Alright this would be my first post on balance issues. The game is too fresh in early access to really say a lot about specific balance issues in normal (Manager) games, there are good ways to win the game, but it's never really certain. It depends a lot on the map, your oponents and the market fluctuations - all the variety that we players love for replayability.

Which brings me to my issue, that variety is severely lacking in CEO games, and some of the things will have to be revisited. I like the harsh conditions, that's not a problem, the problem is that unless you go food in a CEO game - you will utterly lose. It's the same every single game, there is no variety.

It's my hypothesis that the skyrocketing of food prices every single game is due to several things:

* Less claims, less resource production - Leads to a much longer time to upgrade your HQ and build an economy, and the main focus of the economy are resources that you need to upgrade your HQ.

* Slower HQ upgrades means it will take a lot longer to be able to produce food, as food is usually done after the first or second HQ upgrade.

* While no food is being produced, and everyone (except .. yes, you robos! I'm looking at you) needs the resources, this slowly leads to the price skyrocketing.

There are several things that could be done - the settings could make consumption easier on the player, so for higher difficulty levels, leave everything the same but decrease HQ consumption. That would be the easiest possible solution, or one could go tweak the way market price increase works, not sure that would be the advisable route.

Anyway that's a mere suggestion, I'm just trying to point out the problem.