Food is now obsolete and should be removed from game

[powerofvoid]

FTL is like magic: outside of a few known tricks, it works however the setting needs it to work, because we don't have any basis for it in reality.

That being said, if you are talking hard sci-fi space travel, the problem isn't powering your ship's equipment, it's having enough stuff to throw out the butt-end of the ship to make it start and stop, you should be asking how they get ships across a solar system in a mere month or two with chemical or ion thrusters.

For reference, the low-tech solution to getting a lot of delta-V is the Orion drive, which involves pointing a nuclear shaped charge at your ship and setting it off so that you can rocket-jump on the nuclear explosion, and then repeating this process every second until your ship is going fast enough.

And then when you get close enough (possibly only halfway) to your destination, you turn around and do the same thing in the other direction until you stop relative to your destination.

And then when you need to come back, you do step one again.

And then when you get back home, you do step two again.

And this can theoretically make for an economical round-trip time from Earth to Venus and back of 19 days or so.

EDIT: But even with that, 75% of your ship's initial mass will be nuclear shaped charges, and I suspect that it may only be that low if you reload your nukes on Venus.

 

[Riftwalker]

I think that CG should be made out of food,

frankly i wish we had more ways to make various goods. one of the ways should be one that turns a lot of food and half as many minerals as normal. would be cool

 

[Shirasik]

the following jobs in Stellaris:

Whoa, whoa, whoa, take it easy. Stellaris isn't Dwarf Fortress. We wouldn't play Stellaris if it would run at 1 fps every time anything interesting happens. Also I doubt Stellaris will ever let us to use anything like Therapist.

 

[Adantigus]

I got my genome tested for a known cancer risk a couple years back because one of my moms tested positive for it a few years before that after she got cancer, but genome mapping isn't a starting tech for space empires in 2200.

Why don't you already need fusion power as a prerequisite for FTL travel in the first place? How are these technologies sustaining themselves on traditional fission reactors?

A lot of futuristic strategy games seem to pad out the tech tree with technologies that really ought to have been long-since invented by the game's start date, or worse, have actually been invented already. I remember being really disappointed how one of the wonders you could build in Alpha Centauri was the Human Genome Project.

Why do they keep doing this? Is it that hard to come up with speculative technologies? I'd rather they come up with fanciful and essentially meaningless names ("omega reactors" or something).

 

[Derp]

space food is harder to make so that's why more pops are needed to do it

 

[Derp]

A lot of futuristic strategy games seem to pad out the tech tree with technologies that really ought to have been long-since invented by the game's start date, or worse, have actually been invented already. I remember being really disappointed how one of the wonders you could build in Alpha Centauri was the Human Genome Project.

Why do they keep doing this? Is it that hard to come up with speculative technologies? I'd rather they come up with fanciful and essentially meaningless names ("omega reactors" or something).

the storyline of SMAC kind of justifies it though

 

[TarnishedSteel]

I remember being really disappointed how one of the wonders you could build in Alpha Centauri was the Human Genome Project..

At time of publishing in 1999, the Human Genome Project was still underway and was considered a massive undertaking. The Factions landing on Planet lost significant amounts of data, forcing them to effectively redo what was at the time the cutting edge of technology.

 

[Riftwalker]

Why do they keep doing this? Is it that hard to come up with speculative technologies?

yes

 

[powerofvoid]

A lot of futuristic strategy games seem to pad out the tech tree with technologies that really ought to have been long-since invented by the game's start date, or worse, have actually been invented already. I remember being really disappointed how one of the wonders you could build in Alpha Centauri was the Human Genome Project.

Why do they keep doing this? Is it that hard to come up with speculative technologies? I'd rather they come up with fanciful and essentially meaningless names ("omega reactors" or something).

Ion thrusters are a technology that's almost 55 years old today (First space mission with ion thrusters: July 20th, 1964). They're a tier 2 technology in Stellaris.

How many years does it usually take before you unlock them?

 

[Shirasik]

How many years does it usually take before you unlock them?

Thanks to RNJesus, up to 100 years

 

[Alspego]

That's 6 out of 24 POPs on agriculture. 25% of the population. That's roughly the same percentage of people working in agriculture in the United States in 1920.

Make Amerika great again!

 

[stilgarpl]

For reference, the low-tech solution to getting a lot of delta-V is the Orion drive, which involves pointing a nuclear shaped charge at your ship and setting it off so that you can rocket-jump on the nuclear explosion, and then repeating this process every second until your ship is going fast enough.

Delta-v is basically mass of the stuff you are throwing away from your ship times it's speed. As you can't throw things faster than the speed of light, there is an upper limit to how much delta-v single stage ship can have. And the best possible engine is a giant flashlight

Ion thrusters are a technology that's almost 55 years old today (First space mission with ion thrusters: July 20th, 1964). They're a tier 2 technology in Stellaris.

How many years does it usually take before you unlock them?

Invention of wheel happened thousands of years ago. Car was invented a hundred years ago. You can't use the ion engines we have today to move big spaceships, they at most have the power to slowly push tiny probes over the course of years.

Chemical engines have low delta-v but lots of thrust. Ion engines have lots of delta-v but low thrust. Ion engines that have both high delta-v and high thrust is a future technology. And that's probably what Stellaris Ion Engines. tech is.

 

[Jzuken]

Umm, you can still put hydroponic farms on planets now. They go in building slots. If for some weird reason you lack enough farming districts on your worlds, just use a few building slots.

Or you could just buy food.

