New faction centered around food

So i have been following Amplitude games since i discovered Endless space after the Disharmony came out. Ever since, apart from rushing population, i felt that food is on the weak / underfocused side. That in combination with inspiration from other games led me to the idea of this faction.


Inspirations:
Conquest: Frontier Wars --> Mantis
Imperion --> Xen

In Conquest: Frontier Wars, a space RTS game, the Mantis are an extraterrestrial bug like life form that have a very unique way of building ships and buildings: they grow them. They use a ship called the weaver that builds/grows new buildings in orbits of planets. Similarly, in the shipyards the Mantis ship are grown. The Mantis used a lot of strikecraft on their ship, increasing their need for manpower. The Mantis are governed by a single individuum: the queen.

In Imperion, a never finished space themed browser game, the Xen are an alien life form that are based around raiding their neighbours. Their speciality lies in ship construction: Instead of manufacturing the whole ships, they produce a skeleton of the ship to which a bio-mass is attached. Then the ship grows, similarly to the Mantis. In addition, they use a function of metamorphosis. They are only ever to be able to produce a base form of ship, there called Zek. Multiple Zeks can then be morphed to other ships - the bigger the ship, the more Zeks needed. In addition, Ships can also be reverse engineered or devolved again to Zeks. So one could easily find that the enemy is too defense ship heavy and switch to more offense. The base building of the Xen is the brain. It is an organisational building that takes over all local governing actions.

Faction Idea:

Faction trait:

The new faction would not use production, similar to the Harmony with dust in ES1, Broken Lords in EL and the Riftborn in ES2 with food. Instead, all buildings and the base ship design (Zek) have a food cost. Because food is also needed to grow population, there should be a slider empire wide where one can focus between system growth or population growth - again similar to the slider the Harmony had in ES1.

Visual Affinity:

Because their ships are biological, they gain an innate 5% hull repair per battle phase and an additional 10% per turn. Also, they can use Zeks to morph into existing ships to transfer the Zek's health points into the target ship. However, they may not use dust to repair ships.

Colonizing functions similarly to most factions: The colonizer is spent on a planet and then takes time to grow. It can support food shipments. In order to develop the outpost to a colony though, dust is needed (similar to Keii from Hissho in ES2). The dust cost increases for every colonised system but also for overcolonisation (similar to Hissho from ES2).

Population:

The population would be good at producing food and manpower - food for the growth centered aspects and manpower due to their violent nature as well as the need to fill their ships. As such they would be Agriculturalists and have Bountiful Troops. As collection bonus they have increased militarist impact upon reaching 10 pop, +15% food upon reaching 25 pop and 20% increased troops damage upon reaching 50 pop. The political impact should be Ecological with Anti-Pacifist and Territorial.

Starting Set-up:

They start on a unique Steppes planet Chut with positive anomaly called Extreme Seasons: summer that provides +4 food and -2 science per pop for 7 turns then switches to Extreme Seasons: winter that provides +4 science and -2 food per pop after which it takes another 7 turns to switch to summer again. Their starting government is Autocracy because they are all subject to their queen.

Traits:

Growth Plan II: Due to depending on biology to grow, they are naturally gifted at growing food.

Feeble Warriors II: Their bug like bodies are quite squishy, suffering in troops' health

Patriots II: Their focus on swarming enemies allows them to store a bigger amount of manpower

Brilliant Strategists II: Because war has always been their metier, they have been able to overcome their physical weakness by adopting better attack strategies. Strength in numbers.

Planetary Landscaping: Due to their focus on food, they know the secrets of planetary landscaping already

Pirate Slayers: Adept at raiding, they gain more loot from pirates.

Social Chameleons: While they might appear friendly to some, it is only for their ultimate goal to expand and thus they need ways to talk sweet to people. (increases food instead of production)

Ships: (+x means unlockable through upgraded ship design version)

Unique to them, they can outfit protectors with strikecraft. They also have their strikecraft slots limited to fighters only or universal. Only the Zek can be built directly. All other ships have to be morphed from Zeks. Every ship takes twice their CP amount of Zeks to morph. E.g. a colonizer takes 2 Zek but a Hunter takes 6 Zeks. Morphing can be done in the hangar or on a node. Morphing takes 1 turn. If the Zeks are on a node, the Zeks need to be in the same fleet to be able to morph. As such, making a Hunter without additional research in CP techs is not possible as the base CP is 4 and it would take 6 Zeks (and thus CP) to create a Hunter.

Zek: Basic ship design (similar to Ark from Vodyani). Zeks have rather low speed, are fragile and have only a defense and support slot.

Weaver: Colonizer ship with 2 defense slots and 2 support slots

Seeker: Exploration ship with 2 support slots, 1 defense slot and 1 weapon slot

Scout carrier: Protector ship with 1+1 strikecraft slot that can only be used for fighters, 2 defense slots, 2 support slots and +2 support/defense slots

Frigate: Attack ship with 2+1 weapon slots, 2 defense slots, 1+1 support slots and +1 defense/ support slot

Swarm Carrier: Coordinator ship with 2 strikecraft slots (fighters), +1 strikecraft slot (universal), +1 big weapon slot, 2+1 defense slots, 3 support slots, 1 support/defense slot

Scarab: Hunter ship with 1+1 big weapon slots, 2+1 defense slots, 1 support slot, +1 support/defense slot

Tiamath: Carrier ship with 4+2 strikecraft slots (universal), 3+1 defense slots, 3+1 support slots, 1 defense/support slot

Technologies:

Basic fighters moved down from 3rd ring to 2nd ring along with tanks and +3CP

Strikecraft upgrades to include fighters with energy weapons (bolts / beams), bombers with torpedos. Kinda like the reward you get for the quest around strikecraft.

Improved Planetary Landscaping to give +10 Food per planet instead of +5

Replacements for all industry providing tech, partially boosting food production.

General

Overall they play as an expansionist and war hungry faction. Their (early) focus on strikecraft and advanced bombers later on can catch many unprepared enemies off-guard. The affinity for troops make them excellent raiders. Instead of taking over systems, they might want to just raid them. Their ability to morph ships from Zeks into a fleet at any point (even in enemy territory) can make predicting an attack by them very difficult as they could run up a swarm of Scout Carriers or a bunch of Scarabs.

I came up with this idea because I see absolutely no sense of taking mid/late game food improvements (3rd & 4th ring) because on one hand, food is mostly important when you are still growing but at that time you don't have the industry to affford those improvements yet anyway. Also, I really loved strikecraft in ES1 and in ES2 I find them too weak and underdeveloped. Combined with the inspirations from the aforementioned games this came up very quickly.

Please let me know what you think. I know this is probably never going to happen, but I would love to hear what the community thinks about a food centered faction. Thanks for reading.