[Suggestion] Food & Upkeep

[ElegantCaveman]

I find food in Pandora to be a useless resource. It's not fun when you run out, but it's so plentiful that running out is all but impossible. I have some thoughts about how it could affect Growth further, but that's for another time.

This post is about unit upkeep.

What if Food was used for unit upkeep on top of/instead of Credits? Especially for Xenomorph units.

You could have a basic food upkeep cost for your own units (1 Food for all units, for the Troopers and the pilots of the other vehicle), or simply keep human units purely Credit-based.

But how about making Xenomorph unit upkeep purely food-based?

As things are, alien units are sub-par, given that they can't be upgraded. The stronger ones are kind of nice, but since their Credit upkeep matches human units, the only upside to them is that you don't need to produce them. Considering that you have to nearly kill them to capture them, the healing time required after kind of off-sets the production time you're saving.

If you made alien upkeep require food instead, this would give us a new approach to warfare: save some Credits and feed the local fauna instead, fielding a large-but-relatively-weak army of xenos.