Food is now obsolete and should be removed from game

[Ryika]

It is also funny that a few years ago it was agreed that food should have been removed https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/remove-food-nutrition-in-stellaris.956393/ but now when we got even more consumer resources people somehow want to keep the resource that became obsolete, redundant, inadequate and has a terrible gameplay mechanic.

That thread's from 2016, when Food was still a local resource that's much more comparable to (a more primitive version of) the amenity system we have today than the current implementation of food. If you actually read through the thread, most people talk about gameplay problems, and whether food should be global or not, not about whether Food as a concept is obsolete.

I don't think it supports your point in any way.

 

[Jzuken]

On the other end, you could add even more depth to food by creating a "dish designer" and "diet manager" in which you can choose what pops in your civ eat, how much, and in what format (home, restaurant, cafeteria, street vendor, etc) for minor modifiers to various stuff.

Oh, it just makes it worse. Not only you would have to do much more micromanagement, but it also feels wrong for any country but hivemind. Just imagine some president saying "You must eat 25% more and make more babies". Although it makes sense for gestalt consciousness.

If you want to reconfigure the equations and penalties, I'm all for it, since a lot of those equations need some work. But just as there is nothing stopping the devs from applying a growth penalty from lack of amenities, so too does nothing stop them from applying a growth penalty from lack of food, and neither are in place. So it seems to me that what you're arguing for there isn't making food into a part of amenities, but rather to fix the penalties from lack of food. If there were more sensible penalties to lack of food and a scaling penalty where being 1% short of your food needs is less penalizing than being 5% short, would that pretty much not solve your issues? As you acknowledge, the way happiness and amenities relate otherwise makes sense, and it doesn't break the otherwise fairly consistent treatment of how amenities are granted and used.

Another issue with eliminating food as an independent resource, btw, is that you can't store amenities. Your food stockpile would disappear, despite every nation in history maintaining food stocks for times of need.

That thread's from 2016, when Food was still a local resource that's much more comparable to (a more primitive version of) the amenity system we have today than the current implementation of food. If you actually read through the thread, most people talk about gameplay problems, and whether food should be global or not, not about whether Food as a concept is obsolete.

I don't think it supports your point in any way.

I'm arguing that food either needs a rework, or should be eliminated completely for better.

It makes much more sense for food to be a local planet resource:

• it is not as easy or worthy to transport and stockpile as energy and minerals
• it can actually take a few years to transport it from one planet to another in some empires
• it is much easier and cheaper to produce it locally
• it applies penalties to all population empire-wise, while IRL there were examples where countries had famine in isolated regions, but the capital regions had plenitude of food
• because of that it is harder to manage in game, as you can allow amenities shortage on some fringe worlds, but food shortage would topple the whole economy

But if you make it a local resource - gameplay-wise food would work the same as amenities, so it could be merged with amenities.

 

[Bearjuden]

It makes much more sense for food to be a local planet resource:

• it is not as easy or worthy to transport and stockpile as energy and minerals
• it can actually take a few years to transport it from one planet to another in some empires
• it is much easier and cheaper to produce it locally
• it applies penalties to all population empire-wise, while IRL there were examples where countries had famine in isolated regions, but the capital regions had plenitude of food
• because of that it is harder to manage in game, as you can allow amenities shortage on some fringe worlds, but food shortage would topple the whole economy

You could make the same arguments about all the resources in game.

• I would argue food is, if anything, easier to transport than energy. At least food doesn't really decay until its expiration date. Energy starts decaying immediately in any form you transport it in. Any container of energy will immediately and inevitably bleed some energy out to the environment.
• Ships aren't faster because they happen to be carrying minerals, it takes the same time to transport no matter what.
• Again, most likely true for all resources. Local areas in real life are focused on resources but not exclusively like in game, so while it makes sense to have agri-worlds for example there is no real cause for there to be viable planets with not a single consumer goods factories, alloy forges, etc.
• It's not like logistics wouldn't play a factor for getting minerals from your mining world to your forge worlds, or your energy worlds to the rest of your empire. So maybe we want a logistics system. Okay, but why does that mean we can't have food in game? It would certainly be an interesting way to help keep ecumenopoli from being OP, if you had to work out shipping costs because all the consumer goods in the world mean jack squat in the wrong place, but it seems it has nothing to do with removing food specifically from the game.

gameplay-wise food would work the same as amenities

Sure, if you made it a local resource, but it's not, and it shouldn't be. Food is, on earth, shipped all over from productive regions to less productive regions. The Ukraine was the breadbasket of Russia, the Midwest supplies the entire US and more, Gaul and Africa fed the Roman Empire. All of these are cases where food isn't kept locally. The same logic applies in Stellaris, it's just on a larger scale. Instead of moving from one region or continent to another, it moves from one planet to another.

