The size of the food-storage (i.e. the amount of food needed to completely fill it once), depends on the population count. The larger the population count the more food it will take to fill the food-storage the next time. In other words, the more population, the slower the planet will grow.
Actually to be more precise, it is not the current population count of the planet that defines the size of the food-storage, but it is the average population count over the last 8 turns. Also, should the planet have grown by more than two citizens in the meantime, then those past population-counts are not accounted for in the average population-count calculation.
The calculation of the average population count is displayed when hovering the mouse over the food-storage.
First of all, it takes the average population count, and rounds it up to the next integer number. This is done to achieve a certain effect. If you have a planet that has a population-count of 5 for several turns already, and it grows to 6, we want the food-storage size to grow right there as well. If we would not round up, your planet would grow to 6, and the food-storage size would stay the same. Then a few turns later it would all of a sudden grow to a larger size. That would look odd. In order to avoid that, the average population count gets rounded up. That’s the value displayed in the tooltip.
Now that we got all the rounding stuff behind us, here’s what the formula actually does: Say the (already rounded) average population count would be 6. First of all 1 is subtracted from it, that leaves 5. Now, 5 is taken to the power of 1.5, which equals to 11.18. This number is always rounded down to the next lowest integer. So we take 11, multiply that by 40 and add another 40 to it. The result is 480.
That means, for a population count of 6, the food-storage size will be set to 480.
Originally the food-storage size was directly linked to the current population count. However, that opened a nasty loophole that allowed one to shuffle large amounts of citizens around, while growing your planet at a unrealistic pace. All you had to do was move most of your citizens into the stationed military box one tick before the planet would grow, and move them back again after the growth. We considered that unfair.
In order to prevent that we introduced the idea with the average population count. As a result, the food-storage size will adapt to your population-count within the next few turns. But it will not adapt the very next turn.
manual\food-storage-size-calculation.txt · Last modified: 2016/11/08 07:17 by uncountednose