FreeOrion

The rate of growth depends on the target population, so increasing the target, even if the planet isn't anywhere near reaching it, is useful because it increases the rate of growth as well.

That said, it sounds like growth is too slow, so I'll double it.

It might also be worth having some population boosting events as well, to increase the effective growth rate.

Planets which are blockaded off from my main supply chain (but which are not directly under attack) appear to starve to death. If I need to, I can try to recreate this situation in a save file.

I'm thinking of the situation where supply lanes are cut in such a way as to isolate a portion of my empire, but where otherwise the isolated portion remains in supply with itself. By having the occasional high-population high-food production world scattered through the empire, so long as one or two of those are inside the isolated part, I could survive.

Well, I am confused then. I have been able to survive more than a hundred turns and probably a couple dozen colonized planets with no food production other than whatever my capital is producing as a bonus. I figured that if food was essentially eliminated from the UI, that it must no longer be a requirement. I know the planetary farming focus was still there, but it seemed to have no visible in-game effect. So, if we've eliminated all the places where the player monitors food production, but it's still a necessary thing for players to do, how do they allocate planetary focuses in their empire in an optimal way?

It may also be that I am misinterpreting what appears to me to be a sudden invasion of invisible invincible monsters-enemies (improved drones? improved juggernauts? improved krill? a sufficiently advanced enemy? or something else entirely? dunno.) at the 100-150ish turn mark IIRC in the SVNs from the last week or so. But I didn't think SitRep messages of "A battle occurred in [wherever]; 10 Terran Imperium Mark VIIIs were destroyed" with no visible enemies would be the result of starving.

With the new system that "food" only benefits planets 1 jump away or in the same system. The farming focus is not require for population, but allows larger max populations. Your capitol's food is only effecting any colonies you might have right next door.


It's not.
See this post and following

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What version are you playing? There is no "main supply chain" for food in the latest SVN.
This scenario is not relevant to the new food / growth boosting mechanism.
As noted before, the transition - particularly in the UI - is incomplete. Food / growth boosting is not generally required to maintain a base level planet population, but it can be used to increase planets' populations in order to boost their productivity. This boosting should be (even if it is not yet) strategically useful.

I expect that your planets are being destroyed by whatever is destroying your ships (researching better detection tech might be a good plan). I've added a sitrep message to the bio-weapon effect, so that the player knows what's up. It will still probably say "The entire population of Sala-ma-Sond was lost to famine!" or some such when the colony is actually lost, though.

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I'm starting to suspect that too many drastic changes are being tested in trunk at the moment.
Geoff's removal of food, Eleazar population re-scaling and Bigjoe5's I-am-become-death-the-destroyer-of-worlds fleets make it hard to determine what actually happens sometimes.

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Geoff, is it intentional the the farming focus does not help the planet with the farming focus?
That makes it useless for any minor species or isolated colony.


Yeah, not the most fortuitous timing, but don't think it would be overall more efficient to revert one or more of them and test one at a time.

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Yes. Farming was previously the default focus partly so that isolated colonies would default to being able to feed themselves. With baseline population (supposed to be) self-sufficient without a "food" supply, it doesn't make sense to leave isolated planets on a population-boosting focus in most cases, as probably they'd want to be generating something useful, instead of just boosting their own population slightly but not doing anything else productive.

Not boosting a planet's own population was also intended to allow the population boost to be dependent on a planet's current population, without introducing an expoential-growth feedback loop (ie. a planet boosting its own population will have a larger population, and thus get a larger boost, allowing a larger population, etc.) Planets will also need to not get boosts from other planets' population-dependent boosts if they themselves are production population-dependent boosts, to prevent a multi-planet feedback loop. This isn't an issue if the boosts aren't population dependent at all (ie. a fixed bonus independent of source population), or have a hard cap per source or per target of the boost.

I've been following the post-4776 updates pretty closely. I had been playing a 200-system game that happened to have a really sparse neighborhood as far as habitable worlds, that was located in the center of the galaxy too. Thus, in this particular galaxy, it was pretty much impossible to grow fast enough to be able to defend it before the hordes of monsters came. I tried probably five or six different strategies, and none was even close to survivable. Furthermore, since I was focusing on building as many Mark VIIIs as possible (and developing the technology to do so as early as possible), I was being blindsided by the hidden monsters, which were producing planet starvation messages. I know that now that I tried a different universe which put me in a more resource-rich and defensible area so I could research sensors too. Sorry for the ill-defined feedback.

Now, I will persist in the general game-balance thrust of what I was trying to say, which is really kindof a meta-feedback on the recent changes.

First, with systems now self-sufficient as far as food goes, the starvation code and SitRep messages should probably be ripped out. It's just confusing and not really relevant.

