For an independent microstate with a total population of only 18,000, a population that was still steadily declining, and almost no one engaged in production, food was a matter of life and death.
Although food trading was still possible, Eldent truly had no financial resources to speak of. She even provided extra benefits to residents who remained in Eldent, leaving her able to exchange resources only by "charging people."
Super Robot Wars was indeed caught in an Energy Crisis, and Eldent could even be considered part of a buyer's market. She had no shortage of people willing to be charged.
But if Eldent fell into some crisis and consumed vast amounts of food, then someone tried to choke them with food supplies when they replenished their reserves afterward, they could not exactly send all those super robots out into the wilderness to hunt and fish for enough food for 18,000 people, could they?
But for the Scorching Sun, that was no problem at all.
Aside from the experimental plots used for cultivation testing, the Scorching Sun also had mushroom farms with astonishing output. They had originally been intended primarily to produce food rations for Martians, but unsurprisingly, they could also be used as human rations. Their harvest cycle was extremely short and their yield enormous. They could not compare to a major nation, but feeding fewer than twenty thousand people was more than manageable.
War ran on money and energy. Cheng Tian had indeed gained a great deal from the previous battle, but the inevitable mecha maintenance, repairs, replenishment of energy and ammunition, and all the rest were no small expenses either.
In theory, Cheng Tian could directly solve all of that with Chosen Coins. But with a massive mobile power bank like Eldent at his side, why waste that