I really like this.

I think it would be good to include a global mechanic that Food Deficit = starvation = population loss.       Those Farming planets are great, but if you lose them you should suffer big time.

So the biggest change is that Cities and Megalopolises should not cost food to build. 

Population should be dependent on food supply.    Cities only allow your population to grow larger.

I would also add that upgrading the basic farms should use Thillium or Promethium or one of the "space" resources while the hub buildings use monsantium or unique stuff.   You don't need the hub buildings, but the current system is so very unbalanced.

Even using empty tiles to produce food, it still boils down to a system with only one basic solution ("make enough food"). That still isn't an interesting choice. It's just bean counting maintenance.

I do still often see AI planets stalling in development for a long time with empty tiles and no food for cities. If those tiles just defaulted to farms the AI could get started far easier.

The Wild Grain tile/adjecency bonus would make more sense too. If there's wild grain, why do I need to build a big sci-fi farm to eat it? The wasteland tile bonus should definitely be foodless.

The original plan to change food was frankly the first proposed change to the game that I wasn't happy about and I preferred the status quo. However this idea has my full support.

You could tie growth to food surplus, stellaris/ES2-style.

And you could color-code tyles for food production. One color is 1 food per tile, one is 0.5, one for 0 (the numbers are bullshit and aren't value suggestions).

Then you could have an hydroponics improvement: produce 0.3 food (or "a low amount") no matter the tile, to make a sterile square produce food if here really is nothing else you'd rather produce on that tile.

I'm cool with the food system as it is; but I think its too Monsantium dependent.  Monsantium isn't super common and its required for every food upgrade beyond the basic farm.

I also think adding orbital farming improvements (as well as morale boosting improvements) might be a nice upgrade for Influence starbases to make them a more viable alternative to economic starbases.

Seems like the easiest way to accomplish what the OP states - an arable/rich land significance - is to change farms from being [relatively large integer] base rate + [tiny amount] level bonus to the other way around. Make farms a base of 0.3 per tech tier, plus 1 per level. Or something like that. Reintroduce tiering cities, to make food more of a bonus - say, a tier 1 city costs no food and provides only a small amount of popcap; to get truly populous planets you need to spend that food on upgrades. A starvation / unhappiness mechanic should absolutely be in place for having negative food surplus.

And/or: a more major change, but has a bit of a two-birds-one-stone element: instead of having colony capitals, make the initial placed tile more modest; "landing site" or "initial settlement" or "colony seed" or something and have it supply and demand a modest amount of food (in equal amounts), to make planetary bonuses/maluses to food production a little bit more significant (no surplus food? Don't settle that precursor planet just yet). Then players can place (or upgrade to) their own "real" capitol building, like many have asked for over the years, with the option to delete the initial settlement once a capitol exists (and the food situation allows).

How wedded are people to food being produced on planets?

One of the issues that I've expressed before that I have with the current pop growth system is that food is a different resource category than what the silicate and synthetic require to grow their populations.  So, when attempting to play maps with different resource (thulium/durantium/etc) constraints, food falls outside of these constraints because planets and planet tiles aren't 'resources.'

Since population is now such a core component to all of the snowball mechanics (research, production, wealth), one is almost forced to play with whatever default resource levels just to have an even playing field for different life forms.  

One idea would be to have the planet colony produce enough food to support the planet pop cap by itself.  Then additional food having to come from starbases either with a mining ring - or an additional agri ring (similar to the xeno archeology ring) to harvest them (like some nutrient broth resource floating in space or whatever).  I know it may sound counterintuitive to not have food come from the planet, but mechanicially it lumps all of the pop growth stuff into the same resource pool.  So if you play on 'rare' resources, all lifeforms have similar pop growth constraints.  Not just the yor and slyne, or whatever.  

Furthermore, since this resource comes from space - it can be the kind that can go into the global resource pool and get shipped around the empire as excess food for the purposes of pop cap busting on selected planets...

thoughts?

