I strongly dislike the argument of "developer time".  We should consider every idea as if we have unlimited time, we handle the prioritization of popular ideas separately from the discussion of the idea itself.

I am open to this idea, and would like to hear other peoples' opinions.  It is possible that we consider military food to be rolled into the collective cost of military upkeep, and food for pop is just that: food for pop.  After all, when your empire starves your cash production is impacted, but somehow your military doesn't disband until they run out of cash.  Imo that can make a lot of sense if their upkeep costs is understood to also include food cost but not food itself.

Definitely something to think about.

It matters quite a bit for SS players and also for SS galaxies like Orion Nebula is right now. I'd like to keep it, it's an interesting mechanic leading to different decisions.

when your training/building more soldiers, your not creating more people to be those soldiers, your training soldiers, their people you already have.  maybe have soldiers tied into your population count, if u lose 10k soldiers in a battle, then you also lose 10k population

there are really no reason to have soldiers anymore now that droids have a larger defense than soldiers.  just found that out today