Research from every planet goes into a single, global 'RP machine' that allocates it among your projects.
Food and minerals both go into stockpiles, from which your people and your industry eat and are supplied every turn.
PP cannot be stockpiled. What we are saying by 'pooling PP' is that if planet A makes 100 PP/turn and planet B makes 200 PP/turn, you have 300 PP available every turn to build something; this makes it effectively work like research.
My personal problem with this system is that we will inavariably want to limit this somehow; if we don't, it is impossible to balance, because this way a huge empire could build just about everything in one turn (since there is no theoretical maximum PP/turn you could have if you go this route), and if we do limit it, then we are very rapidly making the system very complicated.
Feeding people and researching tech do not use PP, so that is irrelevant. Why is a planet building a building any different than a planet building a ship? Why should you be allowed to pool 10 planets to build a ship but not 10 planets to build a wonder?When a planet is building a building it is forced to use its own production. But when contributing to a global cause such as feeding people, building ships, researching tech it can contribute all of its production.
With regard to tzlaine's criticisms:
I think we could have an alternate mechanism for 'placement' of ships so that, while you do have have a particular source to build a ship or ships, there's no reason the ship has to pop up there. However, by the nature of our system, you won't have that many build decisions to make, because you won't be building anything except infrastructure on your less-important planets. I don't think it makes sense to say 'the player gets involved in building only when it really matters' and then say that 'the player has to make way too many building decisions, so let's just make one big production bank.'1) Keeping track of the progress of production on each of your planets makes big games with 100 systems or more (i.e. ~300-500 planets and build queues) in your empire very painful. It doesn't really matter much if we consolidate these queues onto one screen or not. If you can pick which planet you want any single item to be produced on, even if the game usually picks pretty well, you are still left with a staggering number of choices.
I don't believe you can assume a 'typical' empire on a game that allows you to have such a wide range of galaxy sizes as we do. Our planets are well defined and we can figure out an 'average' planet for any race, but not an average empire.We can just determine the typical empire size and production rate. If you play a smaller empire, you will produce items more slowly, and the opposite will happen for a larger-than-normal empire. I don't quite understand what about this is nightmarish.