Shivetya wrote:
food till full. then it comes down to location in the early game. Back systems go research and make dust when nothing else avails.. nearer to the front they are the more likely they are industry.

That's a very solid strategy.

Ail wrote:
Really? Maybe I've just played too few games but I very often find myself at a situation where I think: "None of the buildings I could currently build are worthwhile right now, let's make a few ships instead."

And it is mostly "having more population" that turns buildings from not beingworthwhile into being worthwhile.



On the other hand, let's say I have a system that lacks maybe 3 pop but has 15 already and a bunch of food-improvements anyways.

Another food-improvement on maybe a lava-planet won't really cut it and maybe reduce the amount of turns for the system to grow out from 16 to 14 or so. While at the same time having the Lava-Planet on Industry would make the difference between building 5 more ships or only 3.



Or if I had financial problems that could easily be solved by putting an Arid to Dust.



There are indeed scnarios imaginable where more food does not make that much sense. Especially if the time to grow won't even change by more food.

This was pretty much the point of my previous post. However, there may be times that you want to build more food buildings even though they won't do you any good. That food to industry building is one case, but my real thought here is when considering the exploitation on the planet. You may need more of something other than food, like industry or dust, but you don't have any of the buildings left that you would like to build. In that case, putting up a food building and then changing the exploitation on the planets to industry or dust (or vice versa) would be the correct approach.

I think I have a pretty good plan/formula/algorithm now:



Planets with bonus for food shall use food-exploit always until maximal population has been reached.

For planets without bonus for food they shall use the food exploit only when: FoodConsumption/TotalFood >= Population/MaxPopulation, otherwise use the exploit that generates most fids.



This equotation leads to a situation where, the closer the population is to the maximum amount and the more food already exists, the higher the tendency to not build food-exploits.

Sounds good to me.

There are diminishing returns for Food; or equivalently, the amount of Food between population levels increases with population. See http://endlessspace.wikia.com/wiki/Population_table . Though now that you mention it, it does get pretty expensive at high population--perhaps it's a good idea to switch to Industry perhaps somewhere between 10-20 population if you're into warring, though most systems can only hold about that many early-mid game anyways. Either that or use the trick of exporting population from a low-population system using colony ships.