Mb Vodyani and Riftborn could get a slightly different version of Drone Networks that'll give 10 manpower and 10 industry instead of food? And like have some other food improvements slightly altered? Like it was with Hissho.

mamarider wrote:

Mb Vodyani and Riftborn could get a slightly different version of Drone Networks that'll give 10 manpower and 10 industry instead of food? And like have some other food improvements slightly altered? Like it was with Hissho.

Without Drone Networks like 75% of your starts are basically automatic losses since you'll lose your first population to starvation before you ever build a drone network. Remove that and you'll never have any population until a third of the way through the game.

That being said we're probably getting passive essence -> manpower soon

IMHO the simplest fix for Vodyani would be to have gargantuan kick in for pops greater than 1. This will ensure that you will never lose your only pop no matter of the start, but you still have to grealtly emphasis food production before deciding to build a 2nd pop.

I don't like that change because then you end up with the wonderful "Pop grows then dies the following turn" spiral. A spiral I hate in general but which is exaggerated for gargantuan population.

There's a bunch of fixes depending on what you think the problem is exactly

1) The problem is pop growth requirements being unaffected by difficulty. Affect them by difficulty.

2) The problem is gargantuan population's negative being too strong. Change the negative i na way to make it less problematic (Population requires 2x the food to grow or population consumes double food).

3) The problem is Shipbound heavily reducing emphasis on food production. Solution is to decouple pop growth from food production (its based on essesnce anyway). Food can be repurposed to be useful in another way (Manpower, Happiness Bonus, etc)

4) The problem is population growth mechanics. Solution is to tweak growth mechanics to be more forgiving at low population and less fgorgiving at high population.

Honestly I'd combine 3+4.