If your going to make food a commodity make it abstract dont force people to build goddamn freighters. None of the ideas addresses the fact that once your planets are full food is useless. It shouldent just become a negative either, just another set of scales to balance. If you have to bother with it then you should get a tangible bonus from it.



It should affect happiness as a well fed population is less likely to rebel and temporary pop should be added if your food has reached high enough levels.



In my current game i'm realizing that there is literally no reason to ever have farms because if its a high food planet in the first place with just a few improvements and techs it will produce enough food to do the job and you can replace the now useless food bonus with something tangible like production/science/dust.

StK wrote:
You never played Master of Orion did you?

You didn't have to do it manually there.. you just had a pool of freighters the AI would distribute the food automatically among your system as long as you had enough of them and if you wanted to move a colonist you needed to have an extra freighter for that but it would only be drag and drop and a number that would tell you the arrival time

That's not the vibe I'm getting from the OP. "Adding population by clicking the colonise button" sounds pretty manual to me

I have played MoO1&2 btw

@Skurkanas I read it again you are right ... it reads like he means doing it manually

but when there was a better solution for that kind of problem years ago (implented in MoO) I think the devs would also be able to find a more practical way then the suggested one.. (^^,)

Skurkanas wrote:
Still not fond of the whole "build transports, then manually send them somewhere to deliver stuff"-idea.



How big are the games you play? Small galaxy, 2 Empires? For with everything larger, it would become very, very unfeasible to ship your population across the galaxy.

I think there are more interesting things to do than to play relocation agent :P



Simply make excess food tradeable and add some nice little transport-animations going to and fro



We could also have the high-level industry improvements reduce food (like many suggested in the other thread), so that we would no longer be able to spam every lava forge world into self sustainability, but have to supply the specialised colonies with food

That is a very good point...



However my 6 original points still stand:



(1) Being able to add more population with colonizers got a good response and would be useful for quickly setting up a colony as well as choosing which systems to prioritize.



(2) Cheaper colony ships facilitate (1).



(3) If you have food being moved between colonies, then you should make the cost of growth based on imperial population because if you don't then small colonies will grow way too fast from the influx of food and large colonies will grow too slowly.



(4) I am open to increasing the efficiency of the automatic food distribution, but I still do not want it to be 100% because you should have some motivation to generalize your systems while allowing specialization. Perhaps 75%?



(5) I feel that population grow is way too important at the moment because many improvements increase its productivity. I want you to be able to have a smaller population, but to have lots of improvements and thus be able to be competitive. Although, if all colonies have some food coming in from the developed systems, then the Sustainable Agriculture idea would be unneeded and it should be moved to a lump rate.



(6) Again, primarily to get new colonies off on the right foot. Perhaps a redistribution option could be added like with the conversions? I am not sure how I feel about that...

In regards to 1 colonists doing all 4 FIDS: You are aware that "1" colonist on the planet is a representative number, correct? It most likely represent a great number, more to the tune of 100,000 or perhaps even 1,000,000 per colonist? So now it is easy to see that "1" colonist can easily produce all 4 FIDS.

After playing a couple of games now I believe that food is one of the first things that needs rebalancing. I found that most of food buildings and hero food perks are redundant as most systems are growing nicely and I am aware that they will just cost me money once the system population is at maximum. There have been some good suggestions in this thread and I personaly would like to see pop growth slowed down as well as some sort of reward for when the system is full, the simplest being that food surplus is converted into dust automatically. Three different buildings could also give you options such as surplus food into dust / industry / science at a 25% conversion. this would encourage the player to seek high food production rather than see it as wasted builds.