How do I move excess food from one planet to the one with a shortage?

[Baron Jukaga]

The logic of not shipping a billion people's needs of food is sound, but what happens when we apply that logic to colony ships? Are we really shipping a billion people in cold storage on those things? To me, 1 pop = a billion seems a little high.

 

[DaveDash]

Because we don't grow food in our factories and research labs.
We don't grow food in our industrial zones and our school zones.
We import it to all of these places from our agricultural areas, so that our production and learning facilities can focus on production and learning instead of agriculture.

We also don't just magically ship food around to places where it's needed the most.

It's based on trade, politics, etc

70% of the planet population today does not get enough food, yet we produce enough to easily feed everyone.

Now in a world of space magic (Stellaris) anything is feasible, so it comes down to gameplay mechanics.

To me the problem doesn't really seem to be global food vs local food. The problem seems more along the lines of food becomes uselss after a while as your population caps out. Global food is one solution to this problem, but without a whole bunch of other mechanics thrown in to make it more interesting (food supply lines etc) then it just creates more problems, and trivilises colonisation and new colony growth.

A good start would be having colony ships actually consume a pop so then even if you don't have migration policies enabled, your core planets don't get stuck full of pop.

Another mechanic could be to increase food consumption required inversely proportional to how much space on the planet you have left, to represent slowing growth as your planet gets more full. Filling that last pop tile should be a very slow process. I think Endless Space food functioned in this manner.

 

[BebopCola]

Food Spoilage is a thing mineral spoilage is not.

We can produce food products now with an effective shelf life of months to years. We're not talking about luxury goods like the shipment of fresh fish for next-day sushi preparation.

Moreover, current supply chain management is increasingly focused on just-in-time delivery over long-term warehousing, meaning the shipment just has to resist spoilage for the transit time and will be used immediately on arrival. Long-term warehousing is expensive and wasteful. If we're going to be so focused on the efficiency economics of interplanetary food shipments, we can't ignore the costs of long-term warehousing as a disincentive on the model.

Food, in this supply chain strategy, is no different than minerals. No one wants to pay the costs of warehousing bulk steel, or zinc, unless it's for an emergency stockpile any more than they'd want to warehouse canned goods and preserved foods longer than absolutely necessary. Food spoilage in modern supply chains is hardly the pressing concern it once was thanks to computer systems and software suites that can predict immediate and short-term local demand with great accuracy. Future advancements in such systems, as well as cheaper transport methods, energy supplies, and production methods will reduce this concern even more.

Again, wormhole travel, zero-point energy, and autonomous robotic labor makes our current understanding of economics and supply chain management absurdly obsolete even if we absurdly assume our technologies for food preservation stagnate at our current level.

 

[DJFariel]

...but without a whole bunch of other mechanics thrown in to make it more interesting (food supply lines etc) then it just creates more problems, and trivilises colonisation and new colony growth.

I don't think it needs a whole bunch of other mechanics. The fact that pops stop producing when bombarded/blockaded is already there, so you can effectively cut food lines already if food were global.
As far as trivializing colony growth goes, I agree and disagree. Managing colony food isn't an issue any longer, but managing empire food comes in its place. Falling below food lines on an empire scale hurts a lot more than just a planet, which is an added consequence to not properly managing your resources. Less micro and more macro.

Edit: As of right now, colony growth is incredibly formulaic and can be graphed up in a rather small flowchart that ultimately ends in the minimum viable food for whatever your colony is specialized for. It's not really unique or interesting - it's just a series of steps over time that you go through in order to have a new planet.

Second edit: the interesting decisions only occur when you first get the ability to build on a new planet. These questions begin and end with "what kind of planet is this going to be" as you walk through your planning of the most optimal food for growth step, and then later replace all your food buildings down to the minimum viable food with the most optimum set up for your planet type. These problems are systemic of a large issue with planets (being rather static with no unique buildings or wonders or anything to differentiate them) that shouldn't be discussed here, BUT removing the food start from the per--new-colony cycle would help with the tedium and make empire management more straightforward.

