For food production, someone made a calculation in an other Thread about the return on investment (PhoenixPoint: "Food Production" takes 2 month (ingame) until amortization). It took 62 days to overcome the initial investment.
However, it’s decomposed this way:
- RoI on material: 37.5 days (31.25 days if you always trade with Synedrion with a 5:4 exchange rate)
- RoI on tech: 25 days
So, unless you take the Synedrion route that makes heavy use of “tech”, you will be trading for “material” only and get the RoI earlier.
And if you 50% diplomacy with Anu (or steal their research) you can have a boost in food production (25%) making it even better and a RoI on “material” of 30 days. Trading with Synedrion with a rate of 5:4, only 25 days.
So clearly worth the medium time investment, but a trade-off.