So I managed to get a bit of a steamroll in my 3rd Empire Difficulty game. 

In the Contemporary Era, I started using my huge Influence excess to fuse my cities together into several Megacities.

The two cities started with 5-8 territories apiece and both had a Food surplus of 80-120.

As soon as I absorbed one city into another, Food consumption skyrocketed and put the Megacity into a huge food deficit, over -500 per turn.

I could accept the Food deficit being explained as disruptions in the supply and distribution across such a large Megacity if the Stability was lower, but as but my Stability was still 100%. It doesn't feel right to me that the two seperate cities, once joined together, suddenly have citizens dying of starvation.

I created another Megacity from another two large 5-8 Territory cities that I had, and the comparison of the two is stark.

Megacity 01:

Population: 205

Food Consumption: 4674

22.8 consumption per pop

Megacity 02:

Population: 222

Food Consumption: 5364

24.16 consumption per pop

Are the citizens in Megacity 02 driven to callous disregard for their fellow citizens in the excitement of the formation of their new local government? Wantonly destroying food supplies and disregarding the people starving to death around them? Could the food consumption be pegged somewhat to population units to resolve this? Or could the Contemporary Era Food infrastructures have a Per Territory bonus to food production or could a new Food infrastructure that reduces consumption per population or per territory be introduced?

It just doesn't feel right that these high-tech, contemporary societies that are sending people to Mars suddenly start starving to death when two of their administrative centers unify together.

tl;dr can food consumption be somewhat decoupled from scaling so strongly with population size or number of territories?

For reference, I'm on turn 381/450 and I've only got three Technologies left to research, so these Megacities are working with end-game infrastructure.

You get food penalties if your pop is over the cities max pop. Please share two screenshots with the breakdown.

Krikkitone wrote:

Food consumption is: 8*Population+0.1*(Pop^2)+30*(Pop without a “job”). (*80% with the Microbiology tech)

the core problem is the formula being quadratic, which means the average food consumption per population is linear in number of populations. That does not really make sense. I understand the devs want to add penalty to larger cities, but since the population in humankind is used not only to yield FIMS but also make troops, this mechanics is perhaps not that reasonable.

My current play is maybe tomorrow do calculation about pops and food, which I will post in the strategy section.

Here is the food consumption and pop growth I promised to make

Not every game mechanic can be "realistic." Population is a huge advantage, and with city caps having one giant über city makes so much sense that you'd consider burning your own city centers to reattach the land to your giant city.

They could fix the population scaling to be less punishing food-wise, but they'd have to consider also changing how stability works for megacities, or changing whether you can destroy your own city centers. And if they make it so you can't destroy your own city centers, they'll probably have to add a different mechanic to balance that out so that you don't auto-lose by accidentally winning a war.

It's only been an issue for me once, and I just built an Angkor Wat + Notre Dame combo to fix it. If it hadn't come up, I never would have built that combo. So... There's also that. Where you do things specifically because the game mechanics leads you to it, but that for me is a fun process. Making it perfectly "balanced" could have side effects in terms of how fun it is to explore the game.

I also wouldn't worry about the deficit too much.

As stated, there is a penalty for being over the population cap.

So what happens when you build farmer districts? It both increases the food you make AND increases your pop cap, thereby reducing the overpopulation.

I also just had a merged megacity. On the first turn it was over 700 food deficit, despite both cities having huge surplus before (inc my Macchu Piccu city). Anyway, it only took several (no more than 10?) turns of building farmer districts continuously and I was back to a surplus. Each farmer district was about 37 food, but since there was less overpopulation, it was not a problem.