 

[COSIAN]

yes, but it would be less annoying, if there was actually a use for that planet that the sector governor decided needed hydroponics farms on every tile, that now has a +59 food surplus :|

Ya the sector stuff needs some tuning. But that said, I note the AI rushes food initially to get the pop up fast and I do that myself when manually controlling. The sector AI does seem to start converting to the desired resource for the sector eventually when you have replace building on .... I always do. But of course the sectors ability to do it quickly is dependent on the resources he has or you are giving him. The issue may be you have the sector set to not replace buildings and given what appears to be the sector build logic in my minimal testing he cant replace the food buildings he rushed.

 

[keynes2.0]

70% of the planet population today does not get enough food,

And the other 30% is obese.

 

[Maca2]

Right a Freighter in Space could be pretty big. The Problem is to get the Freight from the Surface to the Ship and the other way around. Leaving a Planetary is very Energy intensive and hence costly. So your Food once it's loaded on board is probably already so expensive nobody could afford it. And all the pseudo realism beside, since food in Stellaris influences directly the growth rate it is a balancing factor and the ability to transport food from a already established Planet to a new Colony would entirely blow this balancing.

So...what about that making huge fleets of thousand of ships and huge battleships?
How they transport so many parts and materials up?
Cant that work with food?
Space elevator ftw?

 

[Swami]

I didn't know it was a design choice, I respect their choice.

For those that argue that food couldn't be economically shipped across to other planets, you forget food can be some super condensed product that when mass produced, could very well be shipped in vast quantities. If some planet produced huge amounts of food paste, then why can't it be shipped? There's nothing that says what comes out of those domes is anything near tasty, for all we know it's some super concentrated, slow release paste they eat once a week.

Edit:
Spelling

Or lembas bread... XD

 

[Maca2]

I think ppl here overthinking it :-D

The technologie/expensive transport on orbit issue.......Out of question.You can build huge space stationts?Huge fleets with hundreds or thousnads of ships and the gigantic battleships on top of it?So many materials and technlogic parts must be transport up.
Colony ship...you can transport bilion of pops and theyr food rations for few day/week flight.?

So YES you can get the food up to giant empty can(frighter).

And about that overpowered food boost?
I dont know how about you,but when I have full planet I mostly sacrifice farms(when the others thanks to upgrades can produce enough) for space for labs.So most of my planets produce just enough food to not starve...

If you wanna agriculture planet, you must sacrifice your research boost and minerals.
You must maintain the fleet etc etc.
You will use it anyway just to support some huge desert planet with low food(until u have the technologi to supply it with few farms) etc.

I think it can work no problem if the DEVs will want to.

(And why ppl yell it will be so op?you can replace it now that you will simply transport/resettle pop instead food...so what? )

Hawk!

 

[AvengerDr]

This would tie in nicely with the possibility of colonising "hellish" worlds that for one reason or another have some strategic resource that makes them desirable. If you were able to colonise a barren world, you'd need "offworld" shipments of food to sustain the colony. If people are worried about food spoiling in space, then just make that a tech to research. I would imagine that without these techs, only a % of your excess food would be globally available. If you have say +10 food excess, then perhaps only 33% could be available until you research "Zero-Kelvin refrigerators"

 

[blue emu]

Also think how much food is moved around today on earth. I set no reason that in the future with ftl there wouldn't be the same thing happening.

Perhaps a bit of math might help?

Suppose a world is short by one billion meals per day. Let's call it a million metric tons of cargo per day, including packaging. The destination world is one month away at warp speed. If your freighters are big enough to each carry a cargo of food the same mass as an Aircraft Carrier in a single lift, It will require 300 of them to deliver food to the destination colony as fast as people eat it.

... and this assumes that the destination planet is at only -1 food. What if they are at -5, or worse?

 

[Maca2]

Perhaps a bit of math might help?

Suppose a world is short by one billion meals per day. Let's call it a million metric tons of cargo per day, including packaging. The destination world is one month away at warp speed. If your freighters are big enough to each carry a cargo of food the same mass as an Aircraft Carrier in a single lift, It will require 300 of them to deliver food to the destination colony as fast as people eat it.