Actually I modded my own game to have arcologies Only one branch yet because that is a lot of work and I must also provide the graphics to be able to see what is on a planet (I'm no good designer so my graphics look more like logos).

I don't think YOR considering the possible downsides.

Thought about this at work yesterday, and I'm actually in favor of eliminating food as a resource. I say that as someone who likes the current system, I beeline for Bread Basket worlds almost as hard as Precursor worlds because building agriworlds is fun to me. But I understand the idea that teaching the AI that it wants farms because it wants cities is hard (I'm not a programmer so that's about as far as I can go for that).

So I'm in favor of getting rid of food as both a resource and a prerequisite for cities. This leads to 2 questions, namely how do we keep city spam from overtaking every tile and what to do with farms and the associated techs. The first is relatively easy, keep the planetary pop cap so that only 1-4 tiles are being used on the majority of planets in the best hub locations. The second is trickier. I suggest keeping farms as improvements, but basically turning them into little superchargers for the city engines via adjacency bonuses. The base farm would have the +1 pop adjacency and a +0.1 to growth. This would probably render the hospital unnecessary, but I don't know if many people were even using it in its current state anyway. A tier 2 farm could get a +1 wealth adjacency to demonstrate the commerce that is created once you get everything up and running a little. Maybe a specialization tech a little farther down the tree that lets you choose between local cuisine (slight bonus to influence, for cultural players), biofuel (small +production, builder types) or emergency ration bunkers (small bonus to defense/resistance for warmongers). In this manner, food is highlighted in the abstract as a resource and an option for personal choice customization based on the tech tree.

That are good ideas, but I have some adjustments:

- Unused tiles produce food according to the planet type. Desert planets less than terran planets. But only so many unused tiles are taken into account as there are other improvements on the planet. So a freshly colonized planet would only get the food from one tile. If you build another improvement, two unused tiles are taken into account and so on. That prevents freshly colonized planets to produce large amounts of food instantly.

- Food production should be a continual process (like mining other resources), cities and the like should not need food to build, but the population should consume food every turn according to its size. When there is not enough food to feed everyone population growth on all planets should become negative in relation to the amount of food that is missing. Also morale should suffer a hit (perhaps -1% globally per turn food is missing). Don't forget to implement recovery from that morale hit once there is again enough food

- There is no base production of food based on planet class. So to colonize a new planet you first have to make sure you produce enough food (or have stored enough) so that your new colony doesn't begin to starve immediately.

- Food can be traded with othe civs (or sold in the new galactic market coming with the new expansion).

- Introduce agricultural modules for economic starbases.

- Introduce (upgradeable) hydroponic farms to produce food on tiles that are to harsh to grow anything naturally.

- I agree that standard resources become more and more useless as the game progresses. I have modded my game so that some improvements have very high standard resource costs, so I actually have problems to build enough mining starbases (administrators are limited after all). And I began to put in missions that cost a really lot of standard resources (like 50 or 100) to get special resources like monsantium.

Add additional food resources.

1) Oceans should provide a base food supply. Fisheries should increase it.

2) Add Hydroponic Modules to Starbases.

3) Remove the use of tile on a planet devoted to farming and instead make it modular like starbases, pay the fee, increase farming output.

By the 23rd century farming should advance to the point there is aquaponics, hydroponics, and vertical farming underneath the cities and factories on the plantes.

Guys, this has to be intuitive and obvious to players too tho, not just us 1%ers...

Here are a couple of points: it is estimated that already in 21st century people will begin to "eat" food through nanobots, doing no physical effort whatsoever.

The problem with food is, that you can have it any place because everything from photosynthesis to ground nutrients can be artificial, even with 21st century tech. So it does not make any sense to restrain food production. 

And dont get ridiculus with arable land, otherwise its like on one hand you build quantum torpedoes, but on the other you call for middle ages peasants to develop arable land.

My proposal would be do adjustments with some math, but i am not smart enough to propose what those might be.