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?
Seems like the easiest way to accomplish what the OP states - an arable/rich land significance - is to change farms from being [relatively large integer] base rate + [tiny amount] level bonus to the other way around. Make farms a base of 0.3 per tech tier, plus 1 per level. Or something like that. Reintroduce tiering cities, to make food more of a bonus - say, a tier 1 city costs no food and provides only a small amount of popcap; to get truly populous planets you need to spend that food on upgrades. A starvation / unhappiness mechanic should absolutely be in place for having negative food surplus.
And/or: a more major change, but has a bit of a two-birds-one-stone element: instead of having colony capitals, make the initial placed tile more modest; "landing site" or "initial settlement" or "colony seed" or something and have it supply and demand a modest amount of food (in equal amounts), to make planetary bonuses/maluses to food production a little bit more significant (no surplus food? Don't settle that precursor planet just yet). Then players can place (or upgrade to) their own "real" capitol building, like many have asked for over the years, with the option to delete the initial settlement once a capitol exists (and the food situation allows).
How wedded are people to food being produced on planets?
One of the issues that I've expressed before that I have with the current pop growth system is that food is a different resource category than what the silicate and synthetic require to grow their populations. So, when attempting to play maps with different resource (thulium/durantium/etc) constraints, food falls outside of these constraints because planets and planet tiles aren't 'resources.'
Since population is now such a core component to all of the snowball mechanics (research, production, wealth), one is almost forced to play with whatever default resource levels just to have an even playing field for different life forms.
One idea would be to have the planet colony produce enough food to support the planet pop cap by itself. Then additional food having to come from starbases either with a mining ring - or an additional agri ring (similar to the xeno archeology ring) to harvest them (like some nutrient broth resource floating in space or whatever). I know it may sound counterintuitive to not have food come from the planet, but mechanicially it lumps all of the pop growth stuff into the same resource pool. So if you play on 'rare' resources, all lifeforms have similar pop growth constraints. Not just the yor and slyne, or whatever.
Furthermore, since this resource comes from space - it can be the kind that can go into the global resource pool and get shipped around the empire as excess food for the purposes of pop cap busting on selected planets...
thoughts?
Actually I modded my own game to have arcologies Only one branch yet because that is a lot of work and I must also provide the graphics to be able to see what is on a planet (I'm no good designer so my graphics look more like logos).
I don't think YOR considering the possible downsides.
Thought about this at work yesterday, and I'm actually in favor of eliminating food as a resource. I say that as someone who likes the current system, I beeline for Bread Basket worlds almost as hard as Precursor worlds because building agriworlds is fun to me. But I understand the idea that teaching the AI that it wants farms because it wants cities is hard (I'm not a programmer so that's about as far as I can go for that).
So I'm in favor of getting rid of food as both a resource and a prerequisite for cities. This leads to 2 questions, namely how do we keep city spam from overtaking every tile and what to do with farms and the associated techs. The first is relatively easy, keep the planetary pop cap so that only 1-4 tiles are being used on the majority of planets in the best hub locations. The second is trickier. I suggest keeping farms as improvements, but basically turning them into little superchargers for the city engines via adjacency bonuses. The base farm would have the +1 pop adjacency and a +0.1 to growth. This would probably render the hospital unnecessary, but I don't know if many people were even using it in its current state anyway. A tier 2 farm could get a +1 wealth adjacency to demonstrate the commerce that is created once you get everything up and running a little. Maybe a specialization tech a little farther down the tree that lets you choose between local cuisine (slight bonus to influence, for cultural players), biofuel (small +production, builder types) or emergency ration bunkers (small bonus to defense/resistance for warmongers). In this manner, food is highlighted in the abstract as a resource and an option for personal choice customization based on the tech tree.
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.
That are good ideas, but I have some adjustments:
- Unused tiles produce food according to the planet type. Desert planets less than terran planets. But only so many unused tiles are taken into account as there are other improvements on the planet. So a freshly colonized planet would only get the food from one tile. If you build another improvement, two unused tiles are taken into account and so on. That prevents freshly colonized planets to produce large amounts of food instantly.
- Food production should be a continual process (like mining other resources), cities and the like should not need food to build, but the population should consume food every turn according to its size. When there is not enough food to feed everyone population growth on all planets should become negative in relation to the amount of food that is missing. Also morale should suffer a hit (perhaps -1% globally per turn food is missing). Don't forget to implement recovery from that morale hit once there is again enough food
- There is no base production of food based on planet class. So to colonize a new planet you first have to make sure you produce enough food (or have stored enough) so that your new colony doesn't begin to starve immediately.
- Food can be traded with othe civs (or sold in the new galactic market coming with the new expansion).
- Introduce agricultural modules for economic starbases.
- Introduce (upgradeable) hydroponic farms to produce food on tiles that are to harsh to grow anything naturally.
- I agree that standard resources become more and more useless as the game progresses. I have modded my game so that some improvements have very high standard resource costs, so I actually have problems to build enough mining starbases (administrators are limited after all). And I began to put in missions that cost a really lot of standard resources (like 50 or 100) to get special resources like monsantium.
Add additional food resources.
1) Oceans should provide a base food supply. Fisheries should increase it.
