Count me in the group that says the 300% food tiles should just be taken out. There's basically never a situation where you should use them - you can get plenty of population for transports with 1 farm, 100% morale and a fertility clinic.

They just serve to mess up the economy of players who don't yet know to avoid them. And presumably they make the AI play worse, since I seem to regularly invade planets with tons of farms and such low morale that they'll never grow to use the food.

What's an example of a scenario where you'd use one?

The math for morale and taxes is on the wiki, and it seems like a pretty strong argument against them. Suppose you have a 300% farm bonus on your homeworld, and you've researched 1 level of farming techs.

If you build on a regular square, you've a max population of 17B. Your max taxes are proportional to sqrt(17). Your base morale is about 50%, and a VRC will add 20% to the planet's morale. In practice, one VRC plus your racial bonuses will be enough to keep the planet at > 70% morale once it's maxxed, and you'll be at 100% for most of the growth to max population.

If you build on the bonus square, your max population increases to 32B. Your max tax income is now proportional to sqrt(32), an increase of about 35%, or a little more than one stock market. Your morale, however, is now in the bucket. You have a base morale of 20%, and a VRC will only add +8% to the planet's morale. In other words, you'll need 3 VRC to get morale to the minimum you need for the population to grow. You'll have to give up many more stock markets if you want enough morale to make the population grow rapidly.

Basically, you're in a much better situation if you put the farm on an ordinary square, and put a stock market on the farm bonus tile. Or at least that's how the analysis has always worked out for me.

Do you have a counter-example? What's a case where using the food bonus actually leaves the player better off?

I doubt I do. However, I've used a single 300% food tile on a class 12-16 planet, using about 5+ tiles for morale buildings and the remainder for stock markets. I haven't done the math on it, per se, but the planet didn't have serious morale problems. Keep in mind the 'Naturally Joyus' morale bonus, morale trade goods and maybe a morale resource.

1 300% food tile + 2 100% approval tiles = your Economy Capital.
Enough said.

I don't know for sure that I've seen it use a farm bonus, but I seem to recall seeing it at least once. It's also possible that it did so by accident, just randomly picking that tile for its farm.

But I've definitely seen the AI build 3 & 4 farms on a planet, suggesting that at least some of the time it "decides" it wants that much food. Of course, this hurts it even more than using a 300% farm bonus would.

Except that the planetary morale bonus due to native ability is now capped at +100% in DA, regardless of what your actual racial morale ability is.   

The ironic thing is that all the morale nerfing that has happened was to stop people running "unrealistic" tax rates (50%+) with huge populations in excess of 25 billion. All it has succeeded in doing is remove the variety from planet builds, and the absolute optimum now appears to be every planet above PQ7 with 1 farm, 1 morale building and an even more unrealistic tax rate of 79% (gives a universal approval of 80-85%) or tax at 69% if you want universal 100% approval.

As for invading planets with high populations - just plant a spy on all the farms the turn before you invade and then only have to face a maximum of 6 billion unless it's their homeworld.

i tryed this in my last game and it didnt work. the pop stayed the same much to my disapointment. maybe it was a glitch, but my spy did survive more then that one turn so, it should have worked theoretically.



the only counter-example i can think of is if your purpose for the world was NOT income, but rather as a breeder planet. if you had a single planet in the middle of enemy territory, (and ive done this) with a 300% food bonus, you get the food bonus, build 3 or 4 fertility clinics, and the rest moral bonuses. then as you produce troop transports you send them empty to this planet. the AI didn’t seem to hate empty transports as much, though that might just be coincidence. load up the transports from this always maxed huge pop and go take whatever planets you want with a huge amount of solders. that way your new worlds automatically have big populations. AND your breeder world is almost impervious to attack because of its huge pop.

because of this stratagy of mine i emplor you... do not remove this tile! i love being able to have a breeder world!

Ah, I didn't understand that you were using Basic Farms. We seem to agree that you maximize your revenue by getting the planet to around 17B.

Civilization Capital + Xeno Farming = 17B.
Planet Capital + 4xBasic Farming = 18B

So I see that there are cases where the +300% food helps you get to the limit in the fewest number of tiles. The key point is that you can't make any more money by allowing your planet to grow beyond that point.


And thanks, Magnumaniac. I didn't know about the DA morale cap.

True. It would be a more interesting discussion to see what tiles everyone chooses to ignore. Me, I will ignore farm bonus tiles if there's more than one--frankly, I don't often build more than one farm anyway.

I ignore influence tiles if I'm playing on a large, sparse planets galaxy.

I ignore approval tiles on my tech capital and manufacturing capital. I need the tile for factories & labs. I'll also build factories on approval tiles until I truly need the morale bonus. Then I'll upgrade to a stadium or something.

Research and manufacturing tiles never get ignored.

In addition to the farm tiles, I generally ignore influence tiles too. It's very rare that I'll build an influence building to begin with.

I always use manufacturing bonus tiles. Generally I'll use the research ones too, even if the planet is otherwise an all-mfg world. The morale ones get used if I'm planning to build a morale building on that planet, but not otherwise.

I'm the same. Except, when i have a very low class planet say 6 or under and it has a morale bonus and a manu bonus. I will at first put a factory on the manu bonus to help develop the planet, but then i will change it to a something else as i would rather use this planet and it's morale bonus as an Economy world.

I don't as a rule use low class planets as my manufacturing worlds.

I did the same thing; I had that Civilization mentality, "we need FARMS!". It also drives me nuts not to use the bonus tiles, heh, my mouse finger itches, farm, darnit! Its a 300% bonus tile!

I still use 'em, yeah, even the 300% ones. Usually on high pop worlds I go ECON, but with those I make it "mixed" world with some decent industry so I can roll out tranports when their morale gets bad.

Reading this thread with interest after wondering why the heck my homeworld's morale started plummeting.

Am I correct that a general corollary to this situation is that one should seldom if ever research advanced farming technologies?