food consumption per population is slowly more demanding, from 5 food/pop at 1 pop to 13 food/pop at 40 pop.

- You get a percentage boost in food of 10% with a happy system, and 25% on ecstatic.

- There are also luxuries focused on food: +4 food/pop, +100 food and +50% food per system level.

- You can get food from lots of buildings (will not detail it further, there a full building analysis at: Rating the resource buildings)

- Also there are some food related traits in factions and minor factions.

- There are food-focused planet specializations, with extra food in fertile planets.

Some thoughts and research:

- Food is largely in overkill status if you invest a little bit on it, making any food building past Era 2 ones largely useless until you combo it with the food to industry conversion (and that is near endgame). I will try to demonstrate it using averages and some spreadsheet calculations:

As we can see, with the three non-unique Era1/2 food buildings and the max approval is ALL you need to cover any food demand by population on any system no matter how high is the population. Those are all average calculations, a system with all sterile planets could suffer from food needs but I also evaluated it with only four of the ten possible sources of food in the game.

- Current migration system is wonky at best. No matter how many food generation you have, any system feeding two new colonizations OR only one colonization with the food boost from ships will drain 80% of all the food generation from that planet, going into negative values nearly all the time. Also you can ship food for the thousands to new colonies mod to late game, going into overkill once the first ship lands.

What we are missing:

- Due to food resource status, most of the food sources are usually evaluated as poor, and will have a very low priority, if any consideration, in strategic choices.

- Manpower is easily gamed just with a building or a law.

- Food planet specialization is a waste nearly all the time, you will usually have more than enough food in fertile planets with little support. Could be of some marginal use in all-sterile systems, no benefit of the fertile boost, and only if you don't have some extra food sources.

- Food is not an issue once you cover the basics (Era I/II buildings + approval), so there are less strategy choices in the game at that moment.

Possible tweaks to make food interesting in all the gameplay:

- Nerf that "Epigenetic crop seeding" building a little. There's no building with such a scalable neat resource increase in all Era 2 resource buildings.

- Make the formula just more demanding. Just raising the power value from 1.25 to 1.3 would change a the upkeep per pop from 13 to 21 at 40 pop mark.

- Re-evaluate and balance any damn food building past Era 2 ones. Current ones give similar or less benefit than lower tier versions.

- Change the food migration formula for new colonizations, maybe calculating it from the food net increase instead of the food growth ignoring upkeep, or lowering the percentage sent dramatically, so the action of increasing food (Freehold fanfare) sent has any value.

- Adding a food cap on automated food ships sent to new colonies, maybe 150 food (300 food with the food boost action), so doesn't exceed the 300 food needed to rise the colony status once a ship arrives (I would lower it even more).

I am very glad to get some numbers on this, but I cannot seem to parse that consumption formula at all. In addition, the fact that the food stock threshold never increases irks me, as it would seem to me that if the game is going to make us care about increasing our food enough to go for era 5 technologies, our food needs should increase over time as well much like the cost of better Technologies, the increasing costs of Laws as our population grows, the inflation of Dust prices as we make money, etc. If we want more food to provide better returns in the late game, the amount of food required to increase population should become more demanding.

But in regards to your formula, I have no idea what to do with POWER nor what the comma in the middle refers to except to multiply; as a result, whatever number I feed into POP just gives me back that same number in the end. Could you provide a filled-out example of that formula for someone completely mathematically illiterate like myself?

For that matter I have absolutely no idea what I am looking at in that graph. "Pop food colony base" makes no sense as it should just be 40 for every row in the column, shouldn't it? And what is "Previous minus upkeep" supposed to be showing us? Previous what, exactly?

EDIT: I believe I understand now, the "previous" is the column to the left, showing the results of that Food improvement setup once population food consumption is accounted for. I still don't understand where exactly the increases to Pop food colony base are coming from. Shouldn't "Average planet food" be a flat, unchanging number, since it's food coming from the planet and not the population? Or is that how much food the population produces on average?

That aspect is very confusing coming from Endless Legend, where we had our tiles to account for before the inclusion of population bonuses, and I have never seen any instruction in this game to tell me that Planets functioned otherwise.