 

[Achiles]

I would like to see food go back to having planetary aspect. First, there should be a cost to import. You should have to pay like 0.5 energy for every unit of food that each of your planet's run in deficit. It's got to cost something to ship food from your agri-world to every other planet in your empire. Secondly, bombardment, piracy, and the disruption of internal trade should cause malnutrition and eventually starvation on planets that are cut off. Since we have trade value collection routes we should also food collection routes. Maybe even have planetary stockpiles, or malnutrition and starvation could work off of a timer.

 

[LeanneKaos]

It makes much more sense for food to be a local planet resource:

• it is not as easy or worthy to transport and stockpile as energy and minerals
• it can actually take a few years to transport it from one planet to another in some empires
• it is much easier and cheaper to produce it locally
• it applies penalties to all population empire-wise, while IRL there were examples where countries had famine in isolated regions, but the capital regions had plenitude of food
• because of that it is harder to manage in game, as you can allow amenities shortage on some fringe worlds, but food shortage would topple the whole economy

But if you make it a local resource - gameplay-wise food would work the same as amenities, so it could be merged with amenities.

Points 1 and 2 are already practically moot issues with today's technology. Points 3 and 4 contradict each other, I'll let you work out how.

Point 5 is precisely the point of having both Local and Empire-wide resources: some deficits will affect only one planet, others will affect the whole empire.

Sure, if you make food a local resource... then yeah, it becomes largely redundant with amenities and you've now manufactured a reason to just fold the two into the same thing. But then you've just resurrected the issues that people were complaining about in that older thread you linked (where people were calling for the elimination of food.) They tried local food way back when, and they didn't like the effect it had on the game.

Also, thematically, amenities are a different thing from food. Food is what you eat to avoid starving, Amenities are things like basic* health care and sanitation. Shoveling them both into the same bucket is like crapping where you eat.

 

[Jzuken]

You could make the same arguments about all the resources in game.

• I would argue food is, if anything, easier to transport than energy. At least food doesn't really decay until its expiration date. Energy starts decaying immediately in any form you transport it in. Any container of energy will immediately and inevitably bleed some energy out to the environment.
• Ships aren't faster because they happen to be carrying minerals, it takes the same time to transport no matter what.
• Again, most likely true for all resources. Local areas in real life are focused on resources but not exclusively like in game, so while it makes sense to have agri-worlds for example there is no real cause for there to be viable planets with not a single consumer goods factories, alloy forges, etc.
• It's not like logistics wouldn't play a factor for getting minerals from your mining world to your forge worlds, or your energy worlds to the rest of your empire. So maybe we want a logistics system. Okay, but why does that mean we can't have food in game? It would certainly be an interesting way to help keep ecumenopoli from being OP, if you had to work out shipping costs because all the consumer goods in the world mean jack squat in the wrong place, but it seems it has nothing to do with removing food specifically from the game.

Sure, if you made it a local resource, but it's not, and it shouldn't be. Food is, on earth, shipped all over from productive regions to less productive regions. The Ukraine was the breadbasket of Russia, the Midwest supplies the entire US and more, Gaul and Africa fed the Roman Empire. All of these are cases where food isn't kept locally. The same logic applies in Stellaris, it's just on a larger scale. Instead of moving from one region or continent to another, it moves from one planet to another.

Food is harder to stockpile, and it isn't stockpiled to large extent in modern world. Stockpiling and managing food would be a thing in medieval strategies, not in futuristic strategies. Food is shipped because it is cheaper to grow in some regions than other, and because labor is cheaper in some regions than others. But it is possible to grow food almost everywhere, as there is less infrastructure needed than for forging alloys or precision manufacturing, and that's why almost every country has farms but only a few have means to manufacture computers and aircraft.

