I like the idea of corporations as characters, even if it might seem like the space tyrant would micromanage and own everything, because to me it seems more original. There are a lot of micromanaging games out there, but aside from overt enemies, they tend to lack engaging AI like this corporation based planet ownership seems to have the potential to be.
4X planet specialization vs corporations
I am new to this forum and this discussion is absolutely amazing. Discussing abstract concepts like this is so cool I love it.
I would consider planets in terms of their potential growth and how many are currently living on them. Using this abstract concept you could then simplify food to just units needed to sustain current and units needed to grow. Food units would be produced by each planet and shared equally throughout the empire, this will allow you to have farming planets (or even farming companies). Simplifying food will then allow you more focus on the production queue from your simplified corporations.
As Acharis mentioned using a simplified process of having factories dependent on the number of workers/population could help manage the amount of "items" produced by the planet. Corporations would then actively manage these queues based on their own specializations.
Author
What you think about this:
Planets have farms and factories. Farms produce food (and also maybe luxury food?) factories produce consumer goods (default), heavy machinery and player ordered stuff.
Food and consumer goods are needed by the population. Food is used up each turn fully, while consumer goods are stored (by the population). There is an empire wide "food price" and "consumer goods price", it represents availability of these to the population. If the price food is too high there is starvation.
Heavy machinery are produced by factories and distributed between planets. These boost factories (additional machinery for factories, make those more efficient).
Factories by default build consumer goods, once there is a minimum sufficient availability of these empire wide it starts producing some heavy machinery as well. If the player wants something (made a contract with a corporation to deliever ships for example) it takes priority (which means if the player build huge fleet over several turns the consumer goods price will skyrocket). Always at least 10% of production is used for consumer goods.
Farms and factories are auto built, what to built is decided by the planet (if it's fertile it tends to build more farms, if food price is high more farms are built, also the player can decide agriculture/industry tax and those with lower tax are more likely to be built and lastly the corporation that has the charter over the planet has preferences).
I'm wondering about adding mines and refineries to the mix...
My random thoughts on food:
An interstellar civilization would probably have perfected the engineering of closed ecosystems, so you can get away without modeling food system maintenance if you want, and just concentrate on food system growth. (After all, no matter the kind of planet, we'll probably be producing our food in reliable, high-density hydroponic greenhouses, rather than throwing seeds at the ground and hoping for good weather. Iceland's *already* managing to grow tomatoes in the long dark Arctic winter using geothermal.)
Realistically, the important variable for a future-tech planetary colony would be the accessibility of CHON volatiles (carbon, hydrogen, etc.) That's "food", but not in the sense of 9 million loaves of bread, and when they're eaten there's no more bread. It's just that there's some amount of volatiles tied up in the colony's food cycle, and the population can continue to grow until all accessible volatiles are utilized. After that, the population can't grow any further unless they go to more extreme measures, like mining icy bodies (comets etc.) or importing volatiles from other systems. That's very simple to model: there's just a variable for "available CHON" and over time that converts to population. The speed of conversion, efficiency of conversion, and cost of CHON importation can depend on other things (corporate specialties, planetary system type, etc.).
Anyway, just an idea, but one that might make things seem more realistically high-tech. ("Emperor, the Arkantau system is now utilizing 100% of its available CHON volatiles for food production, and population growth has stalled. Grant a charter for Oort mining to the Co-Mine Consortium?" Stuff more like that.)
Author
Hmmm, you know, I like the "throwing seeds at the ground and hoping for good weather" :) You are right, it's more likely for a high tech scfi to have these hydrophonics and stuff, but... Personally I prefer a bigger difference in wealth, like there is the Emperor and high tech ships and everything, but there are also those poor settlers who carve the soil of frontier worlds with their bare hands while fending of some insectoid vicious aliens without much hope of help from imperial army regiments because these are busy subduing some rebelion somewhere else :) Also ocassional starvation (not due a big blunder of the player, but, well, a few planets got a bad harvest and the emergency food stockpile was not enough, so it happened).
After all, no matter the kind of planet, we'll probably be producing our food in reliable, high-density hydroponic greenhouses, rather than throwing seeds at the ground and hoping for good weather.
High tech for the Empire, but rather low tech for majority of the population (it's not that these hydropharms are not invented, it's that these are too expensive to afford by everyone).
Also, I'm wondering about "food being too expensive to transport in high quantity", so the planet has a local food source and can import only from systems that are neighbour only (also it increases the local food price). The player can decide on longer range import, but that's expensive. Also there could be granaries with food stockpiles (and regualr disaster events that make certain planets have drastic food production decreases). I'm not sure if that's a good one...
Ha, yeah, makes sense; space peasants gotta eat. Maybe if you've got multiple species, either in harmony or in an occupation situation, they can break down and start trying to eat each other in times of extreme scarcity 
"Emperor, due to several years of bad harvests, our occupying troops have been eaten by the locals."
It'd be neat to model starvation as a risk-enhancer for random bad events, rather than as just "population loss". So maybe the peasants don't starve, but as the food gets scarcer it increases the planet's per-turn chances for revolt, plague, interspecies conflict, crazy religious conversions, and other bad news.
Actually I do think the corporations make more sense. Just designating a planet to something and simply letting it go is kind of boring, while handling and moving forward a group of corporations creates much more interesting implications. There could be competition between the corporations, and they can be promoted in level/demoted in level based on the actions of another corporation. Anyway sounds interesting. May be interesting for the player to manage, but it is definitely an awesome concept to work with.
Author
I got with the corporations. Here is the topic http://www.gamedev.net/topic/662771-4x-corporations/
Thanks all.
Yeah, I don't like the stright population=food too. Revolts and uprisings are much more fun (and realistic). Food affects population growth, also at extreme cases causes population loss, but overall it's happines. Everyone likes a lot of tasty food (even through they could live on one meal a day of recycled fungus mass) and they would not think of disposing an Emperor that provides it :)
It'd be neat to model starvation as a risk-enhancer for random bad events, rather than as just "population loss". So maybe the peasants don't starve, but as the food gets scarcer it increases the planet's per-turn chances for revolt, plague, interspecies conflict, crazy religious conversions, and other bad news.
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