Farming
I'm not liking the farming mechanic. It seemed like a good idea on paper but in practice, it's just tedious and exploitive. Here's how I'd like to see it work:
Some planets would have a Arable land tile including all starting planets. Building on these tiles produces food.
The tech tree would have a path for players who want to get the most out of those resources to get a lot of food. The arable land resource be destructable -- you can destroy it (like you can any resource btw) to put something else there. This would make food take its rightful place as an important strategic resource rather than one that is simply produced by min/maxing.
What are your thoughts?
I don't think i like the OP idea because of how random the game makes those type of resources and how you can become crippled if someone comes by and destroys it. I do not mind how food is made atm but do see other problems with it.
1. There needs to be a penalty for going below 0 global food. This would stop you from destroying your own farms after you finished building all the cities you needed and also discourage putting all your food in one farm planet (if that planet got captured you would be crippled until you got it back or rebuilt.) Maybe add a bonus for having extra food so it doesnt become useless once you have all you need.
2. I play some games where resources are a non factor because of how common they are and other games where i cannot build things because the resource just doesn't exist- like advanced farms. All resources need to be built into the map builder based on the number of players in the game or the number of planets depending on how the resource is used (a slider to make them rare or common would be cool). You'd have to make it factor in the races used too on second thought since different races use different resources.
Similar to Ganymede Station, from SyFy's The Expanse. They used giant orbital mirrors to grow crops on the planet. To make it easier on the AI, what if the "mirrors" were an actual type of starbase, such as economic, military, cultural or agricultural.
They would be destructible, fragile and essential to protect. Agricultural starbases would be another way to target and cripple a planet. If destroyed or damaged, the population would begin to starve and die.
It really should be called Surplus food instead of just food tbh.
That's a much simpler - and therefore easier to implement - way of doing what I'm suggesting. Simply give Seige as an order for a particular type of ship (obviously it should be armed, it can hardly enforce the Seige by shouting "You shall not pass!" loudly) and population growth, production, wealth, morale etc on that planet goes down by a certain degree. Alternatively, or as well, give Attack Food Ships as an order for an attack ship that creates a civilization-wide downward slide on those four things.
The UI tells you "Your food ships from (whatever planet the eneny ship doing the "Attack Food Ship" order is near) are being destroyed" - to save the hassle of having to spend ages trying to find the enemy ship/planet being attacked in question, that'd get very annoying very quickly.
And make AFS an option you only get when you've spied on your enemies to a level where you know what's on their planets so - logically - you know which ship in which sector should be doing that? Too complicated?
Place holder. (I have an idea, but am on my phone)
In 2 raw production was based on population 1 per 1. High population above 20 billion caused severe approval penalties.
Farming controled population. It wasnt global, so the planet that wanted higher population had to have the farm. For each.level added by the farm it added a billion population.
Some other thoughts.
My planets seem to get enough pop cap with one or two cities and I can get that done by the Age of War. Farm tech beyond that isn't all that great since I don't need the food and often don't have the resources anyways.
I'd like to see farm tech in the Age of Ascension or maybe even earlier focus on changing the types of food grown to add to your manufacturing/research/weapons/soldering ect rather than the amount of food grown. Food distribution trees should be replaced with advanced city designs that would not increase pop cap but add different bonus like I suggested for farms. This would add more thought to where you put farms and cities beyond +pop bonuses.
I love the different tech trees you get on races and especially the special buildings they can sometimes build. I think its the aquatic races that unlock different hydroponic farm tech and would like to see that change to be more distinctive from the standard trees other than hydroponic farms produce 3 base food.
Overall the change proposed by the OP feels like planet development would have farms removed and the tiles instead used for more of the same- factories or maybe research labs.
I like farms the way they are, but they should be easier to build:
Farms that give a Flat food bonus should NOT cost Monsatium.
Only farms that give a Multiplier food bonus should cost Monsatium.
Yes but the current system is hampering the AI. Again abstracting (most) of the farming involved... Truly simplifies the issue of AI which now just needs to think about placing City hugs and grabbing farm techs so it can build bigger or better cities.
Notably, to support "tall" empire building, those farm techs could unlock bigger bonuses to existing cities as well... Possibly through upgrades .
If so empire have expanded or knows it's smaller in terms of colonies than the average empire for the last 20 turns, it could priortize techs that upgrade it's existing cities and such .
I like the Cities and Farms, but not how they are working.
My Idea:
Thematically: I would like to think that "food" is a solved problem for advanced galactic civs of the future.
Strategically: if the only thing food does is limit your pop cap, that is not an "interesting choice" and the entire mechanism should be removed. Otherwise food needs to be useful for more than just one thing.
I agree... I could see it impacting morale
Yep, definitely food needs to impact on several things:
Population: Whichever you need to grow the population of whichever of the four species you are, I think the four "things" should work the same way or as close to it as possible without being too gamebreaking. The ultimate simplicity, of course, is to just have four types of farms for each of the species and have them produce food/Durantium/new person/whatever that race needs. This immediately does away with the possible curse of a galaxy with no Durantium or whatever. Surely if population and productivity is 1/1 all four species as I understand it, that seems a fair solution for Population growth.