Points 1 and 2 are already practically moot issues with today's technology. Points 3 and 4 contradict each other, I'll let you work out how.

Point 5 is precisely the point of having both Local and Empire-wide resources: some deficits will affect only one planet, others will affect the whole empire.

Sure, if you make food a local resource... then yeah, it becomes largely redundant with amenities and you've now manufactured a reason to just fold the two into the same thing. But then you've just resurrected the issues that people were complaining about in that older thread you linked (where people were calling for the elimination of food.) They tried local food way back when, and they didn't like the effect it had on the game.

Also, thematically, amenities are a different thing from food. Food is what you eat to avoid starving, Amenities are things like basic* health care and sanitation. Shoveling them both into the same bucket is like crapping where you eat.

Points 1 and 2 are actually issues if it takes 3 years to travel from agriculture world to capital world. How do you keep salad or meat fresh if it has to travel for 3 years? The only thing you would be able to ship for so long is grain, and for stockpiling food for years you would need even more inventive technology. Meanwhile hydroponics already exist, and now it is even possible to grow meat in lab: link, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat . This is the technology that exists right now, and it is even sustainable as of right now.
Point 3 and 4 don't contradict each other if you think about futuristic empire. Capital world would have a massive infrastructure that could also house underground hydroponic farms and meat labs, rural worlds could have an undeveloped infrastructure that doesn't provide enough necessities.

We have CG that work as empire-wide resource already. Just imagine if food was renamed to "pop upkeep resource" and had "pop upkeep districts", well people would scratch their heads as to why they have to manage consumer goods and "pop upkeep resource" and why they just can't have one resource that does the same job.


Somehow it is the word "food" that triggers everyone because people can't think outside the box and instantly assume that food should be one of the main resources because other strategies also have food.

 

[Bearjuden]

it isn't stockpiled to large extent in modern world.

All sorts of food is stockpiled, today, by various nations. This is flatly incorrect.

How do you keep salad or meat fresh if it has to travel for 3 years

Again, we today stock all food for future eventualities. Milk, wheat, dried fruit, and even foodstuffs you cited as impossible, such as meat; China maintains a stock of 200,000 metric tons of pork frozen for use in shortages. The moment you started talking about fresh, you changed the goalposts.

I had an idea in an other thread (not the main point if the thread) where xenophobic mega companies could set other species to livestock and gain amenities out of them, akin to how certain societies eat things like shark fins. If a logistics system was put in place, I could see amenities being a benefit of locally grown food. But you're arguing something that defies thousands of years of proven history.

 

[Highlordelliot]

Food could possibly represents all industries related to biological matter which included everything from the people who grow for farmers markets to massive agricultural conclomerates to the medical industry, the food service industry and other stuff like rubber plants.

An interesting mechanic for it would be abloackade mechanics for planets. Depending on how much it produces/needs it would suffer penalties. Where a rural world with a small population can hold out longer an urban world might find itself buckling under pressure from famine and food riots.

The way it is stockpiled and traded is kind of bonkers. I would think an empire would seek to ensure its planets were self sufficient.

I think it happens in real life quite a bit with economics. Several nations could be self sufficient in food production but they choose to import since its cheaper to trade.

 

[Jzuken]

All sorts of food is stockpiled, today, by various nations. This is flatly incorrect.



Again, we today stock all food for future eventualities. Milk, wheat, dried fruit, and even foodstuffs you cited as impossible, such as meat; China maintains a stock of 200,000 metric tons of pork frozen for use in shortages. The moment you started talking about fresh, you changed the goalposts.

I had an idea in an other thread (not the main point if the thread) where xenophobic mega companies could set other species to livestock and gain amenities out of them, akin to how certain societies eat things like shark fins. If a logistics system was put in place, I could see amenities being a benefit of locally grown food. But you're arguing something that defies thousands of years of proven history.

Salt and silk trade used to be a huge part of economy in thousands years of history, but it's much less of an importance now. Aluminium used to be worth more than silver until people found a way to extract it. History does change and so do economic priorities. If food as a part of economics was steadily declining for hundreds of years we can assume it would be marginally small in the future.

Food could possibly represents all industries related to biological matter which included everything from the people who grow for farmers markets to massive agricultural conclomerates to the medical industry, the food service industry and other stuff like rubber plants.

