Thoughts on advanced resources made from Food, CGs and Society tech?

[Pancakelord]

Food, Consumer Goods and Society tech. - the holy trinity of dump stats.

Food - was once a planet bound resource (akin to amenities today), so long as you had "enough" it didn't matter, and you had to dumbly build out farms on each world (back in ye olde tile days) to satiate food requirements. Eventually it was made a pan-empire resource, but for a long time you could run at or near total deficit with food - the addition of deficit situations, more recently, killed that strategy, but fundamentally it failed to give food a purpose.

Society - Society techs used to be a bit more numerous early in the games life, early on you had to research each planet type before settling on them, and some of the T0 techs (like the ability to colonise/build colony ships) in the interest of QoL/streamlining. Since then, it's got some uses, but by large plays a backseat in priorities vs engineering techs. Physics too, but it leads to some pretty powerful energy weapons, robotic upgrades and energy harvesting techs, making technicians even more efficient than farmers (a topic I'll skip over for now).​

Consumer Goods: A lot like food, it has a core upkeep loop you need to satisfy, and it feeds in to some jobs (mostly amenities, tech and unity producing ones). But, beyond a single planet decision to distribute CGs and the creation of colony ships or trading it away, lacks any real uses beyond that, and can largely be sold for EC and converted in to other goods via the market.

TLDR:

• Food: You need enough to keep your people alive, a bit more if you want them to grow fast, and can mix some in to alloys if you have a catalytic civic, and that's about it.​
• Society techs: Its nice to have but increasing society production is not as important - generally - as physics or engineering, as those fields offer more potential upside.​
• CGs: a pure upkeep resource. If you have enough, good, sell any overproduction.​

With that out of the way, I wanted to suggest some advanced uses for Food, in particular, that ties in to the other two resources, and get people's opinions on it.
I cant say this is going to be popular with everyone, but I want to get some feedback on a possible mod idea if nothing else.

• Resources:
• 
  Luxury goods (CGs + food or CGs + minerals if lithoid)
• 
  Vitagel (name pending) = Society Tech + Food [+minerals if lith].
  • Essentially a kind of programmable biological substance, vitagel - name pending - would be used for all "advanced" forms of biology in the game, which currently get randomly split between energy costs and society costs, usually. It would require the use of society technology, largely to represent the science going in to converting dumb biomatter in to smart biomatter. A (less efficient/higher input cost?) mineral based fallback could exist for lithoid economies that have no food income, for gameplay, if not lore reasons.
• Uses:
  • Vitagel
    • Terraforming: Long ago this required terraforming liquids and gasses (two specific resources that were cut many patches ago) and since then terraforming only costs energy credits, which adds to the mountain of uses for EC.
      • Terraforming could cost upfront Vitagel + (possibly) a running vitagel upkeep cost if terraforming out of the world's original climate zone (eg. wet to cold, continental to arctic) or to a special world type (ex. gaian) if you don't have idylic bloom (or equivs) or the world shaper AP - both would reduce the running cost by either 50% or 100%.
      • Special/non organic planets like machine worlds, ecumenopolis wouldn't cost vitagel.
    • Bio-Army/Bioships(if we ever get some) upkeep - rather than consuming minerals, In my opinion armies ought to be upkeeping either food or an advanced resource like vitagel, which would cover things like nutrient paste, medicine, combat drugs and other things armies need to survive. Other exotic armies like clones and xenomorphs would consume this as part of their basic existence - and all of the food/society[biology] science that goes in to maintaining that.
    • Cloning/pop assembly. This is one of the few areas that does actually use food, beyond just basic sustenance. Using Vitagel here could add an extra society tech sink, whilst preserving the food drain, indirectly, and societies that are highly dependent on the genetic arts would actually have to prioritise society tech over engineers or physicists to sustain that infrastructure.
    • Vitagel could be used to enhance hive pops. How? Idk just yet. mostly for equivalence with luxury goods (as gestalts don't get Consumer goods)
  • Luxury Goods
    • Boosting branch office buildings/outputs and other holdings: not sure of the mechanics here but some way to burn luxury goods on worlds that host branch offices to increase "mutual" benefit would be nice, or expend luxury goods via overlord holdings to boost vassal opinion.
      • Owning a branch office could let you distribute luxury goods to the pops there, dramatically boosting their happiness and trade value generation.
    • Boosting rulers/ruler jobs: Ruler-pop related modifiers are pretty rare. But something like Luxury goods could be a good way to provide these benefits.

