I will repost what I said in the other thread:



I think the simplest way to "trade" excess food is an initial set up system between two systems. You create a transport ship and equip it with a new civilian module that has to do with food transportation. Each module takes 2 food per turn from the home system and delivers 1 food per turn to the target system. Then, via a new command, you choose the home system and target system and the ship/s automatically travel back and forth between the systems until the transaction is cancelled, and the food on the systems return to normal. These trades would be limited to 1 full turn of moves between systems, and each travel would take a full turn if not all moves are used (In all actuality, each module would take 4 food from the home system, and deliver 2 to the target system, but the transaction always takes 2 turns, so the per turn averages out). In this way, you could set up key farm systems to deliver throughout the empire.



On a completely separate point, are 3 topics discussing the same exact thing really necessary?

Each module takes 2 food per turn from the home system and delivers 1 food per turn to the target system

Why would you lose food throughout the transition from one world to the next?



EDIT: I think if anything the distribution via trading would have to be automated, it would be a drain on production making ships to carry out the trade.



Also the other problem I see is that if you can distribute the food from one giant producer of it it would make expansion rates of new conolies sky rocket compared to the undertaking of establishing a conoly in the present game

On a completely separate point, are 3 topics discussing the same exact thing really necessary?

No, they aren't. Please merge them.

I agree on most points you mention, but as for 1. I don't think that 100% efficiency would be good. It should be possible to re-allocate food but not without effort immediatly with 100% efficiency, that's slightly too easy.

maybe have the extra food convert in the currency(oviously at the a 4 food for 1 credits for example) would be an easier way and would make it relivent at max pop.

KNC wrote:
I agree on most points you mention, but as for 1. I don't think that 100% efficiency would be good. It should be possible to re-allocate food but not without effort immediatly with 100% efficiency, that's slightly too easy.

I initially wanted it to be exchanged at 50% efficiency, but now I think that 100% is best because you wouldn't be able to control where the food goes exempt by only colonizing a few systems at a time which will cost you in that you will have less cultural influence.



If you want to send the population to a specific colony, you can build a colony ship that will cost you some industry and thus be less efficient.

This is the 3ed in a series.

The first one can be found at https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/11618-food-to-colony-ships-conversion

The second, 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 new systems. The basic strategy at present is to colonize as many systems as you can, once your core worlds approach capacity, and to grow as quickly as possible. I fear that this oversimplifies the strategy with regard to growth.



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 more useful and balanced resource:



(1) Make it so that, when a system reaches max population, the surplus food is shared between the growing colonies' population points at 100% efficiency. This is a simple way of allowing food to stay relevant, even when colonies are full.



(2) Make the food cost of new population points increase linearly based on a system’s population. This is because a systems food supply, both local and imported, is based on the size of its population and what worlds that population is on. This would make the population to always take about the same amount of time to grow.



(3) 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.



(4) Make colonizers cheaper by making the Seed Module free in terms of industry. However, they would take up the entire Transport class’s tonnage at the beginning of the game. Colony ships would not be free, because the hull still costs industry and the Seed Module costs a population point, but they are cheap enough to allow the moving of population from one system to another.



Making food reallocation automatic is a zero-micro way of doing it. If you want to choose where to send your population, then you can use colony ships. Time to growth should stay fairly stable because increases of food production would be countered by the colonizing of less fertile planets. Population will grow faster on small colonies as the game progresses, but only because maxed out systems will no longer be growing.



Edit: The metaphor of the title is that food, at the moment, is flawed but can become beautiful with some tweaking

I think that having excess food automatically distributed among the population points of growing systems is the simplest and least micro intense method.

BlueTemplar wrote:
Either I'm not understanding something, or you're the one not understanding... How is this proposal different from how the system works right now?

I am fairly sure that the food to grow increases exponentially at the moment. The purpose of having it increase linearly is to balance where you put the population.



The idea of making colony ships cheaper is that it would make the moving of large numbers of population points from one system to another viable, but fairly inefficient. The Seed Module may not even have to be free, it could simply have a reduced cost.

Zougkla wrote:
I think that having excess food automatically distributed among the population points of growing systems is the simplest and least micro intense method.







I am fairly sure that the food to grow increases exponentially at the moment. The purpose of having it increase linearly is to balance where you put the population.



The idea of making colony ships cheaper is that it would make the moving of large numbers of population points from one system to another viable, but fairly inefficient. The Seed Module may not even have to be free, it could simply have a reduced cost.

But moving masses of population should not be cheap.



How does food growth increase exponentially? You have 1 population on a planet that grows 2 food per pop., you grow 2 food. You gain another pop. it increases to 4 food. Add another pop., 6 food. Food growth is multiplicative, not exponential.

Aye, food growth, like all other forms of growth, is quadratic, which is standard.



Also, shipping food, like shipping population, should be prohibitively expensive (between planets? sure, reasonably practical. Between systems? Not so much. You don't ship food somewhere when it takes years to get there and costs more than the value of the food).

PyroVortex wrote:
Aye, food growth, like all other forms of growth, is quadratic, which is standard.



Also, shipping food, like shipping population, should be prohibitively expensive (between planets? sure, reasonably practical. Between systems? Not so much. You don't ship food somewhere when it takes years to get there and costs more than the value of the food).

Not prohibitively expensive, just normally expensive. As much as creating ships with the correct modules (industry expensive) and paying crew to transfer food back and forth between the systems (fleet upkeep). Also, the expense would be less intense if travel time was limited to 1 year (turn).

Why not just have excess food production increase your empire's happiness? Basically like a scalable luxury, proportional to excess-per-system divided by total empire population.



More food means more morale, more taxes, more production bonuses, more flexibility, etc etc.



You'd need to tweak the levels of morale to account for this new way of increasing it - but I reckon you could do that effectively by increasing the penalty you get from over-populated colonies. That way you don't need food to maintain morale in the early game, just to expand population, but as your planets start to fill out in the mid-game, you'd rely more and more on having a solid base of excess food production to keep up with the morale-hit from populated worlds.



You could also cause a drop in an enemy developed system's morale by blockading it, preventing access to the excess food resource (luxury). A system that's likely to be a battle-ground might need excess food production built in, to maintain morale during a siege.

Also consider having surplus food increase the popularity/morale slightly in addition to a limited sharing.

I agree that there should be some kind of "sharing" of Food between Systems, either by default or through a system upgrade. Handling a Colony like it's not connected to an Empire feels just plain wrong, especially when compared to the pretty much automatic handling of Trade Routes over sometimes vast distances between Empires.



I also agree with SomethingBlue that there should be some "loss".... not all Food can be transported off-world, some Food just spoils to fast.



Another Thing: We all have read books or seen Sci-Fi Movies that involve big, pretty much Planet Sized Cities..... lets take Trantor from Isaac Asimov as an example. Or Coruscant from the Star Wars Movies and Books. Generally they are "Capital Planets".... with the almost sole purpose of managing a vast Empire of dozens, hundreds or even more Worlds. Such "Capital-Worlds" depend on other Planets supplying them with Food, cause they just can't produce enough to feed their huge Populations. In the Case of Asimovs Trantor "To support the needs and whims of the population, food from twenty agricultural worlds brought by ships in the tens of thousands, fleets greater than any navy ever constructed by the Empire". I'd like to suggest such Worlds for the release (or later), but ofc we would need a System to share Food between Systems first.