Food and water

[colonyan]

Main reason for introducing survival resource would be for 
- Creating Source for Instability + requiring risk management
as already have been told by several posters.
Other than that research farm tech level 1 2 3 ... to match/grow population size is plain mundane and repetitive.

To create instability and risk management, some place must be able to produce more than other place.
What if just as Shark7 pointed out, disparity was made between

*Developed Colony (abundant, producer) VS Developing Colonies (Research required colonization colonies)

So Developing Colonies import from Developed Colonies the food/water whatever needed.
Requirement I can think of to create instability and risk management issue for good parts of game sequence,

**Most of non native planet/moon type colonies should require import throughout the game to survive and grow,
unless empire invest in Hightech research field which enables to alleviate the dependency for importing. (New Tech)

Finally, as long as food/water creates interesting risk management or instability element without introducing
mundane task (Farm tech 123... blah...), that will be interesting.

[Shark7]

ORIGINAL: colonyan

Main reason for introducing survival resource would be for 
- Creating Source for Instability + requiring risk management
as already have been told by several posters.
Other than that research farm tech level 1 2 3 ... to match/grow population size is plain mundane and repetitive.

To create instability and risk management, some place must be able to produce more than other place.
What if just as Shark7 pointed out, disparity was made between

*Developed Colony (abundant, producer) VS Developing Colonies (Research required colonization colonies)

So Developing Colonies import from Developed Colonies the food/water whatever needed.
Requirement I can think of to create instability and risk management issue for good parts of game sequence,

**Most of non native planet/moon type colonies should require import throughout the game to survive and grow,
unless empire invest in Hightech research field which enables to alleviate the dependency for importing. (New Tech)

Finally, as long as food/water creates interesting risk management or instability element without introducing
mundane task (Farm tech 123... blah...), that will be interesting.

Instead of a farm tech tree, could just tack it onto the end of the colonization tree, or even have the last tech in that tree include the 'dome farming' attributes. Probably would have been the simpler way had I thought it through more before posting.