2) Add Hydroponic Modules to Starbases.
3) Remove the use of tile on a planet devoted to farming and instead make it modular like starbases, pay the fee, increase farming output.
By the 23rd century farming should advance to the point there is aquaponics, hydroponics, and vertical farming underneath the cities and factories on the plantes.
Guys, this has to be intuitive and obvious to players too tho, not just us 1%ers...
Here are a couple of points: it is estimated that already in 21st century people will begin to "eat" food through nanobots, doing no physical effort whatsoever.
The problem with food is, that you can have it any place because everything from photosynthesis to ground nutrients can be artificial, even with 21st century tech. So it does not make any sense to restrain food production.
And dont get ridiculus with arable land, otherwise its like on one hand you build quantum torpedoes, but on the other you call for middle ages peasants to develop arable land.
My proposal would be do adjustments with some math, but i am not smart enough to propose what those might be.
The icons for farms also show a dome and one of them is elevated far off the ground. Doesn't seem like we need specific terrain to grow food.
Also, Matt Damon grew Mars potatoes. It's hard to imagine the Thalan, Altarians, or Iconians being hamstrung by the dirt under their feet.
Honestly I would prefer you spend 30 minutes or however long it would take you to fix the broken "Station Garrison", before changing any other game mechanics. I don't really mind how food works at the moment.
If there is a penalty for certain tiles it would be cost. Everything else is overcomable by technology.
The game is unrealistic in so many aspects that it makes no sense to develop a food mechanic that is in any way "realistic". It should just be an interesting game mechanic, no more, no less.
How about completely get rid of the food system and just let every planet grow to planet cap size?
At the same time, nerf prolific and make the ratio of pop to production at 2 to 1 (2 pop for 1 point of raw production). This will automatically make the AI better in relation to the player. And it gets rid of a tedious clunky mechanic no one particularly likes.
Also, buff synthetics. Provide an "auto-manufacture population" command (so I don't have to constantly click on "manufacture population", which is tedious) that only requires social production points (no durantium or promethium requirements) and as balance make it so that synthetics can grow their population 50% more than the planet class.
As much as I agree with you, if the devs don't do anything about it perhaps my solution helps you: I modded out the legion cost for "Station Garrison".
I don't know what's so difficult in putting in an option so that the player can decide whether projects do auto-repeat or not, or if that's too much work (because of the need to change the UI what really seems to be an issue) to introduce two versions of each project, one that is performed only once and the other that is auto-repeating.
But we digress ...
I disagree that food shall be abandoned completely. If its a global resource, it leaves a vulnerable weak spot to be hit, to weaken a player's empire, if not guarded properly.
Secondly, food helps to the imagination and make different feel for carbon based and synthetic races.
As such, food is a good idea, a good thing to have because living beings eat food after all. But again, one thing is the idea, the other - to implement it.
Constantly taking things out if they don't appeal to everyone is nothing what I would like to see. Also I doubt that "no one particularly likes" the current mechanic, because the people on the forums are not a representative sample of all players.
What I also not like is the ongoing talk about "nerf things so far until the AI finally understands how to use them correctly". I like an interesting, randomized game and have no problem with unbalanced features. If I lose I start a new game.
Just my opinion, no offense intended.
What you're describing for farms is what hospital do already, but better. A hospital will give +2 adjecency to a city, giving it +20% population cap, and it gives 0.2 growth plus another 0.1 from adjecency. So you're suggesting that farms be a weaker version of hospitals, while also saying hospitals aren't worth using.
The Hospital is 1 per colony, farms would be spammable. Also, that was for the base farm, and the real value for the farm in my suggestion was having additional adjacency bonuses at higher levels for non-growth categories (wealth, influence, etc.), making them more versatile than a hospital.
As noted above, i'd go with:
Have the unused available tiles on each planet produce food by default
This forces a great choice on the player- as you develop the planet, you trade farming space for other functions -construction, research, influence, etc. These would need to be completely unused, so special tiles with resources like monsantium wouldn't produce food, regardless of their development status. Shade the production up or down for desert, toxic or bread basket planets as appropriate.
The game could provide some opportunities to make extra productive food tiles via research paths like the arcologies or greenhouses referred to above, or possibly allow some starbase food modules as well to extend the food supply. The current food enhancement improvements could be built and used as they are now.
Aquatics would need ocean tiles (maybe at a higher base production). Not sure about the synthetics.
Just my thoughts.
The default, unused tiles should neither give nor receive food bonuses for adjacency for this. If the tile itself has a special bonus, that tile could be bumped up.
What if cities "spawned" automatically as population maxes out. So they just automatically spawn on a free tile (if available) as the population grows and you can still choose to build and demolish cities if need be. It makes sense that the civ leader places production, research, farms, defences etc. on a planet. But maybe cities should be more organic so the planet pop itself builds them as needed. I think this would work well for AI, but still give full control to player.
Then food is no longer a requirement to build cities but instead just controls pop growth. Food shortage and the population declines. Food abundance and pop grows and cities spawn.
of the need to change the UI what really seems to be an issue) to introduce two versions of each project, one that is performed only once and the other that is auto-repeating.But we digress ...
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