Obviously, it might be better to buff up a certain species in a different way or there may (I've only played carbon) be an existing advantage in a different area for that species that compensates for slow population growth/population growth relying on something rarer than food, I just see this as the quickest way of solving that issue.
Morale: Hungry people aren't happy people. As morale goes down, resentment of your civilization's government goes up. Also, maybe the morale takes a hit because a planet's leaders - or the civilization government - are buying food off the black market to feed their fellow folk. And it's a seller's market always and the quality's bad but it's eat garbage or starve.
Wealth: See above comment on food black market. It's a seller's market so you're paying over the odds for food. To feed the hungry people who are too hungry to work/produce. Therefore no work = no tax/income for the planet. A planet/civilization can't produce the bigger, fancier ships, farms, factories etc because of the lack of money.
Influence: Is that planet owned by that other race really going to culture flip to a planet that's suddenly got no food and is poor and miserable about it? Planets culture flipping to another planet is more likely as well.
But you cant abandon completely the realism aspect of the game. Arable land? Its not middle ages, its 23rd century for chirstssake!
My thoughts: Current system seems ok with some adjustments.
Planet should have base food production, which supports a base population, for example we won't live on mars till we can produce food on mars.
Planet Type should influence how much food can be grown on a planet. A desert planet will likely have much less food than a lush planet. i.e. fewer people live in a desert than in a lush environment. So a desert planet will have a lower base population than a lush planet.
Planet size could play into this base factor as well. A small lush planet will likely produce much less food than a larger one.
One thing with "resources" being required for different improvements, it would be nice to see variance in them. For example you can have run a factory with Coal (resource), or nuclear power. Two different resources for improvements. Though clearly they have different effects on said production.
So in the tech tree, easier(earlier) techs require none or easy to get(abundant) resources. while later techs require more rare resources. This would prevent the problem Taslios mentions in not being able to build an improvement because no resources. Everyone should be able to build easy/low tech improvements with easy to get resources, while the later techs require harder (rarer) to get resources.
One thing I don't like about the the current resource implementation is that mid to late game most resources become worthless. This may be a trade issue, but sitting on 1000+ of a resource is like why do I even bother? Only the few space bound resources (i.e. antimatter, etc) seem to be of any value and even then Thulium, compared to others seem much less valuable.
So using ideas above, coal plant or solar power. Two different types of of resources. If I only have coal I will use that, which could be bad for planet (moral, or other impact), while solar power would be better.
Arcologies are part of solution, its too long to describe and is best explained here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqKQ94DtS54
And another thing is I don't think population should have any effect on production. Shouldn't we have robots that do all that? Population should be for research, culture, money and legions.
I like the Cities and Farms, but not how they are working.My Idea:
I've been saying that for a while. I can put all my leaders unto farming, start building cities with the extra food, remove the leaders, go into negative food, and the cities will still finish and population will grow. If something was done with starvation there would be more of a difference with silicon life. They can't starve.
How about all unused tiles produce food (a variable supply depending on the tile and/or planet type) as long as you don't build on them. Some improvements could increased the food they produce.
So basically, almost everything is arable land, to some degre. Just like in real life, actually. Settlers can do basic farming on every tile of the planet, as long as there isn't infrastructure occupying the place. Then, some buildings can represent the infrastructure needed to produce greater amounts of food.
That's a good idea. It combines food as a background mechanic (mentioned earlier in this thread) with a new strategy: Not building something increases surplus food.
It seems like that would be easy for the AI to handle too.
That's a good idea. It combines food as a background mechanic (mentioned earlier in this thread) with a new strategy: Not building something increases surplus food.It seems like that would be easy for the AI to handle too.
I really like this.I think it would be good to include a global mechanic that Food Deficit = starvation = population loss. Those Farming planets are great, but if you lose them you should suffer big time.So the biggest change is that Cities and Megalopolises should not cost food to build. Population should be dependent on food supply. Cities only allow your population to grow larger.
I would also add that upgrading the basic farms should use Thillium or Promethium or one of the "space" resources while the hub buildings use monsantium or unique stuff. You don't need the hub buildings, but the current system is so very unbalanced.
Even using empty tiles to produce food, it still boils down to a system with only one basic solution ("make enough food"). That still isn't an interesting choice. It's just bean counting maintenance.
I do still often see AI planets stalling in development for a long time with empty tiles and no food for cities. If those tiles just defaulted to farms the AI could get started far easier.
The Wild Grain tile/adjecency bonus would make more sense too. If there's wild grain, why do I need to build a big sci-fi farm to eat it? The wasteland tile bonus should definitely be foodless.
The original plan to change food was frankly the first proposed change to the game that I wasn't happy about and I preferred the status quo. However this idea has my full support.
You could tie growth to food surplus, stellaris/ES2-style.
And you could color-code tyles for food production. One color is 1 food per tile, one is 0.5, one for 0 (the numbers are bullshit and aren't value suggestions).Then you could have an hydroponics improvement: produce 0.3 food (or "a low amount") no matter the tile, to make a sterile square produce food if here really is nothing else you'd rather produce on that tile.
I'm cool with the food system as it is; but I think its too Monsantium dependent. Monsantium isn't super common and its required for every food upgrade beyond the basic farm.
I also think adding orbital farming improvements (as well as morale boosting improvements) might be a nice upgrade for Influence starbases to make them a more viable alternative to economic starbases.
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