... and this assumes that the destination planet is at only -1 food. What if they are at -5, or worse?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Oscar
Real frighter from today.Not the biggest one,but well one of the biggest I know.
Can transport 197,362 tons of cargo.So you need just 5 of them?
Its length: 395.4meters.

And its bound by gravity, deep of canals, deep of harbors, laws and norm how max big ship can be.(yes even now we can build bigger ships,we just cant by laws)
No future technologies.

I dont see a single reason why in future you cant buils some thing much bigger, some flying empty, hollow HALL

PS:And thats just container ship, I dont talk about Bulk carriers that can take even more(bassicaly around 400,000 tons of death weight as grain)

PPS:At january 1,2015 there was around 50,420 big merchant ships as tankers, cargo containers,bulk carriers.

 

[blue emu]

Can transport 197,362 tons of cargo.So you need just 5 of them?

No, you've neglected to account for the fact that each round trip takes two months, and only carries one day's worth of food. At 200,000 tons cargo space, it requires a bucket-brigade with 150 full ships outgoing and 150 empty ships returning per -1 food. Do the math.

 

[Maca2]

No, you've neglected to account for the fact that each round trip takes two months, and only carries one day's worth of food. At 200,000 tons cargo space, it requires a bucket-brigade with 150 full ships outgoing and 150 empty ships returning per -1 food. Do the math.

Well but even on Earth there are so many ships, that I dont see a single reason why you cant send that many ships so there can be delivery each day.Its a np.

 

[nhsk]

You can today can food that are safe to eat after 100 years -

But we are not able to move food to a colony -

Maybe a population wouldn't be too happy about eating canned food, but hey, would they rather starve?

I saw some mod that let you built a starport addon, I think 4 surplus food became 1 strategic food resourse. Another starport could then build another addon that could receive 1 strategic food resourse that converted it into 4 food. Something along those lines, eliminates freighters etc.

Was a pretty good solution.

 

[Maca2]

And more information for those who thinks you cant carry that much...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world's_busiest_ports_by_cargo_tonnage

In top 10 harbors on earth in year 2013.
There was transported 4,504,296,000 tons of good.
Thats 12,340,537 tons a day.

On this planet.
Just 10 harbors.
With our slow ships and old loading equipment.

I think the problem is,that you guys CANT IMAGINE how much cargo we can transport today with our technology.

 

[monsterfurby]

Plausibility aside, I think it would be an interesting game mechanic. Currently, once your planet is at its population cap, you have to demolish any excess food production in order to not waste space.

If civilian trade routes or food transportation (possibly at a cost) were in, that would open new possibilities. Mining worlds that feed the empire's war effort but are dependent on the supply route from dedicated farming worlds sound interesting and would make the conduct of wars a lot more interesting. Star Ruler 2 - I know I keep citing that game - had a pretty interesting approach to these supply matters. It went maybe a bit overboard with it, but I kind of enjoyed Distant World's civilian ships that would take care of slowly but surely evening out supply and demand within the empire autonomously.

 

[ctb123]

At first I had an issue with not exporting excess food like some other games, but once I decided to just accept how it currently works life has been good. The whole game economy would have to be reworked for balance if they did allow for exporting food. I think it COULD be done by Paradox, but SHOULD it be done? Other than some issues that are hopefully being addressed by the upcoming updates, I really like the economy and planet development part of the game as it stands.

 

[Chyll]

I'm okay with the idea of food being transferable... but not at a 100% ratio. There should be loss. Devote x food to export, and only x-y gets anywhere.
I don't know the balanced values... but in my head 100% efficiency feels wrong.

 

[N Katsyev]

Yeah, when trade comes in I wouldn't mind some sort of tradeable food commodity that's generated as some small percentage of a planet's excess production. That commodity then would be eaten by planets with a shortage or if there's no shortage be available for foreign trade. Simply having a global food feels entirely wrong though.