Honestly confused by food

Let me start by saying that food confuses me too.  Not the game food but food as a general issue but that's between me and my team of therapists.

That said, food = population cap. 10mt - 10 billion not million.  If it's saying million, it's a typo (we decided later on in dev to make populatoins measured in billions).

Will that carry over to other planets? For instance, if I have a planet producing 30mt can it support three planets of 10 billion a piece, or does food have to be produced on planet?

Food only affects the planet you build the farms on. As Brad says it only determines the local maximum population.

IMO it would be a lot less confusing all around if they simply renamed farms to residential sectors.

One great use for farms is to build them on farm bonus tiles and then build markets.

Instant supertax planet.

The only problem is keeping the people happy, which is what I have problems doing. To many people, no planets to dump them off on, and not enough moral boosters to keep them happy. What do I do? Remove a few farms to lower the population cap?

Yep.

 

The only problem is keeping the people happy, which is what I have problems doing. To many people, no planets to dump them off on, and not enough moral boosters to keep them happy. What do I do? Remove a few farms to lower the population cap?

Or you can always take the evil solutions that cause your population to be killed off. Well, that probably won't help you in the long run. There are never enough of them.

Yep.

Oh. I figured that it would be much more involved than that. Thanks Brad.

Population vs Morale management is one of the top critical issues you deal with each game. If you can master that juggling act you can take full advantage of a booming economy to fund your war machine and dominate the galaxy.

This is why morale resources are so critical compared to the other resources. If you can control a couple morale resources and keep them at full mining capacity, you save yourself some tiles on your planets that you might otherwise have to fill with morale boosting buildings.

One thing to keep in mind... 51% is the same as 63% is the same as 100% as far as your overall approval rating is concerned. So keep those taxes riding high! (Okay okay, there's a population growth bonus for keeping 100% morale...but I could care less!! Hehe. This is one area that will be changing in the near future as the dev team comes up with an elegant way to tie approval into more bonuses... HOWEVER, as it stands now!! Keep approval above 50% but dont let it sit there at a high % either.)

DO NOT build farms on low class planets! They do NOTHING for the planet but waste valuable tile space. There is a hard limit for population on each planet and it's based on class. I will quote CaretFarmer who provided us some valuable information on this subject...

Currently, the game limits the maximum population of each planet based on its quality. The limit (in millions of people) can be expressed by this formula: Limit = 20 * ( Q + 1 ) ^ 3 where Q is the planet's quality, and the '^' symbol means 'raised to the power of'. So, for a planet like Mars (Q = 4), the most people it can support is 20 * ( 4 + 1 ) ^ 3 = 2500 million. Therefore, for Mars (or any planet below class 6), it's useless to build any farms because the base colony production of 5 mt/week is already more than the planet can otherwise support. A class 6 planet will derive some benefit from one basic farm (it's limited to 6860 million), and a class 7 planet will fully utilize a single basic farm (with a limit of 10240 million). I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out other class/farm combinations. Note: If a planet overshoots that limit, it doesn't necessarily go back down to the limit but it certainly won't grow in population any more.

The formula above is poorly expressed. Try:

Limit = 20 * ((Q+1)^3)

The formula above is poorly expressed.

I'm going to have to disagree with you.  While there's no universal order of operator precedence, in many commonly-used computer languages that have an exponentiation operator (eg., Perl, VBScript, Python, Ada, Fortran, Awk), exponentiation has precedence over multiplication.  Also, in mathematics, the generally-accepted rules of operator precedence (PEDMAS--see http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.order.operations.html) give precedence to exponentiation over multiplication.  Alas, C++ (the language in which GalCiv2 is written) has no exponentiation operator, but if it did, I suspect it would follow the same rules.  So, while your re-expression of my formula may be more explicit, it isn't any more correct.

It can be poorly expressed without being incorrect. While I (and, I expect, most people who read it) understood it just fine, we have evidence that at least one person (simulcra) thought it was ambiguous. When you're talking to humans ambiguity is largely a matter of perception, so if someone thinks it's ambiguous that probably means that it is. And ambiguity breeds confusion, which is never a good thing.

Also, the adjective "poor" is open to some interpretation. Something can be perfectly good and still be poor compared to something else if your definition of "poor" is broad enough. And a more explicit expression is better, because of the ambiguity issue discussed above. Therefore, the statement "The formula above is poorly expressed" cannot simply be dismissed as false.

Ah, yes.  I took simulcra's comment as meaning the formula was incorrect, but PJ_'s interpretation is probably more accurate.  The addition of parentheses to the formula does add clarity.

I wasn't trying to wee on anyone's savoury potato products. I used the word poor, when I probably should have said "ambiguous", so apologies for that. The precedence for the calculation in the original *isn't* clear to a non-mathematician, since it could just as easily be interpreted as (parentheses shifted for example):

(20 * (4+1)) ^3 = 1000000
In any case, it's nice to know how this works, so thanks!

That should read 1000000 above, but for some reason, the forum won't display it.


Edit: err, one million. The forum seems to be clipping the zeros off!

The formula is useful. Now I know when to stop building farms. Well, back to the game.

Alas, C++ (the language in which GalCiv2 is written) has no exponentiation operator, but if it did, I suspect it would follow the same rules.

Well, if you use pow(), it would be 20 * pow(Q+1, 3)...
Actually, on a computer, the whole thing is moot because processors don't have instructions for exponents, so doing powers requires a set of multiplications: e.g. X^3 = X * X * X. The exponent operator is merely an alias for that kind of function.

As for the food itself, I was wondering how a person could survive on less than a kilo of food a week. Must be pretty strict rationing in the future...

About the planet quality population limit, I've seen Mars stop growing at 1.3 billion in the 1.0.005 gamma game before. Are you sure the formula's correct?

All you guys need to look at my post i made here and see if you can awnser it for me. Thanx
https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=162&AID=102155