Both vitagel and luxury goods could be produced via planet-unique buildings. e.g. a Vitagel factory worker consumes food and Society tech to make X Vitagel a month. On top of that, they produce extra vitagel and consume some food/soc-science per number of farmers/2 and researchers/2 on the planet [alternatively, rather than adding another job, the factory itself produces the vitagel whilst consuming scaling [per num farmers and scientists present] amounts of food and society research).

• This would make Agri worlds and tech worlds good places to drop these, and they'd only take 1 building slot - somewhat similar to the alloy foundry building.
• Luxury goods factories could work in a similar way. But instead scale off farmers and cg workers. Making factory worlds and agri-worlds a good place for luxury goods production.

Below in green are the major existing sources/sinks for Food, CGs and Soc Tech.
In Amber/yellow are new possible resources and sinks for those resources.

 

[Tamwin5]

There have been a few threads talking about this (mainly about food). The main conclusion isn't that food needs more uses so much as that it needs one time uses. If you need to produce a bunch of vitagel and luxury goods that costs 1000 food worth of upkeep, then you'd just employ 1000+ food worth of farmers and run into the same situation of a massive stockpile and nothing to do with it. Sure it makes farmers more important, which is nice, but it doesn't really impact how food is.

Making resources out of science is an interesting idea, but I think the solution for society research is just making society repeatables more useful. I think that the +20 naval cap one could probably be uncapped, for one. I want to say that Starbase cap should be uncapped as well, but I suspect that would actually lead to worse balance, and people trying to starbase every single system in their empire (although we already have planetary rings doing something similar, so maybe that's ok?). You could also add repeatables for Leader XP gain, empire relations, infiltration speed (there should really be normal techs for that too), and diplomatic weight.

 

[mammonmachine]

Occasionally, I've wondered if food needed a more generic name, e.g. biomass, to extend the kinds of uses we can imagine for it. I think an advanced resource that uses food would be a good idea, and vitagel seems like an interesting model for it.

I'm a little unsure about consuming research to produce a specific resource. I like idea of research being consumed in order for pops to enter new specialist or ruler roles, with more roles requiring society than other research types (it's weird how pops leap into roles requiring many years of education) - but at the moment I'm not quite sure what this adds to gameplay.

Finally, it seems pretty obvious to me that army production should consume food and either consumer goods or alloys, and not minerals.

 

[fourteenfour]

I would be more happy if we normalized economics across all empires. Consumer Goods are are just a diversion that makes it harder to balance between those empires which require them and those who don't. If we ditched consumer goods we could use food; minerals in the case of lithoids; to drive living standards along with amenities. Amenities are universal in population effects and if we used them combined with food as an example to drive living standards it would give a real reason to have clerk/drone jobs.

I really don't want to introduce super resources, we already have special resources that must be found and would have a more profound effect on the game if possessing a system with them was required instead of transmuting/refining for them or worse buying them off the market.

 

[Pancakelord]

I would be more happy if we normalized economics across all empires. Consumer Goods are are just a diversion that makes it harder to balance between those empires which require them and those who don't.

From a flavour standpoint I'd firmly disagree with this. But from a technical standpoint, If we were in the 2.x patches, I might have agreed with you on it both being too hard to balance and too hard on the AI.

• But barring DAs, RSes (given enough time) and meme builds like mastercrafted aquatics, economic/game balance is pretty solid.
• Also, the AI is more than up to snuff now, it's actually non-resource issues mostly holding it back - trade value, slavery+non sapient machine migration and fleet capacity are stand out issues.

it would give a real reason to have clerk/drone jobs.

Clerks are for trade and unemployment. The reason they lack purpose is because trade is technically broken, it isn't coded like a traditional resource and can't be harnessed in a way akin to minerals.

And pop growth changes make unemployment largely a thing of the past, as sad as that is.

Really what clerks need is

1. A technical/back-end trade rework (probably the cleanest method)
2. A new class of modifiers that replace them.
   • E.g. clerk 1 per city district/ 1 per commercial building is swapped with another flavour worker job
   • Each tradition could unlock a new planet decision to trigger the swap to X job type. Subterfuge could unlock "intel analysts" that increase spy growth speed. Or the diplo tradition could unlock 'political analysts' that boost dip weight, trust growth and so on.
3. The most hilarious idea I've seen is to rework influence to work with large numbers (like energy, unity etc) and have clerks be the primary non-gestalt source of influence. It'll never happen but it's perverse enough to wonder how it'd play.

we already have special resources that must be found and would have a more profound effect on the game if possessing a system with them was required instead of transmuting/refining for them or worse buying them off the market.

