The icons for farms also show a dome and one of them is elevated far off the ground. Doesn't seem like we need specific terrain to grow food.

Also, Matt Damon grew Mars potatoes. It's hard to imagine the Thalan, Altarians, or Iconians being hamstrung by the dirt under their feet.

Honestly I would prefer you spend 30 minutes or however long it would take you to fix the broken "Station Garrison", before changing any other game mechanics. I don't really mind how food works at the moment.

If there is a penalty for certain tiles it would be cost. Everything else is overcomable by technology.

The game is unrealistic in so many aspects that it makes no sense to develop a food mechanic that is in any way "realistic". It should just be an interesting game mechanic, no more, no less.

How about completely get rid of the food system and just let every planet grow to planet cap size?

At the same time, nerf prolific and make the ratio of pop to production at 2 to 1 (2 pop for 1 point of raw production).  This will automatically make the AI better in relation to the player.  And it gets rid of a tedious clunky mechanic no one particularly likes.

Also, buff synthetics.  Provide an "auto-manufacture population" command (so I don't have to constantly click on "manufacture population", which is tedious) that only requires social production points (no durantium or promethium requirements) and as balance make it so that synthetics can grow their population 50% more than the planet class.  

As much as I agree with you, if the devs don't do anything about it perhaps my solution helps you: I modded out the legion cost for "Station Garrison".

I don't know what's so difficult in putting in an option so that the player can decide whether projects do auto-repeat or not, or if that's too much work (because of the need to change the UI what really seems to be an issue) to introduce two versions of each project, one that is performed only once and the other  that is auto-repeating.

But we digress ...

I disagree that food shall be abandoned completely. If its a global resource, it leaves a vulnerable weak spot to be hit, to weaken a player's empire, if not guarded properly.

Secondly, food helps to the imagination and make different feel for carbon based and synthetic races. 

As such, food is a good idea, a good thing to have because living beings eat food after all. But again, one thing is the idea, the other - to implement it. 

Constantly taking things out if they don't appeal to everyone is nothing what I would like to see. Also I doubt that "no one particularly likes" the current mechanic, because the people on the forums are not a representative sample of all players.

What I also not like is the ongoing talk about "nerf things so far until the AI finally understands how to use them correctly". I like an interesting, randomized game and have no problem with unbalanced features. If I lose I start a new game.

Just my opinion, no offense intended.

The Hospital is 1 per colony, farms would be spammable. Also, that was for the base farm, and the real value for the farm in my suggestion was having additional adjacency bonuses at higher levels for non-growth categories (wealth, influence, etc.), making them more versatile than a hospital.

As noted above, i'd go with:

Have the unused available tiles on each planet produce food by default

This forces a great choice on the player- as you develop the planet, you trade farming space for other functions -construction, research, influence, etc.  These would need to be completely unused, so special tiles with resources like monsantium wouldn't produce food, regardless of their development status. Shade the production up or down for desert, toxic or bread basket planets as appropriate.

The game could provide some opportunities to make extra productive food tiles via research paths like the arcologies or greenhouses referred to above, or possibly allow some starbase food modules as well to extend the food supply. The current food enhancement improvements could be built and used as they are now.

Aquatics would need ocean tiles (maybe at a higher base production). Not sure about the synthetics.

• Pros
  • This should be readily understandable to the new player 
  • dead simple for the AI at the start
  • makes for the interesting choices later in the games
  • has an element of realism in it without extra micromanagement
  • makes some smaller planets without special tiles more desirable
• Cons
  • disservice to the effort real world farmers put in
  • might affect the tall vs wide empire choices unduly

Just my thoughts.

The default, unused tiles should neither give nor receive food bonuses for adjacency for this. If the tile itself has a special bonus, that tile could be bumped up.

What if cities "spawned" automatically as population maxes out. So they just automatically spawn on a free tile (if available) as the population grows and you can still choose to build and demolish cities if need be. It makes sense that the civ leader places production, research, farms, defences etc. on a planet. But maybe cities should be more organic so the planet pop itself builds them as needed. I think this would work well for AI, but still give full control to player.

Then food is no longer a requirement to build cities but instead just controls pop growth. Food shortage and the population declines. Food abundance and pop grows and cities spawn.