I think Food could work as another resource similar to minerals, so it can be stockpiled and moved between colonies.
Each colony would have some natural food production depending on the planet/biome. This would drop as the population gets closer to the planet’s existing population capacity, representing more of the available land being built on.
Agricultural installations could increase food production and use small amounts of maybe Sorium and Corundium for fertiliser.
If a colony doesn’t have enough food it would first lead to rationing and unrest, then eventually starvation and population decline. The population would keep falling until it reached a level the available natural food production could support.
The main idea would be to reuse as many existing mechanics as possible so it doesn’t add a load of extra micromanagement, while making fertile planets and food supply lines actually important.
Keeping it the same as minerals means it can be transported by Mass drivers also so you can create small food colonies in system that otherwise would have no use as they might have a good climate but not have any mineable minerals.
Lastly make it selectable at game start which will allow it to be an extra layer of difficulty for players to choose.
At the tech level of TNEs, fertility and food productivity are pretty much independent of climate.
We can already today grow food indoors and in some pretty inhospitable places.
In game terms, the fact that colony cost increases the proportion of people involved in agriculture reflects this well - inhospitable places need more people working to recapture water / power greenhouses / recycle nitrogen etc.
Not saying the idea is wrong per-se, just think the current system actually captures it pretty well, although it does prevent the creation of “bread baskets” to support other colonies. I think given how quickly food goes off and the scale of daily distribution of food, however, a planet feeding another feels like a huge logistical task that isn’t the same as minerals, which don’t rot and aren’t needed 3x per day
Tracking food is a fairly regular suggestion. I don’t believe it would add sufficient meaningful decisions to compensate for the additional micromanagement, so instead it is modelled via the colony cost and infrastructure mechanics, with the assumption that high tech food production is possible locally with the necessary infrastructure in place.
Harsher environments require more infrastructure, which simulates all the necessary life support, including food production. A portion of the colony population is dedicated to agriculture and environmental, with that portion being higher for harsh environments. The requirement for other colonies to provide support in terms of food is covered by the required transport of infrastructure to sustain the growth of new colonies.
If I add a new trackable resource, it would most likely be power, as that can be handled in a variety of different ways (nuclear, geothermal, hydro, direct solar, solar mirrors, orbital stations, etc.), with non-surface sources requiring defence. Different environments would be more suitable for some power options than others, so it adds a variety of interesting and meaningful choices. Not for v3.0 though
That makes sense, and I can see why you wouldn’t want to add another resource just for the sake of tracking food, especially if infrastructure is already intended to abstract food and life support. I hadn’t really looked at infrastructure that way.
I do think there is potentially some overlap between what you’re describing and the idea I had though. Using Venus as an extreme example, nearly all of the population you send there would be focused on simply surviving the environment, including producing food locally.
If food was supplied from somewhere much more suitable, part of that population could instead be freed up for mining or industry. So the choice would be between making Venus more self-sufficient, or having a more productive colony that is dependent on a food supply from elsewhere.
That was really the kind of decision I was thinking about. A fertile world could specialise in food production, allowing harsher colonies to specialise more heavily in mining or industry, but at the cost of creating an ongoing supply dependency. I thought the use case for worlds with no minerals was a good idea to give them something else to do and a worth while terraforming candidate.
I didn’t know about the stimulate civ mining one thanks for that.
I understand your reasons and i concede . I didn’t mean no mineral worlds where useless, I meant a reason that would make you want to terraform a world.
The power stuff sounds interesting also would that include battery installations or just a supply V demand mechanic.
It’s fine - the food suggestion has been discussed a lot in older threads and comes up quite often.
Power would likely be direct demand, as batteries have implications for ship design too and I don’t want to get drawn into a power allocation system like Star Fleet Battles. It is by no means certain I would add this btw - it’s just the most likely of the potential industrial additions.
The logistics of doing this are a bit extreme for the scope of Aurora.
If we assume for the sake of argument that the average citizen of your glorious stellar empire eats 1 kg of food per day (aiming for a low estimate here), then one standard 25,000-ton freighter hold can transport enough food to feed 1 million people for 25 days. Most shipping routes that aren’t Earth-Luna take well over 25 days for a round trip, so for every million people you wanted to support by shipping food from some other colony, you’d need at least 2-4 freighters on a continuous cycle. In what one inagines to be a typical case, maintaining a colony of 10 million in an inhospitable system with agricultural excess from another system may require several dozen dedicated freighters.
Now, I do realize that the idea here is to use food shipments to reduce, not eliminate, agricultural requirements on hostile colonies, but even for a partial reduction I’m not sure the investment in ships and fuel is worth gaining back a few percentage points of manufacturing population. Or put another way, is gaining 1 million more factory workers worth 2-4 freighters and their continuous fuel consumption? I think there’s far more efficient ways to gain factory workers than this.
When you do the numbers like that it doesn’t make sense your right. I suppose the core of the request was to create or inject additional situations or scenarios in game where an attacking NPR or other really made you panic if they attacked a growing world and for example you went heavy on centralizing your food production to only a few planets and you have to really protect those shipping lines. This would require players to focus more on shipping lines. I know some do now. But a reduction in minerals may not be a dire as a reduction in food for a planet.
Part of the suggestion was also to leave it optional as there is already a lot of micro so you could decide if you wanted it or not.
Just on the weights you could assume there is some TNE tech that produces low weight calorie dense foods or everything in the future is just dehydrated rations ha
My not-doing-any-math, knee-jerk reaction is “hell yes, how often can I make this trade?”
Freighters are a one-time cost, and not a big one.
Fuel is incredibly cheap to produce and transport.
20 more working confacs is a gain forever.
I’m not intending to weigh in on the discussion of the underlying feature idea. Just wanted to point out that the tradeoff you presented as clearly not worthwhile does, in fact, seem eminently worthwhile to me, at first glance.