Second, with food gone, the whole supply/starlane system is much less important. Running ships out of fuel was only occasionally a problem for me under the old system, and it almost certainly won't be a problem now. Now, the only significant consequence of having supply lines cut is that you lose the ability to do much production in the isolated systems. But, because you aren't worrying about starvation, you can switch focus to mining&industry in the isolated systems and probably keep producing a little. That was a pretty unlikely outcome in the old system, where you were frequently scrambling just to feed the people when supply lines were cut.

Third, as I suppose I have implied, I am not personally in favor of eliminating food. It's taking out a lot of the fun/complexity of the game IMHO. Obviously, it's not my call, but that's how I see it.

Fourth, from a game balance perspective, the problem with the new monsters is that in a small universe, you have some hope of finding and eliminating their nests fairly early (once you realize that the AIs are no longer going to be a threat under the new system). But in a medium universe (I'm typically playing in universes in the 200-300 system range), the monsters are growing and breeding out there, and by the time you even encounter most of them, they are ridiculously powerful. The Black Krakens and Bloated Juggernauts were so sudden and numerous (and fast-moving!) by the time that I encountered them, that I couldn't build ships faster than they came, even though I initially was able to preserve the majority of my empire. I was building 50 Mark VIIIs every turn, and I probably killed 15-20 or so of them, but they kept coming & I kept losing all the ships I was building. I'm all for a challenge, and I'm all for new and more powerful monsters but I think they are too sudden and numerous presently, at least in a 200-system galaxy, by the time you encounter them.

I could go on, but that's probably (more than) enough to chew on for now. Hopefully, this feedback is taken as the constructive criticism it is intended to be.

It's on the to-do list.
Uh, what? What does ship fuel have to do with food being removed?
As noted, the current changes are incomplete. One probable change is to make population bonus distribution require an unblockaded resource connection between source and target. Another change that may make blockading more significant is making the relative contribution from other planets generating population boosts larger and the inherent baseline population of planets less. Another is letting planets boost the population of other planets more than one starlane jump away.
I suggest not judging (too harshly) before things are semi-finished. The first, relatively quick and simple, iteration of the changes aren't giving a complete picture of the final results.

Also, it would be more helpful to say how things could be tweaked (within the new basic system) to be improved, rather than just pointing out problems (although pointing out problems is also helpful).
This thread is about food. Could you move the monsters discussion to a more appropriate thread?

Bottom line, by eliminating the food focus, there is one less thing for players to choose among when choosing a strategy. IMHO, that's a bad thing. I don't care about food per se, but I do think that research/mining-industry is frankly too simple. Food is as good as anything else, and is pretty much par for the genre of game FO is. Yes, I understand that food is going to be something growthy, but IMHO that sort of thing ought to be a researchable & constructable buildingy thing, not a planetary focusy thing.

I talked about starlanes/supply lines in terms of in-game effects. Again, the thrust of what I was talking about is that with the elimination of food, the starlanes/supply lines becomes more ornamental than challenging/useful/fundamental to the game, like it used to be.

But enough of all that. I've said what I have to say, given that the implementation is still in progress.

You need at least one more planetary focus that accumulates some necessary resource and which supply lines/starlanes affect the distribution of. Right now, there's just minerals in that category.

As noted, there is still a farming focus which should / will be useful. Whether it is producing a necessary but otherwise useless "food" resource to maintain planet populations, or boosting population directly shouldn't really matter in terms of whether it is a useful focus to chose on some planets.
Starlane connectivity and blockades still affect minerals and industry distribution, and can/will affect food distribution. And if the size of starlane-connection-dependent population boosts is relatively larger than it is now, it will certainly be useful to have those connections between growth providers and growth receivers.
Why is it necessary that it be a resource that "accumulates", which I assume means has a stockpiled amount? Why does a single resource need to both be stockpiled and have its use limited by starlane connectivity, particularly given the problems with stockpile locations that that leads to?

By "helpful tweaks within the new basic system", I meant how to tweak the current food/growth/population boosting mechanism to reduce or eliminate the problems you note, not how to revert to the previous system or add a new system.

I don't object in principle to the idea of planets being able to survive without being connected to any farming planet, but I do object to the idea that a planet can't starve to death due to a blockade. If there are no objections, I'm going to rewrite the farming effects to use ResourceSupplyConnectedByEmpire, and only allow Good planets to survive without farming or applicable techs.

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Adequate is arguable weather it should be self-sustaining or not. Otherwise i don't object.

Though it will be odd that one isolated Poor colony must starve to death, while two isolated together Hostile colonies set to farming can sustain each other.

You'll probably have to rip out what i've recently changed -- go for simple and understandable, rather than preserving work that doesn't make sense in the new context.

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Probably Adequate, Poor and Hostile colonies won't be able to farm without appropriate tech; I'm also planning on putting the effectsgroups in the target species' descriptions so that only the largest bonus can be chosen, and making the bonus dependent on Infrastructure, so that planets can increase their own populations without feedback, so lone colonies will be able to sustain themselves if they are able to sustain other colonies with them.

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