It needs to be more then a growth bonus though because once you've reached full pop its once again useless. There should be an overpopulation bonus, as long as you can feed it your populations will jump up to 800% its current pop but be balanced by absurd food requirements and negative attitude modifiers. I'd personally love to be able to assign where this overpopulation bonus gos towards so you can change it on the fly to suit your needs--need more fleets? crank those workers towards production!



Its space china.

Nosferatiel wrote:
That is true for mammals, but possibly not for insect like cravers who may be able to just increase egg-production, given that they are capable of overfeeding queens so they produce new queens and that the whole system doesn't just saturate very fast. (That is, of course, quite theoretical...)

But it is definitely not true for the Horatio, who will probably convert lots of food into nourishment solutions to fill their clone centers. They can directly convert nourishment to clones, so there seems to be no limit but the building speed of clone centers.

It is still true in both cases, but what you said goes along with "food does not generate population." It also allows for population to grow in unnatural ways as well. Bottom line, with no food, people will starve. If people starve, they die. So population will drop till food is at a sustainable level. Adding more people but not adding more food is not the answer. If interconnected trade routs were developed between systems, perhaps via automatically traveling cargo ships, then the problem can begin to be remedied. That would be an intersting idea. Create a Cargo ship and schedule it to pick up at x and drop at y, possibly even setting up complex routes and circles or more simply between two systems within one turn of each other. The amount transferred per turn could be set by the player or by the fleet size (i.e 1 food per ship).

Due to your great feedback, I have posted a rebooted version of this idea at /#/endless-space/forum/29-archives/thread/13504-composite-suggestion-food-the-ugly-duckling-2-0-industry



This is refined and updated to include my thoughts on industry as well.



Keep up the good suggestions and don't forget to rate!

SomethingBlue wrote:
Food does not generate population, it allows population to naturally grow.

That is true for mammals, but possibly not for insect like cravers who may be able to just increase egg-production, given that they are capable of overfeeding queens so they produce new queens and that the whole system doesn't just saturate very fast. (That is, of course, quite theoretical...)

But it is definitely not true for the Horatio, who will probably convert lots of food into nourishment solutions to fill their clone centers. They can directly convert nourishment to clones, so there seems to be no limit but the building speed of clone centers.

Food does not generate population, it allows population to naturally grow. Even if you were able to grow "extra population" and send it to a smaller system, then the population will likely die if it can not be supported with the food there. I would suggest a tech allowing excess food to be transferred to adjoining systems. Up to a certain percent of the excess would be evenly divided to all adjoining systems. However, I think in that system there may end up being an infinite loop with a central system feeding outer systems that are in excess and turn around to feed the inner system. But something of this sort of system would be beneficial.

Yes breadbasket systems and the ability to blockade them indeed.

stirge_jr wrote:
On the note of food, I feel they oughta take another page from Masters of Orion 2; each planet in your empire consumes x amount of food and produces y amount, giving you an empire wide net total of food. After that, you build freighter fleets to transport food from more productive planets to lesser ones like the lava planets etc..., thus balancing your net total of food.

Agreed. A simple, yet elegant solution. You immediately see whether you are producing excess food or not enough. If you combine this by trimming down found output, food would be come a more strategic resource.

I was simply thinking of using the existing Seed Module to move population instead of creating a new module to move food. I think that manually setting up shipping lanes is not in this game's style and is an unnecessary complexity (I know that sounds hypocritical in light of Cravers gata Crave, but that was just a wild idea).



What do you think about a civilian Supply Module that would refund its cost by using the colonize button? This would allow the movement of industry from system to system (at a loss because the hull cost isn't refunded, only the module itself) and would allow forge worlds to supply other systems with industry, further encouraging system specialization.



I also want to make it so that Seed Modules cost no industry but fill up a transports entire tonnage. Colony ships would still cost some industry, because of the hull, but I think that the population cost in sufficient.

Kamalisk wrote:
I am fine with food determining population growth, and the cost for that growth seems fine.



However the cost of "upkeep" of the population is linear. Meaning that it always costs 2 food per person in a system, this should be changed to grow non-linearly with population levels, so that you need much more food to maintain a huge population. Right now I have never ever had a system become starving and fail to grow once food was above the levels required for the system.



This would fix all the food problems and make the higher tech food improvements much more useful to maintain your larger systems. Then there is no need to change food to be traded or whatever.



