Hi everyone if there's something I saw while playing is how food appears to be less important in Endless Space 2. And in fact it's not, : food is useful to fill planets faster, to maintain high pops and to gain manpower. In the late game you can also convert a percentage into another ressource like industry or dust if I remember correctly.


However, for me, food never seems to be a priority, I never have to build around food like I have to do with science, industry or dust. 


- One of the reasons is the limited capacities of planets compared to Endless Legend where playing around food was a viable strategy. 


- Another reason appears to be that there is no "mid-game" with food, once you researched the first techs and have a lvl 2 system, you can just play with the spacioport and send excessive pop where you want.


Of course the limited pop on system is a part of the Endless Space experience but I would suggest to make few things :

- Commit players with food : 

     - Oblige them to spend food (or rather manpower since food isn't stored) to buy things, for example to level up          heroes or system levels.


- Ensure food as a supportive ressource to make your empire grow faster and stronger : 

     - Spend food to create stockpiles for industry/food/science usable in other systems.

     - A possibility to half food productions to boost Industry/science/dust/influence production (maybe a technology?).


- Add mid-game technologies to find other use to food, like the idea just above, better manpower generation, new population slots (earlier in the tech tree), synergy with influence? (like convertion of %food into influence).


- And finally something more related to the politic affinities, since ecology has a huge play on approval and is the opposite of industry, maybe add approval debuff on heavy industry to make ecology and approval a bit more important and rushing to industry a bit less obvious.


Sorry for the big text and the ideas a bit scattered, of course a lot of what i've said isn't easily doable or that necessary but it's just to share my feeling with food, seeing the unexploited potential of this ressource. Have a good day! :D