Food stockpiling?

[Salem Graves]

What's the deal with it? I'm playing a game that is currently set to low, I'm very early in the game at the moment, but I'm already capped at 200 food, I'm not entirely sure what food is used for besides feeding your pop, but it seems like only the surplus feeds your pop? Is there any reason to not increast food stockpiling, what's food mostly used for? I'm very new to the game if you couldn't tell.

[NixBoxDone]

Several things really:

For one, food stockpiles set low means you get a bonus to pop growth much earlier, boosting your rate of production as earlier pops means earlier pop resource output and earlier upgrade from ship shelter to planetary HQ and the accompanying building unlocks and upgrades.

Setting it to high on the other hand allows you:

- Trade food for resources or science treaties with AIs or with the trading enclave
- Use food as a tribute to marauders
- Have a much bigger stockpile in case you lose a planet during war, have an uprising, have pops migrate away from food buildings, have happiness negatively impact overall food production or any other crisis that impacts food, really.

It's a trade-off between early advantage and overall stability of your empire. If you're clever you'll increase the stockpile limit after your initial colonies are at or near max pop capacity and enable the farming edict once you do to quickly stock up when you don't have a need for pop growth bonus.

There are also some fringe cases such as devouring swarms that tend to get huge short term food infusions from harvesting primitives or conquered planets as life-stock followed by longer periods of less food income.
They need the buffer so they can stockpile what they gain in that push and then dole what they gained out during the next couple years as they build up for another conquest.