As of right now, once you have improvements that give 2 food per person, you will never starve :P

I like this idea. Something like the first two population points cost 2 food, the second two cost 3, third pair cost 4 food, and then whatever the final population point is, it cost 2 or 3 times what that point normally would. So on a planet with five population points, the 5th point would cost 8 food in upkeep, for a total of 20, versus the 10 that it would have in the current system.



I'm not sure how this would really affect the flow of the game, but if the idea of having food as an empire-wide commodity comes into effect, then it could be interesting to look at if we can have Industry, Dust and Science exploitations and system upgrades start to have a negative impact on food production for some planets as you progress up the tech tree. After system improvements, any Lava or Gas planet can be easily self sustaining, but if using an Science or Industry exploitation, and there are lots of S or I system improvements, then realistically that's taking up a lot more space on that planet, so perhaps this should have a negative impact of food production, so that this planet absolutely relies on neighbouring farm planets and systems?



Another thought is that the calculations of empire and happiness bonuses could be tweaked so that they are applied on a planet by planet basis, and then only to that planets exploitation. So an ecstatic planet with a Dust exploitation generates 50% more Dust, but only what the planet naturally has of the others.



You could still roll into a system later in the game and using your big Dust balance to buy up food related perks and get a system balanced in one fell swoop, but it would make the choice between which of FIDS you focus on with which planet a bit of a bigger deal, and really bring terraforming into a more important tech to have, in order to find that perfect balance to your empire.

I like your ideas, a lot, because during my different games played it was easy to feel how useless the over production food is once you reach the max pop inside the system.

But well... it's the Alpha, maybe the growth system hasn't been balanced yet properly





What about if transports could be used to move the overproduced food creating space route caravans of transports ships going from system to system within your empire (kind of like the routes you set for ships in the Anno games serie).

That would give the possibility to pirates to intercepts them out of space, and not just come doing a blockade on systems, hehe.

Arghy wrote:
It needs to be more then a growth bonus though because once you've reached full pop its once again useless. There should be an overpopulation bonus, as long as you can feed it your populations will jump up to 800% its current pop but be balanced by absurd food requirements and negative attitude modifiers. I'd personally love to be able to assign where this overpopulation bonus gos towards so you can change it on the fly to suit your needs--need more fleets? crank those workers towards production!



Its space china.

If the food upkeep of population is changed to be exponential then it will be the very late game where you will have to worry about excess food and that is when the tech that converts it to production fits in.



Much like in Civ, cities grow much much slower as they grow in size because of the upkeep required for the population.



Food improvements aside from the first couple of ones in the tech tree are absolutely useless because of the linear population growth.



My systems with 20 population should require massive amounts of food, then the excess food will never become a problem until end game (in smaller systems you don't build many food improvements, so it is not going to be a problem there)

Here's what i think. Make food as important as MoO2, where you could have some planets growing food, and trading the excess food it makes to colonies that can barely produce it, or add new researchable tech that "transform" excess food to an approval or FIDS bonus.



Also, could we have tiny ship animations on the galactic map doing the trade?

I have rebooted this thread to include new ideas without extensively editing this post. It can be found at https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space/forum/29-archives/thread/13504-composite-suggestion-food-the-ugly-duckling-2-0-industry



The problem is that, at present, food is fundamentally different from the other resources. Whereas the others produce stuff for your empire, the supply of food simply determines how long it will take for a colony to come fully on line. Developed colonies can produce so much food that they can pump out colonizers, so it doesn’t really limit the rate at which we can colonize other systems. At the same time it is takes much longer to grow a system without a good agricultural world.



After a colony is full, food is useless until the Dust Visualization tech at the very, very end of the game (which I don’t think is a good idea). I propose a few simple changes that would make food a galactic resource like industry (with regard to ships and conversions), dust, and science.



And here they go:

(1) Make it so that colonizers add population to colonized worlds simply by hitting the colonize button when in colonized systems rather than colonizing new planets.

(2) Make colonizers dirt cheap (or even free in terms of industry) by getting rid of the Civilian line of modules (because the Seed Module appears to be the only one in there) and making the colonize ability part of the Transport hull, because that is all they are used for.

(3) Increase the food cost of new population points but make it flat. The idea will be to have population generated on farming worlds and then move to the frontier.

(4) Make it so that whenever a system exceeds its population limit, a free colony ship is created in the hangar. This can then be used to move that population point to another system.



This system is straightforward and intuitive and much more realistic than the system as it currently stands while solving the problems presented both by food over, and under, supply.

OP i also feel this way about food, almost as if a terran or jungle world is "wasted" by building Food production on it, rather than your 4 points i think simply making food an empire wide resource would be better. That is a percentage of food surplus provides in one system spreads over into another and provides a growth bonus.