We do? You can buy just about everything on the market, and much of it can be refined too.

Resources spawn homogeneously across the galaxy, after 2.1, where prior to that they were actually something that spawned in discrete places and had to be sought out.

That kills a lot of exploration for me - reasons for war, too. Despite this thread not being about unique/rare resources (it's about food and CGs and their overabundance due to lack of use) I'd be all for the inclusion of more of them.

 

[Pancakelord]

Occasionally, I've wondered if food needed a more generic name, e.g. biomass, to extend the kinds of uses we can imagine for it. I think an advanced resource that uses food would be a good idea, and vitagel seems like an interesting model for it.

I'm a little unsure about consuming research to produce a specific resource. I like idea of research being consumed in order for pops to enter new specialist or ruler roles, with more roles requiring society than other research types (it's weird how pops leap into roles requiring many years of education) - but at the moment I'm not quite sure what this adds to gameplay.

Finally, it seems pretty obvious to me that army production should consume food and either consumer goods or alloys, and not minerals.

Food is a basic resource so that it can feed pops easily, so I'd assumed you needed it 'first' and it would be too weird for pops to eat 'biomass', flavour-wise.

But it could work, possibly, as we already have CG as a core upkeep cost, and that's a 2nd tier resource.

I'm not advocating for food becoming an advanced resource, but it does open up a few interesting ideas, that are at least fun to consider the mechanics of.

• For example:
• Hive drones can consume biomass straight from the ground
• whilst sapient pops consume food (biomass that has been processed in a building/job?)
  • unless the sapient pops are set to the basic sustenance living standard,
    • where they'll eat biomass too, but be pissed and output less.

It doesn't provide more use-cases for food, but it does make hive drones quite a bit more distinct, which is nice.

 

[Pancakelord]

The main conclusion isn't that food needs more uses so much as that it needs one time uses.

This is a fair point. When it comes to single uses I think there are really 4 major uses for food(or vitagel, or bio mass) without coming up with new mechanics:

1. Terraforming
   1. Planet terraforming upfront cost
   2. Planet feature rolling / mutation / replacement. (Largely gated by APs related to terraforming) Eg. spending x food/vitagel to increase planet size, change district counts or attach extra planet modifiers there to squeeze out extra performance.
2. Situational planet decisions (the problem with the old distribute food - and to a degree distribute luxury goods - is that it can be done at any time (and it's cheap) and so people did it all the time. Stuff like:
   • Hosting a festival after a leader is coronated, or a war is won, randomly getting diplomatic events related to your culture/food (sort of like banquet events in crusader kings).
   • Each time you unlock a society tech (stuff like the ones that make you research faster, vitality boosters or climate adaptation) you get to issue some sort of medical shot to your pops, via an event or situation, or via medical centres somehow.
3. Espionage operations related to biological agents
   • Poisoning enemy food supplies,
   • Planting viruses or weird gasses in enemy population centres.
4. Army construction.

 

[mammonmachine]

Is an issue with food also that nothing ever really goes wrong? Of all the resources, it seems the most likely to fall into crisis e.g. some strange alien blight that effects crops, or a sudden weather shift on a particular planet causes crop failure? I know that none of these scenarios are a lot of fun, but they could create opportunities especially when they happen to another empire - e.g. being able to offer food aid, and there being a choice of having it go through the government (boost to diplomatic relations) or via non-governmental channels (increased attraction in that empire to your governing ethics).

(quick edit: I should add that I am a couple of versions behind, due to Paradox's surprise change to the minimum Linux version, so apols if there is already a situation that does this)

 

[mammonmachine]

A slight side-note, because it doesn't address the major issue, but it always surprises me that living standards don't effect food consumption.

 

[Pancakelord]

A slight side-note, because it doesn't address the major issue, but it always surprises me that living standards don't effect food consumption.

That's because living standards were added long ago I think. Whilst the food policy was added More recently (supplanting distribute food decision).

Food consumption - not to go too deep on this - would impact caloric intake, and would probably have a large impact on physical and mental health, but the way it manifests in game would probably step on living standards (by influencing pop political power, like living standards do) too much.

