If systems are left under automated control, when there is a need to create population ALL planets get changed to food production, even if growth is already at max with no planets exploiting food. To my knowledge you can't produce more than 1 population per turn, so there is no reason to change exploitation to food if population growth is already 1/turn.



Any chance the weighting could be changed on this with regards to when exploitation is changed? As managing 40+ systems manually is very time consuming and leaves me preferring smaller galaxies for my games when I play on Endless difficulty, just because every little bit really does matter when you're trying to beat an opponent with such huge advantages over you FIDS or otherwise.



If I'm wrong and you can get more than one population per turn, perhaps something should be added to the UI to make that clearer, as I've never seen that happen.

You can, get more than one population per turn, but that usually only happens on the lower population levels, particularly when you take a horribly mismanaged AI system and beef it up by throwing 100k dust at it. Generally speaking though the rate of population increase does still scale as your food increases. In that as you get more population, you need more food for the next population to... populate.



What I will say is that you shouldn't shy away from more food, particularly now that the Advanced Industrial Systems "Food2Industry!" function will only activate at population cap, and that with one rank of Cloning it actually produces more Industry from a Methane with Hyper-Scale Farms than a Methane with 3D-Replication Plants.

I agree, But I haven't seen this issue since Lights of Polaris

You can gain more than 1 population per turn, at any stage of the game.