ArrowLance wrote:
4. This is the time to regear the economy and burn your food producing exploitations and enhancements if you want.

This. Also, the tech for converting food surplus to industry is very handy, even if it is very close to the science victory condition.

Excess food points can generate industry points if you research the tech.

Mods. I hope we'll be able to mod it.

I am fine with food determining population growth, and the cost for that growth seems fine.



However the cost of "upkeep" of the population is linear. Meaning that it always costs 2 food per person in a system, this should be changed to grow non-linearly with population levels, so that you need much more food to maintain a huge population. Right now I have never ever had a system become starving and fail to grow once food was above the levels required for the system.



This would fix all the food problems and make the higher tech food improvements much more useful to maintain your larger systems. Then there is no need to change food to be traded or whatever.



As of right now, once you have improvements that give 2 food per person, you will never starve :P

Arghy wrote:
Why not make food something collectible? have a food stockpile bar that feeds your pop and allow those transport ships to manually ship food to other worlds. We can have systems dedicated to nothing but production that get their food delivered to them by a system that overproduces food and delivers it to the forge system. Food should be an empire wide resource and be necessary for a thriving industry base. If you automated the delivery ships or just made it abstract the prospect of managing food supplies with population size is friggin awesome!



You should be able to ship excess pop and food to other worlds to speed up colonies but add an ever increasing food demand. Imagine having a system that pumps out 2-3 dreads a turn but is completely dependent on another system being dedicated to feeding it and now imagine someone has blockaded your breadbasket system! Your forge system would be up in arms with starvation and riots as you fought to clear lines of supply. You could of course balance your systems to counter this but with great risks come great rewards!

I agree with this.



Food should be a internally traded resource. Shipped from the bread baskets of your empire to far off colonies. It would also be a nice way to make the galaxy map come alive a little more, with inter-empire traders and transports going about.

Maybe those could even be intercepted, starving systems on the far end of the route.



This would also be a way to circumvent the issue without changing the whole colonisation system. The way the OP proposed it, high initial food races (those with terran or even jungle planets) would get a huge boon early on.

On the note of food, I feel they oughta take another page from Masters of Orion 2; each planet in your empire consumes x amount of food and produces y amount, giving you an empire wide net total of food. After that, you build freighter fleets to transport food from more productive planets to lesser ones like the lava planets etc..., thus balancing your net total of food.

The system we have is functional, don't get me wrong, but it does have some flaws. My main point is that food acts vastly different from the other resources and I just wanted to show how it could be brought back in line.



Specifically, there is virtually no penalty to colonizing as many systems as you can get your hands on at the moment and I fear that that oversimplifies the game.



I think that part of the problem is that, at the moment, most improvements are geared toward boosting the productivity of the population. If they focused instead, as a few do, on producing resources directly then you would have the choice between building your empire's industry or growing your population, etc. Right now population is by far the most important thing to have because everything comes from it.



On a side note, do you agree that the Sophons should have an Ocean homeworld?

Why not make food something collectible? have a food stockpile bar that feeds your pop and allow those transport ships to manually ship food to other worlds. We can have systems dedicated to nothing but production that get their food delivered to them by a system that overproduces food and delivers it to the forge system. Food should be an empire wide resource and be necessary for a thriving industry base. If you automated the delivery ships or just made it abstract the prospect of managing food supplies with population size is friggin awesome!



You should be able to ship excess pop and food to other worlds to speed up colonies but add an ever increasing food demand. Imagine having a system that pumps out 2-3 dreads a turn but is completely dependent on another system being dedicated to feeding it and now imagine someone has blockaded your breadbasket system! Your forge system would be up in arms with starvation and riots as you fought to clear lines of supply. You could of course balance your systems to counter this but with great risks come great rewards!

1. This would be great absolutely great.



2. No, that would make bread baskets all too powerful.



3. I like it the way it is, feels balanced enough for now.



4. This is the time to regear the economy and burn your food producing exploitations and enhancements if you want.



Don't forget that there is another way to grow a system -- heroes -- that is incredibly fast and overpowered.

4 is not a good idea. 1 is allright, to populate new systems fast. 3, I suggested on another topic aswell. 2 won't change anything.



More on 3; food requirement for "next population" aswell as the food consumption should increase more and more in my opinion. Right now, I have a system with 55+ population, generating 4500 food each turn, aswell as 2500 industry and 2200 science. Industry and science costs go up, but food requirements doesn't as far as I can tell.