An interesting mechanic for it would be abloackade mechanics for planets. Depending on how much it produces/needs it would suffer penalties. Where a rural world with a small population can hold out longer an urban world might find itself buckling under pressure from famine and food riots.


I think it happens in real life quite a bit with economics. Several nations could be self sufficient in food production but they choose to import since its cheaper to trade.

Blockade mechanics could be implemented with CG and amenities.

Strategy games need "just enough" resources, because if you have too many resources it becomes difficult for players to manage them, difficult for developers to balance them and difficult for AI to account for them. I mean we already have an AI that cheats by getting free resources off the market without paying any energy credits.

 

[Tisifoni12]

I think it happens in real life quite a bit with economics. Several nations could be self sufficient in food production but they choose to import since its cheaper to trade.

Key to that is whether it is in fact cheaper to trade. Measuring food miles in light years . . .

There is more likely to be a market in luxuries than staples.

And if for example meat protein can be grown under laboratory / factory conditions rather than on pastures ?

 

[Bearjuden]

Salt and silk trade used to be a huge part of economy in thousands years of history, but it's much less of an importance now. Aluminium used to be worth more than silver until people found a way to extract it. History does change and so do economic priorities. If food as a part of economics was steadily declining for hundreds of years we can assume it would be marginally small in the future.

You are either not reading what I'm writing or are being deliberately obstinate, because what I'm saying is that stockpiling food is not a practice that is or has ever been in decline. I can't put it much more bluntly. Countries all over the planet to this day maintain strategic reserves of all kinds of food to deploy when there are shortages. That is exactly what happens in Stellaris. You have a stockpile of food, and then something happens and your net food income goes negative because there is a shortage, and so you draw out of the stockpile to supplement what is produced. This happens now just as much as ever, and there is literally no reason whatsoever that it should stop happening just because we made it to space.

 

[Friedrich von Deutschland]

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.

I like to imagine that IRL humans are actually super advanced in Stellaris terms but by some fluke we’ve failed to discover some of the more esoteric technologies and never unified into a one world government. So as a result our civilization looks a bit underwhelming by comparison.

 

[LeanneKaos]

Food is harder to stockpile, and it isn't stockpiled to large extent in modern world.

You've never worked in the grocery industry, have you?

Points 1 and 2 are actually issues if it takes 3 years to travel from agriculture world to capital world. How do you keep salad or meat fresh if it has to travel for 3 years?

In a box. And who says it's "fresh"? Processed food is a thing, and has a rather extensive shelf life. Hell, I've seen army rations from the 40s that are still edible (not the greatest, but edible):

And that's with outdated tech. Imagine what a futuristic empire can do for storage and preservation... oh wait, you're too busy trying to imagine why it wouldn't try instead. NVM.

(Also note that while it maybe takes 3 years for your 'formal' ships to cross your empire, you can send a random worker across the galaxy instantly... I'm humoring this point, but the time it takes to actually cross an empire is more of an artifact of 2.0's attempts to create 'tactical opportunities' and 'discourage doomstacking' by keeping you stuck in a system for 3 months at a time and gets broken the second you poke at the background movement.)

Point 3 and 4 don't contradict each other if you think about futuristic empire. Capital world would have a massive infrastructure that could also house underground hydroponic farms and meat labs, rural worlds could have an undeveloped infrastructure that doesn't provide enough necessities.

Right there *is* the contradiction: that last line effectively demonstrates that "cheaper to grow it locally" isn't always a thing.

We have CG that work as empire-wide resource already.

Yes? And also energy and also minerals, and all three do different things from what food does. Again, I point out that we *had* local food (which is what your 'erase food, just have amenities' would amount to) and it wasn't popular.

Somehow it is the word "food" that triggers everyone because people can't think outside the box and instantly assume that food should be one of the main resources because other strategies also have food.

That... doesn't even make sense, except as a cheap attempt at condescension.

Strategy games need "just enough" resources, because if you have too many resources it becomes difficult for players to manage them, difficult for developers to balance them and difficult for AI to account for them. I mean we already have an AI that cheats by getting free resources off the market without paying any energy credits.

