Food is now obsolete and should be removed from game

[Maethendias]

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  Respectfully Disagree x 58
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  Agree x 5
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  Helpful x 1

WOW people REALLY like arbitrary non usefull ressources who knew

 

[Lady Lacroix]

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.

For this you would need at least a basic logistics system in place first and honestly i'm not quite sure how you could make that work without it being totally frustrating having to personally manage the movement of goods throughout an empire when planet populations are constantly rising.

 

[EvilTom]

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  Respectfully Disagree x 58
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  Agree x 5
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  Helpful x 1

WOW people REALLY like arbitrary non usefull ressources who knew

Food seems an important thing to have in the game (as organics NEED it to survive). People don't want it removed - they want it relevant and a good game mechanic.

It's not arbitrary.

 

[EvilTom]

For this you would need at least a basic logistics system in place first and honestly i'm not quite sure how you could make that work without it being totally frustrating having to personally manage the movement of goods throughout an empire when planet populations are constantly rising.

I agree. Maybe just trade lines, like how to the trade system works... or even a "private" economy like in Distant Universe.

 

[Maethendias]

Food seems an important thing to have in the game (as organics NEED it to survive). People don't want it removed - they want it relevant and a good game mechanic.

It's not arbitrary.

you could just have it tied into consumer goods.... i mean, THATS LITERALLY WHAT CONSUMER GOODS ARE IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT

also, why is it a good mechanic? it literally does not add ANYTHING.... ESPECIALLY WITH THE PLANET REWORK.... oh yeah, nvm... it gives you now free money from time to time since you can just throw it away for credits... i see now why people like it

 

[Ryika]

you could just have it tied into consumer goods.... i mean, THATS LITERALLY WHAT CONSUMER GOODS ARE IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT

Stop yelling please.

Consumer Goods are a lot of things. TVs, cars, clothing, that keyboard that you're typing on... Food is also a consumer good, but it does have a special role - as was already said, it's the only type of consumer good that is really necessary for basic survival and is a core need of literally everybody.

In a galactic empire that produces its foods on some worlds and needs to have it distributed on other worlds, it merits its own resource in my opinion - there's so much that could be done with the resource.

 

[powerofvoid]

Thinking about it, there the anti-fooders sort of have a point. (but we still shouldn't eliminate food):

From a game mechanics perspective, food is sort of redundant.

But from a perspective of making the game feel alive, and not like a boring bunch of game mechanics stuck together, I think it is useful.

And that second thing is important, and something Stellaris could probably do with improving on.

 

[Schroom]

I don't know if you guys follow Aspec, but he put out a video where he literally builds not a single farm and still has an abundance of food. granted he is soilent greening the hell out of the game mechanics, still it can make you think while discussing the current issue in this thread.
meaning there are other, more creative ways of making food you might no think about immediately.

at least for me food has never been an issue.

 

[EvilTom]

you could just have it tied into consumer goods.... i mean, THATS LITERALLY WHAT CONSUMER GOODS ARE IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT

also, why is it a good mechanic? it literally does not add ANYTHING.... ESPECIALLY WITH THE PLANET REWORK.... oh yeah, nvm... it gives you now free money from time to time since you can just throw it away for credits... i see now why people like it

Have offended you with your shouting? I did not intend to say that it was currently a good mechanic. I had intended to mean to that people "want" a good mechanic with food as food is relevant.

"Consumer" goods does not mean that I eat my TV or car, but I'm being slightly obtuse with that. It's an extreme example. I'd be happy if food was a constituent of consumer goods, with civilizations that concentrate on bio or organic buildings, ships and good require more "food" etc.

What would hive minds use if they didn't have food? Would we differentiate them from mechanical.

The fact is, is that normal organic/biological populations require food, so it could be and should be an interesting mechanic. I want to have populations starve, or have bad harvests, or mismanage their environment, or have to ship in food from "farming" planets... not necessarily because it's real or realistic (or not) but just because they are commonly sci-fi tropes.

 

[Ciderglove]

you could just have it tied into consumer goods.... i mean, THATS LITERALLY WHAT CONSUMER GOODS ARE IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT

also, why is it a good mechanic? it literally does not add ANYTHING.... ESPECIALLY WITH THE PLANET REWORK.... oh yeah, nvm... it gives you now free money from time to time since you can just throw it away for credits... i see now why people like it

Maethendias, I'm afraid you misunderstand what Consumer Goods are. They are not food. They are things like fridges, telephones, computers, books, cars, cupboards. They are entirely distinct from food; the clue is that they are made out of minerals.

 

[Maethendias]

why do people constantly think going capslock means me screaming... when im just being lazy and use caps instead of the fat marker to point out stuff

 

[Maethendias]

What would hive minds use if they didn't have food? Would we differentiate them from mechanical.

the thing with that is that they SHOULDNT acutally use "food", but BIOMATTER, and.... if you use specificly created (grown) biomatter to make a ship, building or weapon, NONE OF THAT BIOMATTER IS FOOD, its more akin to grown alloys and minerals.

also, food for hiveminds doesnt make nearly as much of a diffrence as you say.... considering only their pops run on food (oh yeah ooooh, and those 4 edicts ..... things you just fire and forget). You dont use food to build buildings, ships, armies etc... you use MINERALS AND ALLOYS.... like machine empires, I MEAN HIVEMINDS EVEN USE ENERGY CREDITS, that represent both electricity AND money flow.... so theres that

also also, how it currently stands, BOTH gestalts are severly underdeveloped, so there isnt even a point TRYING to differentiate them via artificial means (especially when those means are just illogical and, well.... unreasonable)

 

[Jzuken]

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!

