Anybody still here?

Great Idea! That idea of selling food to other civilizations to get their good side and to get money would really help me in DA. It would also help me stat popular with my people (36 billion people planets are bad ideas). Keep those ideas coming!  

Now that's a brilliant idea. It would really slow down the colony rush.

If each planet you colonised had to have freighters travelling to it carrying food, it necessitates getting the trade techs, setting up trade routes, ensuring the trade routes are safe etc. I don't know how difficult it would be to set this up in DA, but, If it was just a matter of having freighters going backwards and forwards from your planets and when each time a freighter came from your home world or a self sustaing world (X) amount of bonuses could be given to the target planet. This could continue until it reached a certain economic/population/production growth level. It would be more important to colonise at a steady sustainable rate.

It would also add a complexity to warfare because if the colony was not self sustaining enemies could interupt the freighters and really stuff up the colonies and the war effort.

Good idea!!!

Wouldn't one of the first things news colonists do be start farming their own food or finding indigenous foodstuffs? The colony rush is a 'rush' for a reason; having to regulate food delivery to colonised planets would slow it down too much... You'd think colony ships included enough food to support the settlers upon landing for at least a few galactic weeks anyway. Looking back on human history, few colonists were so well provided for by the states they were claiming land for.

Other than that I really like the idea of food as a resource spread over your entire empire, I'm sick of [my home planet especially] being at 40% or lower approval because of overpopulation that I can't do a thing about because the capital city is the thing making too much food, or that putting a basic farm on a planet doesn't provide near enough maximum population and a xeno farm or higher too much. Lending whole planets over to food production for your entire empire and being able to sell the surplus would add to the game, imho. Placing farming under social production would make that focus category useful after a planet is fully developed, not sure if it'd make sense that more farms = faster improvement building... more workers for greater production capacity?

I can see Kryo's point in it being more than a patch (food, population, morale, economy and troops defending against invasion are too interlinked currently for it to be simple to completely rework the system... an extremely ambitious mod, perhaps?).

I think you missed the part about freighters having to carry food to other worlds and selling food as a resource. That would NOT be an easy mod. And if they DID just add a morale bonus to farms this would wipe out the entire economic strategy; more farms would mean your population could expand with your morale INCREASING instead of DECREASING the whole time, meaning you could set HIGHER taxes, which would be COMPOUNDED by your now MASSIVE population, meaning you could afford anything you wanted, and still have a HUGE treasury. No, this simply wouldn't work.

I don't think the idea of freighters carrying food to worlds is very good either. I mean, when you think about it, EVERY mining starbase mines a resource, morale mines natural medicine, for example. I think it is automatically assumed that your resources of all kinds are always being distributed by transports, and that they are too trivial to be a serious target in war and would screw the graphics engine with so many ships.

What I think WOULD be a good idea is to set up a "food economy"; essentially you would consider food as a form of money, and your farms would produce food and add it to your "food treasury", and your population would consume food weekly, subtracting from your food treasury. You could trade excess food or buy extra food via the diplomacy screen. The population limit could simply be limited by the Planet Class (bigger planets can hold more people) and your overall population would be limited only by the total amount of food you produce. If your food treasury ever went negative there would be a morale penalty (which would inherently slow population growth), and if you went too far down people would start dying off. You could also have a limit cap to your food treasury (reasoning: food spoils and you lose wasted food), but they could have a technology branch that would increase your food limit, or maybe just add this effect to an existing tech. With this players could establish specialized farming worlds, and support their whole empire on a few worlds. Of course, this would allow for the possibility of a "galactic siege", as some of you mentioned, being able to capture enemy food worlds to starve them into submission.

this suggestion reminds me of the way food was handled in MoO3 (*shudder*). not that i had a problem with the food paradigm in that game, i just shudder to think of the game itself.

i like the idea, but agree with Kryo that it's more of an idea for a future edition.

extrapolations: during times of war you could target food transports, thus starving planets that relied on imported food; blokade target planets to soften them up before an invasion; and perhaps too much food surplus would have a negative effect on soldiering (everyone gets fat).