Where have farms gone?

Well... It's a bummer. You can build farms only on special resources on a planet. Problem is that they are quite rare.

Not really a problem Selekos as you cant build much pop these days (limited to planet class). H S Lahman, dont despair yet. Even if you do not find arable tiles, you can still build Kimberly's Refuge. A bit of planning and adjacency stacking with a bit of help from techs and farmers, you can quite easily have enough food to sustain max pop on 15+ planets.

Sorry, but this does not explain two things. (1) why are farms no longer in the tech tree at all? They were in C: Planetology prior to 3.0, but I couldn't find them anywhere in the tree now. The tree should not depend on what planet you looked at last. (2) What good are planetary food bonuses if there are no food tiles on the planet?

[Rant]

Also, what good is one galactic Kimberly Refuge improvement for +5 food when food tiles are so rare that your first five planets have none? That will only give you one city. If food bonuses tell you nothing about food tiles and food tiles are rare, then you need to get really lucky on you first few planets or you will be hopelessly behind. (I'll bet the AI on god level knows where the food tiles are.)

[/Rant]

Food has been a traditional early game problem in GalCiv III, but 3.0 seems to have made it much worse.

It's not quite that bad. If you build Kimberly's next to a colony capital and assign 3 farmers to the planet, you will have 12 food available even without any arable land tiles.

This is usually enough to pop-max both your homeworld and your best colony. There is also a tech that gives +1 food to each of your planets.

Nevertheless, I have to agree with you that carbon-based civs are now at a severe disadvantage when compared to the other three. Carbon-based desperately needs some buffs in v3.0.

This means that in multiplayer we will race for building Kimberly's, and a player that won't build this one building will have huge disadvantage. I like competition, but one building is not enough.

Yeah, I guess in MP you have to go Silicon/Synthetic/Aquatic at the moment.

I am a Gal Civ 3 newbie. 

Food is a huge problem that I do not know how to solve?

 

I never find any farms on my planets, except when playing as the Yor Singularity. (possible negative logic bug?)

As Yor, I had a ton of farms generated on each planet.  To many in fact.

This was actually a huge problem for me, because this severely reduced the number of usable hexes.

You can not build any thing on a farm, except a farm upgrade.

I eventually figured out that I could destroy the farms, which I immediately did.  

The Yor do not need food, organics do?

 

I need a way  to generate food for organics?

I tried building a Food Distribution, but it did not really do anything.

Food is a way to increase your population per planet by letting you build more cities (4 food required per city).  With crusade, population is only used for raw production or colonizing.

The "arable land" tiles can be farmed to add to the food supply, and all other food tech enhances the food production from these tiles or city population. I have found that the larger the planet, the more likely it is to have "arable land" tiles. Additionally, you can research tech to give all of your planets a base food production of +1 which adds 1 unit of food for every planet in your empire. 

You can also research and upgrade your planetary city capital on each planet to increase base population by +1, and this can be done more than once. Note this doesn't require any more food production.

Cities are more useful now and placement is critical, as getting a +1 population bonus to a city increases the available planetary population by a full 25% for each +1, so you don't need many cities to hit the limit of max population equal to the planet's class rating. If you do build a city, always put a hospital next to it for a 50% bump to your planetary population potential.

If you just want increased production on a planet, and don't want to work on food, mine the local asteroids to get +1 raw production from each one within 10 hexes. Each asteroid will be as effective as a unit of population without any "wasted' tiles for food production.

That's in the base game. I suppose that it would be fairly easy to create a mod that simply gave you 1 or 2 food per planet as a base production.  Or maybe an economic station mod for "hydroponics" to add some food production.  At this point, for any planet under 12 class, you'll only need one city to max out the population on that planet. 

I have not agreed with how population, and how farms were done for awhile. I don't have a problem with colonies only starting with a Max of 3, but our home planet have less than what we have now. With a prediction of us reaching 12, and not being able to go over by this time.

Someone complained in the beta for crusades that if food were 1/10 per turn on farms for carbon then the slynn would be at a disadvantage, so it got changed to a fixed amount. This even, puts carbons at a greater disadvantage. Now yes we can't grow food every 2 and half months, so that is the point Brad is using now, so I realised we can grow food twice a year. That is my suggestion.

But the problem is the ai can't find a reason to grow food, so to balance it with the ai he turned it into a resource. 

Yea as far as I'm concerned this global food is a catastrophy, and we need to bring carbons back to how food used to be. This would never of happened be if there weren't so many complaints that food wasn't global. 

This game becomes more ridiculous in many ways as it tries to find a balance in its mechanics.

-Has advanced technologies allowing for space travel and interplanetary colonization.

-Neolithic level of agriculture.

Humans in this alternate universe must have never figured out hydroculture.

Looks like it would be reasonably simple to add a base level of food production per planet to a tech tree as a starting basis.

And Earth is only at 7.5B now with a fairly flat growth rate per the last fifty years, so the population from a capital and 1 extra city would seem to be reasonable.

i don't know what it was 50 years ago, but it had 4.5 billion in 1984

I've recently been playing with rare habitable planets, and the arable land has been hit or miss.  With plenty of planets to colonize, I've not had a problem.  When there are few arable tiles, it is certainly more difficult, but not impossible, to gain a good production base.  Usually I'll build culture starbases when I have few farms available, so that I can take advantage of asteroid mining.