And this breaks it even more. Why even build Dyson spheres and matter extractors when Rusty Joe can sell his beetroots and wage wars on fallen empires with an agrarian world?

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.

Food seems an important thing to have in the game (as organics NEED it to survive). People don't want it removed - they want it relevant and a good game mechanic.

It's not arbitrary.

We have amenities, which are not in a central pool, and which will be devastated when the planet gets raided. We didn't have amenities and consumer goods before and that's why we had food that represented pop upkeep and was also in a planet pool, just as it should be. Then we got a bunch of game mechanics that added energy as pop upkeep, and also added devouring swarm while we still had tile system, so devs had to make food as a global variable so you could have food planets, which makes less sense. And now we get amenities which work the same as food used to work, we also get consumer goods which affect living standards. And yet we still have food that just became redundant.
Most strategies require one or two resources for pop upkeep, but if you have to micro a lot of resources for pop upkeep it just becomes more of a city simulator.

Stop yelling please.

Consumer Goods are a lot of things. TVs, cars, clothing, that keyboard that you're typing on... Food is also a consumer good, but it does have a special role - as was already said, it's the only type of consumer good that is really necessary for basic survival and is a core need of literally everybody.

In a galactic empire that produces its foods on some worlds and needs to have it distributed on other worlds, it merits its own resource in my opinion - there's so much that could be done with the resource.

We can expect to be able to produce food locally in 200 years, as it is already possible to build sustainable systems. It is also amusing that you could transport food from one system to another for a few years, but you can't dedicate small parts of planetary building to it's production. And that's what amenities system already represent. If you have a small shortage of amenities - then maybe your pops don't have hot water in their showers, streets are littered. If you have a huge shortage - then you also probably have a deficit of food, which makes pops unhappy. And amenities shortage is local to a planet, and pops happiness scales with amenities, not like a flat empire-wide happiness reduction if you run into food shortage.

You would expect that a country runs out of consumer goods and amenities long before running into food shortage.

 

[Maethendias]

Maethendias, I'm afraid you misunderstand what Consumer Goods are. They are not food. They are things like fridges, telephones, computers, books, cars, cupboards. They are entirely distinct from food; the clue is that they are made out of minerals.

i know what consumer goods are... i was talking about tying food into consumer goods, considering BOTH RESSOURCES fullfill the SAME ROLE. It wouldnt make a diffrence at all (thats why i said they are the same, since they fulfill the same role; an upkeep mechanic for biopops, which is the reason why food is redundant as a ressource)

if you dont like the term "consumer goods" for the general name of ressource representing , well goods and foods required for biopop upkeep, name it something else, that is NOT the point of this post or my argument

 

[Ciderglove]

i know what consumer goods are... i was talking about tying food into consumer goods, considering BOTH RESSOURCES fullfill the SAME ROLE. It wouldnt make a diffrence at all (thats why i said they are the same, since they fulfill the same role; an upkeep mechanic for biopops, which is the reason why food is redundant as a ressource)

if you dont like the term "consumer goods" for the general name of ressource representing , well goods and foods required for biopop upkeep, name it something else, that is NOT the point of this post or my argument

But Food and Consumer Goods do *not* fill the same role. Food keeps people alive and lets populations grow. Consumer Goods keep people happy.

 

[BarbeQ]

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.

Why not implement sieges or better blockades of planets into the game. Currently, I fleet can only use orbital bombardment. But a fleet could also cut off a planet from any external supplies. In this case, any shortages from planetary production would not automatically be balanced out through other sources within the empire. The pops on the planet would become upset over time and maybe revolt or even surrender to the blockading fleet. This way, one could conquer systems without the need of bombardments and large invasion forces. Food and food supply could be a critical element in such a situation.

 

[Ciderglove]

Why not implement sieges or better blockades of planets into the game. Currently, I fleet can only use orbital bombardment. But a fleet could also cut off a planet from any external supplies. In this case, any shortages from planetary production would not automatically be balanced out through other sources within the empire. The pops on the planet would become upset over time and maybe revolt or even surrender to the blockading fleet. This way, one could conquer systems without the need of bombardments and large invasion forces. Food and food supply could be a critical element in such a situation.

Very cool idea!

 

[Bearjuden]

but you would need 5-6 hydroponic farms to cover food needs of one planet.

You're being hyperbolic here, but getting at the one issue I kind of agree with: farms need to be upgradable. I don't understand why any of the basic resources don't have an upgradable building (or any at all) but it makes by far the least sense for food, when in the real world we're already looking at ways to build farms in skyscrapers. Surely the advanced space faring societies of Stellaris can figure out similar such solutions to allow for vastly increased farming output.

 

[bobucles]

If you consider "food" to be an abstraction of a larger "survival essentials" market, it makes sense that it's a fairly large market. People don't only need potatoes but water, sanitation, processing and medicine. An individual farm may only require a tiny fraction of the populace, but when you're including sewage plants and snackeries and penicillin it takes a lot more people than you think. A shortage of these "organic" resources will absolutely degrade the health and well being of your population and cause severe problems.

Don't throw a hissy fit because the icon is an apple.

 

[BarbeQ]

You're being hyperbolic here, but getting at the one issue I kind of agree with: farms need to be upgradable. I don't understand why any of the basic resources don't have an upgradable building (or any at all) but it makes by far the least sense for food, when in the real world we're already looking at ways to build farms in skyscrapers. Surely the advanced space faring societies of Stellaris can figure out similar such solutions to allow for vastly increased farming output.

In the same way, some of the starbase modules/buildings could also benefit from some upgraded versions powered with special resources.