1. Slave/worker output.
   • And then slave rebelliousness (a well fed slave has the energy to swing a pickaxe, either at a rock or at you) - which should probably manifest as increased political power (because then happy AND well fed slaves also help preserve the status quo).
2. Specialist science output.
   • You need a balanced diet to think at maximum capacity.
3. Ruler/general colony decadence and debauchery.
   • Trope of rich extravagant society.
   • There is a decadence mechanic for AEs, and a hedonistic civic but no real decadence mechanic, so hard to imagine how it would be added - if it were.

 

[Pancakelord]

Is an issue with food also that nothing ever really goes wrong? Of all the resources, it seems the most likely to fall into crisis e.g. some strange alien blight that effects crops, or a sudden weather shift on a particular planet causes crop failure? I know that none of these scenarios are a lot of fun, but they could create opportunities especially when they happen to another empire - e.g. being able to offer food aid, and there being a choice of having it go through the government (boost to diplomatic relations) or via non-governmental channels (increased attraction in that empire to your governing ethics).

(quick edit: I should add that I am a couple of versions behind, due to Paradox's surprise change to the minimum Linux version, so apols if there is already a situation that does this)

There is a situation that triggers when you're in deficit of any resource (not gotten around to forcing unity and science in to negatives to see if they did that too - probably not as neither go negative in vanilla). It basically lowers pop growth and a few pops die or run away I think. But by large food doesn't spoil/rot and pops don't really die off (though starvation in the later stages does basically stop pop growth).

 

[Sutopia]

I guess you can be a good modder.

 

[Tamwin5]

This is a fair point. When it comes to single uses I think there are really 4 major uses for food(or vitagel, or bio mass) without coming up with new mechanics:

1. Terraforming
   1. Planet terraforming upfront cost
   2. Planet feature rolling / mutation / replacement. (Largely gated by APs related to terraforming) Eg. spending x food/vitagel to increase planet size, change district counts or attach extra planet modifiers there to squeeze out extra performance.
2. Situational planet decisions (the problem with the old distribute food - and to a degree distribute luxury goods - is that it can be done at any time (and it's cheap) and so people did it all the time. Stuff like:
   • Hosting a festival after a leader is coronated, or a war is won, randomly getting diplomatic events related to your culture/food (sort of like banquet events in crusader kings).
   • Each time you unlock a society tech (stuff like the ones that make you research faster, vitality boosters or climate adaptation) you get to issue some sort of medical shot to your pops, via an event or situation, or via medical centres somehow.
3. Espionage operations related to biological agents
   • Poisoning enemy food supplies,
   • Planting viruses or weird gasses in enemy population centres.
4. Army construction.

Yeah, I think terraforming is probably the big one. It makes sense you'd need a bunch of plants and other biomass to change ecosystems.

For espionage I think food would be mainly used for hive mind operation events. For normal empires CGs would make more sense.

The other big use of food I'd like to see is the ability to actually breed amoeba/tiyanki. Either more wild ones, or specifically tamed fleets. Using pacified amoeba as your primary defense force should be an option, if probably not the most powerful one.

A bit more niche, but I'd love to see primitive interactions expanded. Early primitives could be wowed by massive amounts of food, while more advanced ones would be impressed by your advanced devices and goods (CGs).

 

[GOLANX]

Building Upgrades should cost Consumer goods not Strategic Resources

Gosh this idea is a multi headed Hydra. Consumer goods don't feel right as just an upkeep resource, Civilian economy policy, Pearl Divers really feel out of place when Alloys are the important resource and Consumer Goods are never the Civilian...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Having modded this in I really think it's the right way to go for CGs it makes them feel like such a great resource to invest in, with purposefully inflated costs it isn't just easier you have to make decisions about which buildings and when to upgrade them, and really fairly high upkeep costs means they aren't just upgrade and ignore you will need a lot of production so CGs never become valueless I cannot recommend this approach enough.

I've also moved some of the cost of consumer goods into food, representing wood, wool, cotton, paper, etc that are acquired through that is a common part of consumer goods today. This has helped food feel a bit better, but it's really the upfront costs that make a resource interesting like @tamwin Said. By buoasecending you shift more of the minerals into food, with exception of lithoids, and synth does energy instead of food, it's a whole complicated web of different production costs that is cool and feels good but might be confusing to new players, and is buggy atm.

