I had that idea to finance my energy needs by selling food. It was working well for a while, but it didn't scale. But in general, of course, there are many reasons to produce tens of thousand of food per month - like feeding your population, for example. It's only producing so much more than you need internally is not such a great idea.
Food is better than energy
- Thread starter redharo
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slightly off topic but damn, how did you get 800 sprawl in an empire that size? are you just churning out habs/RWs like crazy?Explaining it in detail is more extensive than I thought so I just got this screenshot and maybe it'll help.
As you can see I am producing energy from pops and I do have some fallen empire buildings but they're really not needed as I could just sell more of my excess food and consumer goods. Not a giant empire either.
It is also worth mentioning that this doesn't always work all game. Especially early game food is very important for growth and expanding your empire drains all the resources from your producing worlds. But at some point you start to outproduce the cost by so much that you'll have more and more surpluses.
In my current late-middle game, empires place 0 value on energy, food, and minerals in trade. But I supported a major expansion of my fleets by trading the 3 strategic resources for alloys. something like 1:4 (1500 gases got me 6000+ alloys).
The game does seem to be good at assigning ~0 value to resources an AI has excess of.
I think all that you are saying is correct. My experience was very similar to yours and on a similar scale. I am guessing that people who sell food at 1+ are running relatively small economies. You can run your economy on much lower prices though. I was surviving with the prices around 0.3-0.4. It's not a good play, but I wasn't prepared to this situation and it takes time to switch some production from food to energy. When the prices went below 0.2 I've stopped selling and started selling other things instead and drove prices of everything way down.
Is there a minimum cap? If there's it's not 0.6. The lowest price I've seen was 0.12
Most likely habitat and ecumenopolis spam, fueled by megastructures. It's suuuuuper tedious though managing 4,000 pops. I had a similar run, but personally stopped all growth in my entire empire once I hit 1k pops because I was starting to lose my mind.
It might be that different goods have different minimum prices just as they have a base price.
It seems to me that the simplest solution to all this is simply to make food cheaper than energy. Make the base price .5 instead food per energy credit instead of .7, and you go a long way to blocking this exploit (though of course not entirely, since really the problem is the over-supply of energy, and more generally, the unlimited supply of everything on the market).
You know I was actually surprised by that as well. It probably doubled in the last 50 years. Once you finished Synth Ascension pop growth skyrockets and you need to build districts constantly.
And I wouldn't really call it spam. I have maybe 5-10 habitats, 3 ecumonopolis and only 1 ringworld. (which I guess counts as 2 as it's the Cybrex one) And I'm actually starting to run out of space on the 1st and 2nd module.
There is if energy generating districts are so bad that they are a trap to use for many empires.
It also seems weird from a lore perspective.
"We just invented cold fusion!"
"Great. Now we can power our death fleets with it, and have more powerful shields and energy weapons."
"Can't we also use cold fusion to power our planets?"
"Why would we do that? We have farms."
"But.... fusion is a great source of power."
"Not as good as methane from a cow's anus."
(pause)
"Why don't we use cow anuses to power our starships?"
"The delta vee from the flatulence, obviously."
Heh. Worth a chuckle.
Fortunately, in practical terms, this seems to be more of an AI issue than a design issue given the perverse budgeting AI in unmodded Stellaris, and thus a comparatively easier issue to address.
I am wondering whether those saying to go with no generators are doing so under 2.2.2 or 2.2.3. It may well work under the former but I have serious doubts under the latter.
In 2.2.3 this does not look to be even close to being true. The prices collapse much more quickly than under 2.2.2 and they recover much more slowly. Trickling in small batches of 100 as one poster mentioned is pointless. It would not only turn this game into a clicker, but it is a meaningless quantity by midgame.
So I did some cheating and quickly turned all my energy districts into farms and sold all my excess food. Let the game run for a few years and that's the result:
As you can see if you start selling ridiculous amounts each month the food price does plummet quite a bit. Now farms are definitely not more efficient than generators. However the point still stands, that you don't need generators at all. I think in my case if I would have had a split between clerks and farmers the food price wouldn't have crashed that badly. Also I could just sell some alloys... but anyway. I guess the topic of the thread is that farms are always better than generators which apparently is not true.
As you can see if you start selling ridiculous amounts each month the food price does plummet quite a bit. Now farms are definitely not more efficient than generators. However the point still stands, that you don't need generators at all. I think in my case if I would have had a split between clerks and farmers the food price wouldn't have crashed that badly. Also I could just sell some alloys... but anyway. I guess the topic of the thread is that farms are always better than generators which apparently is not true.
So I did some cheating and quickly turned all my energy districts into farms and sold all my excess food. Let the game run for a few years and that's the result:
As you can see if you start selling ridiculous amounts each month the food price does plummet quite a bit. Now farms are definitely not more efficient than generators. However the point still stands, that you don't need generators at all. I think in my case if I would have had a split between clerks and farmers the food price wouldn't have crashed that badly. Also I could just sell some alloys... but anyway. I guess the topic of the thread is that farms are always better than generators which apparently is not true.
Yeah, that’s another screenshot showing a substantial amount of income from trade supplemented by food trades. But it’s the clerks carrying the majority of the burden, not the farms.
Which is fine.
That's not how this works. Using the market relies on the AI putting the price up by buying stuff. And that usually works both in 2.2.2 and 2.2.3.
Yes. Just wanted to validate my suspicion as I did have some generators before. If you go full on farms it will crash the food price and make farms quite inefficient for energy "production".
So basically the way you turn food into energy is through clerks. This however needs a substantial workforce as clerks are very inefficient and only produce little net value per pop. So this is only viable when you either have good bonuses to trade value or just a large amount of pop growth bonuses.
That only works when you're small. When you can easily oversupply AI, they can't keep up with your sales and prices crash.
True if you are doing food only. But using minerals and alloys... It depend on a few things (like galaxy size but also how many bonuses the AI has). But short of a machine empires energy requirements you can certainly stop buildings any energy districts as soon as the galactic market opens.
Sure, there will always be a point where you can crash the market on a product. Where that is can vary greatly from game to game.
In my game I am selling close to 350 food a month for around 2.5 credits each. Periodically I even sell 10,000 food chunks when my stockpile starts to fill up. The price is holding fine.