I recommend you don't try to play Distant Worlds, then. Something like 40 different resources in the base game, and the files are built to support up to 80 for modders who want to add more.

 

[DeadEyeTucker]

Food has gone down in terms of it's impact economically, but that's mainly due to efficiency in food production. It's now relatively cheap and available in large quantities. But if you think it's economically dead or completely unimportant then you'd be really wrong. Vanish the majority of food overnight and we'll see what markets crash and what industries die. Cause as much as I love to drink and play video games, I can name two things I wouldn't be spending money on if basic food tripled in cost.

As for in game, one problem of deleting food and relying on amenities and CG is slaves. They're a perfect example of where CG, and to a reduced effect, amenities don't work as a "pop upkeep" resource. Slaves in a stratified economy have ZERO CG upkeep and workers have 0.1 CG upkeep and slaves use 0.75 amenities. But they both still consume food.

Lastly, Stellaris isn't a post FTL alien galaxy simulator. It's more of a Sci-Fi Genre Simulator. And bread basket planets are one of those tropes/things in sci-fi such as Star Wars.

Now, that's not to say you haven't raised some points about food not being more interactive or affecting of the game. If you have rampant piracy or planets blockaded there should be some issues when food isn't produced locally. A simple effect for blockades would be to just have a planet under blockade contribute 0 to empire pools. Or have some scaling slider based on infrastructure/strength of garrison vs blockading fleet power. Logistic loss based on trade would be a bit harder. You could do something simple like "all resources are collected at the capitol" like trade value is, and any % of trade value from a planet to the capital that's lost would be the same % loss on resources generated by that planet. But that doesn't simulate non-capital worlds getting cut off from supplies. I think it would be hard to get right, but if you could it would give wide empires another thing to contend with. Either they ignore it and the efficiency of their empire takes a significant hit, or they deal with it and spend resources and time protecting trade.

 

[Jzuken]

When I started this thread I made an argument about food as a game mechanic, but people still derail it into "pops need food because that's what they eat". So why don't we have to manage water supply supply, then? It is also essential, but we don't have "water income" and "water stockpile".

 

[Cannes]

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

Yep, it is quite likely that in future societies, as resources become abundant, that people will gravitate towards service jobs, especially food businesses. Essentially nobody will eat at home anymore, you will always go to fancy restaurants every day, to get new and amazing food experiences.

 

[Bearjuden]

When I started this thread I made an argument about food as a game mechanic, but people still derail it into "pops need food because that's what they eat". So why don't we have to manage water supply supply, then?

Water is something you consume that's necessary for life...can you think of any resource in game like that? Consumable, transportable, and without which pops logically should start dying? We might've even mentioned it once or twice here in this very thread.

And fwiw I think the question of "does your proposed change make any sense" doesn't constitute derailing it. It's an important question to consider. Removing diseases from CK2, or manpower from HoI4 might "streamline" those games and make gameplay easier but if you suggested such a thing you'd be laughed out of the thread because it'd be downright unrealistic in every sense. Saying something should be changed because the gamplay it provides isn't interesting is a perfectly valid position to hold, but only within the framework of fairly trying to model the situation, and removing food from the model entirely isn't really an honest representation of how empires work.

 

[Secret Master]

Its worth mentioning at this point that food is a way the game uses mechanics to create sci-fi tropes. Now that we have city planets, the inclusion of food (and planet specuakization in general) lets players invoke the whole “this luscious planet is our breadbasket.”

I still think the labor devoted to food is absurdly high, but food does create strategic decisions and makes sense in terms of some science-fiction stories.

 

[FlyingPhoenix]

Without a logistics network and a starvation mechanic I don't see that food really adds value. In Stardrive for example you could create blockades of the logistics network or make surgical strikes on key planets. This kind of gameplay doesn't happen in Stellaris as much in my experience.

Strategy games should be as much about interaction with other actors as anything else, and given that the resource model only encourages interaction via warfare, I don't see that modelling the civilian economy adds much.

 

[Sheriff Godwin Law]

I like food because its existence makes the livestock slave and extermination by processing mechanics work.

I suppose either of these methods could also fuel the creation of consumer goods, but then we end up in a situation where conquering your neighbor and processing them into food can be used to fuel an expansion of research labs and cultural centers. Which seems to be needlessly abstract.