Things like terraforming (need to support a new biosphere) and genetic modification would be great places to spend but are more limited use. Clone armies and regenerative hull plating are more consistent uses that could be added but just aren't high enough and be balanced. Tieing food into new events would be an interesting take, using events to create seasonal cycles, unexpected food spoilage events, it could be interesting but ultimately I don't have many good answers on the food front that work long term.

Society Research is a confusing mess trying to be Biology, psychology, sociology, environmental science, a lot of different fields at once. This said its primary source is the same as engineering and physics so it's just the research field with a lot of fillers. Imo they could toss the physics and engineering tech increases into social cause better researchers is more of a social thing. Some techs I think should be taken out and moved to a special Project you complete with Unity, for doing X# of traditions as Unity still needs to have a better role in the game compared to technology, the flat +cap upgrades would be good choices although I'm thinking of the capital building upgrades and ship classes as well (perhaps costing a combintarion of Unity and tech). One could easily see how sociology and psychology could be used to improve societal organization, and improve pop motivation but these just aren't issues in the game to begin with, society tech just isn't solving problems players have, and adding more value would need issues to begin with, eg making societal organization more convoluted that can then be improved with tech (this may or may not be the right choice).

Oh and imo bring back the colonize world type techs

 

[HFY]

Sounds like you want a reason to stockpile food & CG, and more places to spend Society tech.

- Food: disaster relief. Add events and situations which require a large bulk food expenditure to get the best result.

- CG could also function as disaster relief, for Lithoids and such which don't need food, but that's a bit boring. Perhaps digsites effectively turn a chunk of CG into minor artifacts & progress. You don't know exactly when the digsite will progress, so you want to keep a buffer around.

- Society Research: perhaps Ascended planets consume research. There are already chunky projects (genemod for example) which rely on Society Research, and you can't really stockpile it like Food or CG, so I'm not sure it's the same problem as those resources. But if you need to have another place to spend it, consider planetary upkeep.

 

[3ishop]

- Food: disaster relief. Add events and situations which require a large bulk food expenditure to get the best result.

- CG could also function as disaster relief, for Lithoids and such which don't need food, but that's a bit boring. Perhaps digsites effectively turn a chunk of CG into minor artifacts & progress. You don't know exactly when the digsite will progress, so you want to keep a buffer around.

Maybe spent to lower devastation? Closest we currently have for disaster tracking for world.s

 

[SirBlackAxe]

I'm behind adding new ways to spend food and CG, but it's not clear to me why adding new resources is necessary as opposed to just spending them directly. What gameplay benefit does the extra hoop to jump through add?

 

[HFY]

Maybe spent to lower devastation? Closest we currently have for disaster tracking for world.s

I like this, and it's even easy to integrate into the game since it's also war-related.

- Give a few more events / situations which result in Devastation.
- Allow the player to lower some kinds of Devastation by spending Food and/or CG.
- Allow any empire to lower Devastation in another (allied / friendly) empire by spending Food and/or CG, perhaps in trade for a Favor, or if done through the CG then in trade for a timed +% diplo weight modifier.

Then have a few more ways to spend chunks of food:

- Grow a new planetary feature (from a list of special features unlocked by tech and APs, e.g. Mastery of Nature might unlock a bunch).
- Grow a Space Amoeba / Tiyanki breeding megastructure (if you've pacified them).
- Grow a mystical "space tree" if you've gotten that event; would grant some minor bonus in one system. like +5% pop happiness.
- Create an army of biological virus-bombs if you've had the Irassian precursor; this army self-destructs upon landing but by doing this deals damage to every enemy army. Good to mix into a normal army stack.
- Festival for some recent event (dragon landing, leviathan slain, war won, federation formed, etc.) to promote an ethic associated with that event.

 

[3ishop]

There is a rare planetary feature for island sized turtles, I loved that when I got it lol. Can breed them on the planet to increase number of districts in exchange for food and time. Also gives some bonus to science. Wouldn't have minded them getting expanded to allow them to colonise other ocean worlds

 

[mammonmachine]

Having had more time to reflect on this, I would suggest:

• Make vitagel using food and consumer goods. Consumer goods are used in science production, so it makes sense that they are used here. Society science should not be used because the day-to-day production of vitagel is not a scientific problem (any more than, say, the production of alloys or volatile motes).
• Place all vitagel techs in society, making the society tree more useful. Have vitagel start off difficult to produce efficiently, but becoming easier with the right society techs, with extra bonuses from biological ascension. If society is still not useful enough, I think the answer is more tech on this branch, rather than trying to create new uses for it.