Rethinking the food bonus tiles

Yep, I completely agree, I almost never use the food tiles to build farms on, a fully researched xeno farm on a non food bonus tile doubles the population of an average planet of 8-14 quality (8 to 16bn) and that requires two extreme stadiums to keep approval in the mid 70s under meaningful taxation and star federation government, a farm on a food-bonus tile on such planet would mean like 24bn population (if 100% bonus) and 4-6 extreme stadiums to maintain same approval, depending on taxation and government which, from my perspective (half the planetary tiles wasted on approval structures), might be only meaningful on planets with over 20 quality... even then, if you deduct the upkeep from the tax increase from the extra people it doesn't look overwhelmingly good, on the overall I think it's a waste of tiles that could provide significant boost to production or research of with proper buildings, a farm on a tile with 2/3/500% bonus is madness...

What I would like to see is a system where worlds within a civilization can, with the right tech, ship, and/or module ship excess food and other commodities to other planets within the same civilization or potentially even allow the trade of such items to other civilizations.  That would take care of the "excess food" problem and add another interesting layer to the game.  You could have planets that are used as "breadbaskets" which would allow other planets to specialize even further.

I like the idea of Farm Worlds. Which would also happen to make sweet targets during wars.

That'd make sense if you can build "housing" buildings too, so that population caps on planets aren't entirely controlled by food. Then you could have excess food on one planet going to another one to support a higher population there.

They were useful for stymieing invasions.  Put a farm up, watch your massive, unhappy population take out their angst against the invading hordes.

Unless the invaders use the propaganda attack.

The third farm give you 15 billion population per colony already, making the bonus tiles completely superfluous lol. Anything higher than that becomes a hassle to maintain (... unless you mod in a 500% morale bonus for your civ :3)

I support agricultural planets, as well as possibly freighters to move it. On that note, is anyone getting the MoO2 vibe from this idea?

Farm colonies would be great, actually the option for resource re-allocation on empire level would be great lol

I agree with farming colonies that provide food to other worlds, or to a rebalance of the morale and population system so that it's practical to use even a single 100% food bonus tile. Once planetary populations approached 20 billion, there just wasn't a reasonable way to keep the population happy, and a single Advanced Xeno Farm on a +100% food tile was sufficient for 22 billion people in the colonies. At 15 billion you could keep everyone more or less completely happy with two VR Centers, while at 22 billion you'd be looking at 60-70% approval even with four VR Centers, if I recall correctly, if you maintained a reasonable tax rate. The expense of keeping it even marginally happy wasn't worth the bonus from the higher population.

The end result for me was that I only ever used the food bonus tiles for food production if I didn't intend to put any real research into the farming technology line (meaning I stayed with the first, or possibly the second, farm, rather than getting to Advanced Xeno Farms) or if I was playing a race that had crappy food production abilities and didn't intend to trade for or steal food production technology from the opponents (Iconians and Yor, mostly, although Yor morale structures were such that having a high population wasn't a good idea anyways). I also can't honestly say I've ever used the 300% food bonus tiles after I realized just how hard it would be to keep the population at an acceptable approval rating - even the pitiful Iconian RoboFarms would boost the planetary population up to 20 billion with just one on a 300% bonus tile, and that population is right at the edge of being too high to keep at an acceptable approval rating using a reasonable number of morale structures.

I also feel that any bonus at all on the Advanced Xeno Farms is simply impractical to make use of - even with a 0% bonus it already nearly doubles the population cap of the planet it's on, and the higher your total population is, the more morale bonus per person you need in order to maintain acceptable levels of approval, which quickly pushes population bonuses into the category of "no point - too expensive for its return", especially since a couple of high-population planets with low to mid approval have an enormous impact on even a large empire's overall approval rating.

The AI also uses bonus food tiles very poorly.  When approval starts to plummet they tend to lower taxes as a stop-gap measure, but then they don't do much about the problem.

Yes it does.  One of the worst misuses was when the Thalan would locate their "super building" (can't remember the name) on a 300% food bonus tile.  It would pretty much cripple the planet because of the high population.  If I captured it I would usually make it a transport-producing world to take care of the excess population, but that's just a crude work around.

Yes, and what would really be cool is if planets could be blockaded.  If a food world was blockaded, then its food shipments stop and one has mass starvation through out his or her empire.  Or, a planet without any food production could be blockaded and then not receive food.  The result is the same for that planet. 

The Hyperion Matrix.  Yeah.  Best thing for it is to just nix the food bonus and give them a pop growth boost, because that's actually handy on a homeworld.

I've always been fine w/ the food bonus tiles, however, I do think if they keep something along the same format the 300% food tile should come w/ a moral boost as well, to offset the hug bonus or put the cap higher when you use those tiles...

I'm not all that fond of the food colony idea, nor the idea of building housing structures since that adds more micro and the game is complex enough.

An alternate solution would be to make it so that you can't just build ONE farm to get an ideal population (15b in GC2).  I'll admit I'm pretty lazy about this in GC2.  I just put ONE farm on a non farm tile on planets where I want the easy to manage 15b (at max tech) and that's that.

If you needed multiple farms to hit that 15b at the highest tech level, it would make those farm bonus tiles very appealing.  If in GC2 you needed to place 7 farms that yielded 1b each at max tech to boost from 8 to 15b, and your economy specialized planets couldn't just ez-mode to 15b with one farm, then those food tiles would be pretty sexy and you might have to put more consideration into where you specialized for economy.  Plus if you could tweak population on a smaller scale you could push some planets beyond 15b without pushing them WAY beyond into unmanageable morale.

I always saw the food tile/morale balance problem as a challenge. I think it was put there deliberately. If the AI was unable to handle it, well, Brad has made some comments about the difficulty he had programming the AI in 1 & 2, and about how that is going to be different in GC3.

I just didn't use the 300% tiles at all because to me having such a large population on a planet really created more problems than it was worth.  It also seemed to not be the way a true Galactic Civ would handle excess food, i.e., to grow the population of a planet so large that morale problems ensued and life became so miserable that the people rebelled.   

That was what the entertainment string of morale boosting buildings, morale boosting techs, and approval resources was for.

True, but the use of those buildings (especially in sufficient numbers to make up for the HUGE morale hit that one took by using the 300% food tile) took up spaces that could otherwise be used for more beneficial buildings like factories and research centers.  Having the huge population simply wasn't that beneficial in my opinion, especially when taking into account the price one paid.

This post reminded me of that time when i conquered Thala and was rly looking forward to the manufacturing matrix to only find out that the moron NPC placed it on 300% food tile while there was a 300% Manufacturing tile already. DOH!!! That @sshat left me with a crowd of some 32 billion or something around that. 

just kill them off lol

Yes.  I HATED that.  My solution was to use that world as a transport hub and just keep the population bled off.  It was a crude work around at best and I hated having to do that.

I did exact same thing, but i also totally built a few galactic stock markets and thalans were also kind enough to leave me eco capital so i got some scratch money to use as toilet paper or something, seeing as my bank was around half a trill at that point.

Has anyone noticed that no economic bonuses ever appear?

I find your post cutely amusing, because by the way you built your sentence it sounds as if you think there are eco bonus tiles in the game and you expect one to appear every time you play but it never does