ORIGINAL: Hazard151
Oh, shipping food absolutely makes sense.
It's mostly just a question of multiple factors, which include 'how many people do I need to feed', 'can I produce this specific product locally', 'how much product can I ship per day' and 'how much will it cost to ship what I want to ship'.
For tiny colonies mining valuable materials it makes sense to ship food. For large colonies with limited farming capacity but with easy access to another planet with enough excess food production it makes sense to ship food. For most other considerations though, at minimum the bulk of food production would have to be on the planet it's going to be eaten.
I don't agree... what about all the waste... you want to recycle it into new food. The food itself is just a vessel for injecting energy into the biological mechanism in a species body. Sun plus bio-matter is food which mean energy that get into the body.
Food production with technology that is present in DW would be such a vastly small percentage of their economy it is really not worth to make a big fuss of it. It is just an industrial product like anything else, most colonies will need to be self-sustainable in many regards. Sure, really small colonies will be less self sufficient... but once you reach a few million in population you would find enough versatility to be self sufficient in most basic industry including food production no matter what planet they live on.
Even small mining stations have to recycle their waste and would probably make food of their own as a bi product of that, they would have enough energy to do so.
Many modern countries GDP from agriculture are so vastly small that it nearly is inconsequential despite being able to produce far more than it needs. Put that into perspective of vastly more advanced technology and do the maths on that.
If food for some reason was a special resource it would be immersion breaking in my opinion as we it would feel as we were back in the middle ages. It is fine for a game like Civilization as food back then was a big limitation on population size in any particular place. Food have never really been a factor for population growth, mainly on the maximum size of populations. This is usually why you historically had large scale migration of entire population in history as growth generally are decoupled from food production.
I think there would be many more interesting more realistic resources or goods you could introduce to have similar effect as food. I also would not like if we in some respect would control these resources or the production of them, this is not what the game is about. But having unique resources that only populated planets produce could be a nice idea for an expansion.