Hydroponic farms are extremely inefficient in their current state. A single unupgraded civilian industries can provide 12~30 pops with consumer goods and four times as much when fully upgraded. A hydroponic farm just gives a flat +2 farmers and about 16 food without a lot of bonuses and can't be upgraded.

Wait a minute. So you are complaining that food production matters more now, instead of being a no-brainer like it was before?

And why bother with agri-worlds? Agriculture is so efficient, that I almost never have any agri-worlds. The last time I did, it was a lush planet with titanic life. And then I bulldozed the farms in favor of mines.

It is harder to manage but it is not rewarding to do so, as you only have to manage it to prevent penalties, but don't get much in return. All other resources are more useful, and easier to manage, as you can manage them directly by spending or not spending them and mostly you won't run into the situation where the only option to cover the deficit would be to start building agrarian districts and buildings.

I also find it stupid that a tall empire that can extract matter from black holes and build ringworlds could be held back by food deficit, and amenities represent food more directly than food itself in the game.

 

[Ryika]

It is a proportional representation of the labor force, though.

I don't know how many Blorg are in a POP. But I do know that 6 of 24 POPs is 25% of the labor force in agriculture.

Yes, but again... a pop is not a proportional unit of your empire. Because of that, you simply cannot make the claim that 25% of the labor force are farmers based on that data. Pops are not a representation of your labor force.

Or do you really think there are only three kinds of blue-collar jobs in the world of Stellaris? What about construction work? Maintenance work? Who's doing the space mining, and who's building and manning your ships?

Imho, this very clearly shows that the pop system is an abstraction. For it to be anything other than that, we'd have to assume that everything that isn't represented, is automated ... which really doesn't make sense to me, because you'd expect many of the jobs that are displayed to be automated long before many of jobs that are not displayed.

And sure, it being an abstraction doesn't just mean that "everything goes!" - an abstraction should aim to present a cohesive picture, I very much agree with that. But saying that exactly 25% of your labor force is in agriculture just because that's the percentage of jobs in the job system are farmers, is not a sensible conclusion in my opinion.

 

[BarbeQ]

Hydroponic farms are extremely inefficient in their current state. A single unupgraded civilian industries can provide 12~30 pops with consumer goods and four times as much when fully upgraded. A hydroponic farm just gives a flat +2 farmers and about 16 food without a lot of bonuses and can't be upgraded.

In this you are right. There should me some advanced versions that privide higher yields. Or other special buildings that produce food (maybe in combination with other resources). More instersting stuff to do with food or ways to produce food from. Maybe an amenities bonus from a high food surplus or better pop growth boni?

But please do nut cut the whole food mechanic. Improve it.

 

[AGenericAccount]

It is harder to manage but it is not rewarding to do so, as you only have to manage it to prevent penalties, but don't get much in return. All other resources are more useful, and easier to manage, as you can manage them directly by spending or not spending them and mostly you won't run into the situation where the only option to cover the deficit would be to start building agrarian districts and buildings..

In this you are right. There should me some advanced versions that provide higher yields. Or other special buildings that produce food (maybe in combination with other resources). More interesting stuff to do with food or ways to produce food from. Maybe an amenities bonus from a high food surplus or better pop growth bonus?

But please do not cut the whole food mechanic. Improve it.

In big cities that have a lot of food districts and a food processing plant, building a lot of hydroponic farms makes sense...

 

[BarbeQ]

In big cities that have a lot of food districts and a food processing plant, building a lot of hydroponic farms makes sense...

Yes. True. But I still would like to have some more options here, like advanced farms or food industries that produce food and amenities or turn food into CG or... stuff that makes this whole thing a bit more versatile.

 

[Aldahen]

There is naturally the RP and Immersion aspect to the whole point: what does food production present and why do we need so much resources to do it?
One can delve quite deep into that. And the topic I'm raising touches this a bit too.

And then there is the game play perspective.
You have your basic resource extraction (energy, minerals, food), semi-finished goods (alloys and consumer goods) and then the end products (ships, research, amenities etc...).
And the "end products" tie in nicely with each other. I do like this new economy system and choices and planning you need to do to balance it out.
Even the fact that so large part of the population works on food doesn't bother me.

But what worries me, is that the basic resources are so similar. I actually do not make a distinction between them. To run my empire, I just make sure I have a healthy surplus on the basics resources as a whole. Whether it is energy, minerals or food doesn't matter. I use the galactic market to balance the things out. The fact that the mechanisms to produce them is the same makes it a bit boring. In the end I decided to concentrate only on food as you get 12 units per worker as opposed to 8 for the other resources. This +50% productivity increase more than offsets even the full 30% transaction fee on the galactic market.

To the OP: Forget energy and minerals and go all-in for food!

 

[Lady Lacroix]

FTL is like magic: outside of a few known tricks, it works however the setting needs it to work, because we don't have any basis for it in reality.

That being said, if you are talking hard sci-fi space travel, the problem isn't powering your ship's equipment, it's having enough stuff to throw out the butt-end of the ship to make it start and stop, you should be asking how they get ships across a solar system in a mere month or two with chemical or ion thrusters.

Wasn't really complaining, just pointing out how if we're going to start nitpicking the technical accuracy or feasibility of technologies in this game then we'll be here all day. But yes you are also correct.

 

[EvilTom]

Food is in a central pool, which is better than when we had to supply food on individual planets... but there's no way to blockade or affect the transmission of food (or other resources) to planets. A blockade mechanic would work well... or piracy should affect food in a resource transferal system.

If you build a moon that suppliers food to an city world that has no food, you should have a risk of the city world starving if that is interrupted.

That's why food feels lacklustre. It has so much more to give.