New idea for farming

Use it like a resource

from GalCiv2 Forums
In DA, it has become a major pain for players to use that big 300% farming tile, because the morale on that planet plumets. If you do build a farm there you soon realise that building a factory over that pristine land would be the best move. Now, to the idea:

I think farming should be a minable resource, like asteroids. Like any real resource, they need to be stored and distributed to other worlds. Instead of making a farm destroy your morale, the morale would go up because they are not in famine and food is cheap. You could also give it to other race to use if they are on hard times, for money ofcourse. Thus giving you a new way to make needed money.(Or anything else you want from another race). Galciv2 even has a random event where your planet has a famine, but it's mostly an alignment event sadly. Since spies are in the game, you could steal food and use it for yourself. (hehe, laugh at your enemies starving). If food were a stockable resource it has much more potential than being just a morale tradeoff for population.

So, what do you guys think?   
ideas
9,302 views 11 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Anybody still here?
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
More an idea for future games than anything else, as it's a complete overhaul of what's in place now (too much for a patch).
Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
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!  
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
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!  


Another idea I just had was maintaining a food supply in the colony rush. Since the colonies are just recently established they would have to get food from Earth and drain Earth's supply to survive. If you expand to quickly, Earth's(or your homeworld) will run dry and your civilization will starve to death!  
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
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!!!
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
This is a a really good idea.
This could add alot of depth that will make the game so much more realistic than it already is (its very realistic in my eyes). I play Warhammer 40,000, and in that game they have alot of different worlds.
There are, Forge Worlds (which are basically factory planets), Agri-Worlds (Farming planets), Hive worlds (where they stuff the population into), Administration worlds etc etc.
The game allows you to 'specialise' planets, but you still treat them as normal planets in the sense of morale and invasions etc etc.
Having true specialised planets, where you have a planet dedicated to a certain job would be much more sound. So, you could have a lava planet as your manufacturing world, a planet thats green and lush for your farming planet, and a standard planet where most of your population is. Another thing, the manufacture world wont have a large population because if the polluting industry thats on it. And the same goes with farm worlds, because they will have as much of the land as possible used as farming. You could also have research planets, military planets (like you have with military starbases), your capital planet would have a mixture of all of those things. This means your planets have to trade with each other, which promotes economy by giving businesses the means to expand and trade with each other.

So, you could have a manu-world trading with a research world to provide them with computers etc etc and the research worlds provide the manu-world with new concepts for machinery that means the factories can expand and improve. Same with farm worlds.

This idea sounds so cool I wish I could go and make the game myself. Maybe when I graduate from Uni doing my AI degree, I might be able too!
Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top


Another idea I just had was maintaining a food supply in the colony rush. Since the colonies are just recently established they would have to get food from Earth and drain Earth's supply to survive. If you expand to quickly, Earth's(or your homeworld) will run dry and your civilization will starve to death!


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?).
Reply #8 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It would not have to be a very ambitious mod. Just add a morale bonus to the farms in PlanetImprovements.xml.

It would not be Metaverse compatible, however.
Reply #9 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It would not have to be a very ambitious mod. Just add a morale bonus to the farms in PlanetImprovements.xml.

It would not be Metaverse compatible, however.


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.
Reply #10 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
okay, so making food in this game a tradeable thing would be very difficult...

and frankly the food supply means more people which means cramming which = unhappy

So it always made sense so long as you built farms...

I just started a remake of the tech tree and improvements/ship components... and I have 10 total normal constructions to build on any planet (though these have upgrades)

The most important is the 'City'

The city comprises some industry 3 some morale 5% to counter the vicious food issue and obviously food 1 and is cheap... also since invading planets is too easy it provides 1 to planet defense...

and their is a build limit of 5. Now That means that you can increase the population with these very easy to produce cities by about 6 billion or so. You can't overbuild massively on a world population wise because your limited to only 5 Cities... however you will still have the food = unhappy issue.

Not to fear, you cna upgrade the city to metropolis... which provides a bigger bonus in everything, but especially morale... and then another upgrade to hypercity.

With 5 hyper cities on a civilization capital you end up with a max of 50 or so billion and they will roughly peter out at 50% approval... with some morale techs/resources or structures you should be fine...

anyways thought it was similar to your idea... and the concept of the redux is to reduce the building list and make setting up a planet very very easy, so to avoid constant micro... and to make space less of a premium
Reply #11 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
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).