In my game in 400 star galaxy (I hold just 16) it took 1000 food/month for prices go lower and lower each time I was selling food. Then I reduced the number of farms and tried with 500 food/month and the prices were able to return to normal.
Food is better than energy
- Thread starter redharo
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Selling food is particularly attractive because farmers produce more food than miners/technicians produce minerals/energy. Selling other stuff can delay the point where you will need to produce energy (and give the to adjust your economy). Generally, the point when prices crash is when you become the dominant economy. It obviously depends on how fast human plays, if there is significant presence of non-diplomatic AI that can also have an impact, since they don't trade.
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.
You seem to have an overabundance of both food and energy income. There is no need for it to be that high. This means you can afford to have less farms and to sell less food. Which means the price of food would be higher.
Also, you don't need to sell food every month. You can wait for the price to recover and then sell.
Obviously farms are not *ALWAYS* better than generators. E.g. if you buff generators with tech and species traits, but don't buff farms, then generators would presumably be better. However, farms are better than generators provided you take reasonable, minimal steps to ensure that the price of food stays relatively high.
One very easy way to make sure that the price of food always stays high is to set the minimum price you will sell food every month.
If you intend to run without energy districts you kind of need to sell every month. Let's say your energy expenses are 10K/month. To raise that you would need to sell 10K food per month at 1.0
But then you won't sell enough units to raise sufficient amount of energy
This is true if you don't have the trade resource to collect, or anything else to sell monthly.
Generally this is not an issue till later in the run, when you can start to compensate for it.
Yes, selling food for energy is a good early game strategy and then you transition to something more balanced.
Yes, that was my point. I had a mix of generators and farms before and the food price was very stable at around 1 energy. However this thread claims that food is just simply better so I did the extreme test and the claim is just not true. People are throwing those ideas around and I simply wanted to actually see the numbers in a lategame scenario. (it's not even that lategame). And there you have them.
Also your suggestion of selling in bulk does not work in the latest patch. Whether I sell 55k every year or 4.5k every month does not matter.
The whole situation with farms giving 6 food is a mess. And should be fixed at some point.
One aproach is to adjust rest market prices to more like 1:1:0.66 so if food is easier to produce, make it cost less.
The better aproach is to make yields of rural district 555. Which is better in so many ways.
Beside that, they could make another food policy "Empty Shelfs" with -50% consumption but brutal -30% growth -15% hapiness.
One aproach is to adjust rest market prices to more like 1:1:0.66 so if food is easier to produce, make it cost less.
The better aproach is to make yields of rural district 555. Which is better in so many ways.
Beside that, they could make another food policy "Empty Shelfs" with -50% consumption but brutal -30% growth -15% hapiness.
And the best approach at all is to:
- Improve the AI so the AI empires don't buy absurd amounts of food, preventing the ever gluttonous food market driven by empire represented market actors from existing in the first place.
- Possibly tweaking the rate of recovery of prices towards the default to be slower - and not only for food; alloy selling also comes to mind. This to lessen the gluttony of the abstracted civilian sector. Whether this is necessary depends on the impact of 1.
- Take another look at food-energy balancing for machine empires as part of their general overhaul.
The mess ultimately is that the value of Food = Minerals = Energy, but the need for Food != Minerals != Energy at all times, nor does the ability to produce Food = Minerals = Energy.
There are 3 interleaving problems that the developers have decided balance out cost wise. This is clearly not the case since Food and Minerals consistently rise above 2-5 credits each.
My guess is that the whole 6 food thing is a fudge because Paradox discovered late in development that it was too hard for players and AI to balance economy around 4 food, so they upped it a bit.
In any case I really can't seem to replicate any kind of efficient food-selling strategy past the early game. It's great for avoiding energy starvation when rushing AIs early or to buy a few more scientists, otherwise meh. I always seem to roll the +15% energy building really early too.
In any case I really can't seem to replicate any kind of efficient food-selling strategy past the early game. It's great for avoiding energy starvation when rushing AIs early or to buy a few more scientists, otherwise meh. I always seem to roll the +15% energy building really early too.
Please stop fixating on food only. Sell minerals too. It works much better. I never said I sell only food. In fact I keep saying I sell food+minerals and it lasts till mid to late game easily.
Never seen mineral selling work out. By the mid game I need to buy minerals anyway.
I don't think anyone suggested food alone could cover all expenses all the way until late game.
Instead that generators are unnecessary because by the time food sales start to saturate the market, you can usually make up the rest through trade or selling alloys/minerals. Continuing to ignore generators also means that you lose nothing by ignoring generator techs and can more quickly research other things.
I have played multiple empires without a single energy district the entire game. I'm not going to claim that not building any later game is 100% optimal, but it still works well enough. The AI by that point is gasping for alloys so you can get an absurd amount of credits for them (and at that point my ecumenopolis is producing more than I really need myself)
Meanwhile, I had an educational game last night where the price of alloys was down to 1.55 EC per unit thanks to all my sales. :cries:
But I learned my lesson: Skip straight to ring worlds/matter decompressors much earlier if running pacifist and you are out of planets to colonize. Habitats aren't going to cut the mustard no matter what you dedicate them to (unless you are a hive mind and utilize their building slots for warrens).
All the various primary industry Districts should produce 5 per job. It is silly that it takes two-third of the raw inputs needed to produce a single unit of Food that it does to produce a single unit of Energy, and yet their market price is, by default, equal. That's just an arbitrage opportunity, and it lasts for a surprisingly long time.
