Personally I hate to see waste in my empire. When I see my fledgling empire struggling to build all the buildings I need on some planets and then wasting billions of credits on others that have finished the initial building spree, I just think that there has to be a better way to do things. It would be so much easier for me personally if I had spending sliders on a per planet basis. I don't mind a little micromanagement if it means that those extra 50 bcs that are currently going to waste in social production can instead be placed into research or into military production/back into the treasury.

As it is it just seems like my empire is being run by a corrupt, overly bureaucratic bunch of idiots who can't tell that they are funnelling billions of credits down the drain because of all the hoops that you have to jump through to optimize your economy. We are forced to spend hundreds of bcs on social production that we aren't even using just so that we can get our developing worlds a couple bcs to set up a much needed factory or market.

@ above, it does appear possible if the production potential is there. But you will end up with annoyences no the less. Uponr esearchign new tech that upgrades your factories lets say,y ou uber 20 factory planet that had nothign queued socially now has a queue of 20 items. Same for every other uber planet out there. Out of nowhere you find it that the ships which you designed specifically to be built within 5 turns on all those planets now take 10 turns to complete! Add to it the fact that now your research took a hit too becasue you got used to the fat juicy extra tech you were getting from the planet... altough that may not be so servere since you had so many factories :/ But I'm sure there would be tech planets out there so it owuld still hurt. Hold idea behidn the concept is not to penalize a player for discovering new upgrades and such.

But the problem with what you are saying is that the system right now just penalizes the player ALL the time.

It is the equivalent of me needing to pay $250 a month for gas for my car EVERY month, even though I only drive $50 worth of gas in most months, so that on those 2 months out of the year I go on vacation and do drive a lot of extra miles, there is no increase in my credit card bills. i.e. I pay for it every month whether I use it or not simply to flatten out any large changes in spending. That simply makes no sense.

As far as constructive solutions to the problem, I do like the idea of unused social production simply being funneled into military and research production (spending). This solves the problem that the players face in that social production on planets that aren't building anything is currently wasted, and also solves the problem that there would be huge changes to the budget any time there is an upgrade researched, since the money is being spent at a fairly constant rate no matter if a social project is being built or not.

To try and get back on track with strategy discussion, the precursor mine example really gave me something to think about regarding the production issue, by providing an extreme example of how things go wrong when the industrial capacity of your planets is not built up evenly.

Having that precursor mine and manufacturing capital on the same planet made me realize what happens when one planet has 10x the production capacity of all your others. Scenarios:

Most funding is allocated to research - Things are OK, since factories do not affect this.

Most funding is allocated to military - Things seem OK here. Planets with no military project build nothing and waste nothing. Your mega industrial planet turns out ships like there's no tomorrow. Your other ship-building planets build ships also, but at a much slower rate than if your mega industry planet did not exist. Bottom line is that if your mega planet has 10x the industrial power of your other planets, it will produce roughly 10 ships before the other planets roll 1 ship off the assembly line (if everything builds the same ship). Not immediately good or bad, just FYI. Maybe have the mega planet build your warships while the other planets build constructors/transports.

Most funding is allocated to social - You just got a whole bunch of tile upgrades to build and you boosted social production. This is where the bad news happens. Your mega planet upgrades those buildings like they're going out of style. Then, while you're waiting for your other planets to finish upgrading, the entire industrial might of the mega planet is being paid for to produce.... nothing. If you have no social project left, it's all being wasted. The double whammy of it all is that if your mega planet accounts for 50% of your empire's social spending, you have to waste 1 credit just to spend 1 credit on a social project on any other world. Truly a nightmare scenario, although you can reduce the waste slightly by 'focus'-ing on military or research. Even so, the closer you push your spending slider toward 100%, the more your treasury screams in agony. And if you run out of cash and have to dial your spending down to a more reasonable level, it will take forever for those other planets to build anything, because your mega planet is ruining the distribution of funds by sucking up many times more than what a normal planet does.

There is a silver lining to this mushroom cloud, one example I can think of when this might actually be helpful - that's when you're building a galactic wonder, or one of those trade good thingies, and you want to beat everyone else to it.

(end of scenarios)


Recommendations follow:

The strategy I am leaning toward at the moment is to try and give all planets an industrial capacity that is either equal or roughly proportional to the number of tiles on the planet. This way, when it's time to upgrade social projects, my hope is that my planets have a chance to finish at roughly the same time (all other things being equal, which they are not always...).

About that precursor mine (applies to other production bonuses also). Nobody said you HAD to use it. But as we saw above, you may WANT to use it to get a galactic wonder built. So, my new strategy will be to build a trade center on it until I need to use the awesome power of the precursor mine. When it's time to build one of those really big projects, first build a factory on that tile and then get your project done fast! Just make sure to convert the factory into something else when you're done using the bonus.

A note to the person who said that they get more research by having their mega-production planet focus on research: True, but check out what your planet is spending per turn and make sure you are getting the whole story. You are getting a lot of research points, but you are buying them for WAY more than 100% of what they cost when you pump up the research slider. Certainly an option if you decide you need research and are willing to pay for it.

Note on the manufacturing capital. Build it. I just tested this in a game, rather than allowing you the privilege of paying for more industry points, it increases your production without an increase in spending. Sadly, the game does not clearly point out the awesome-ness of this building in that it gives you industry for FREE, making it one of the few upgrades in GC that actually gives you something for nothing once it's built. You may want to build this on your strongest industrial planet so that you get the greatest amount of bonus, free industry. I need to check whether this is true of the tech capital also.

Research bonus:
I have yet to confirm whether the research tile bonuses increase capacity or actually give you free research points. Either way, I don't believe that concentrating your research capacity on one planet is a problem. The reason is that unlike military or social production, it makes no difference what planet produces the research, it all goes to the same place. Additionally, if research is set at 50%, then you get the same amount of research whether it all comes from one planet or whether the capacity is divided evenly among the empire.

IF the tech capital bonus is free like the manufacturing capital, you probably want to build it on the planet that is capable of generating the most research.


Fellow citizens - if I am wrong about any of the game mechanics please correct me immediately... thx If you think my strategy recommendations are wrong then please put your energy into explaining why your idea is better and not into telling me how wrong I am, thx again

In GalCiv II, only social production gets wasted. At one time, social product was put back in the treasury if there were no buildings and it was a micromanagement nightmare. Why? Because on a large galaxy where you have 30 colonies, you would go from being $3000 in the black to suddenly $-$3000 in deficit spending because you researched some tech that upgraded your factories or research labs or whatever. And then the balance would shift, all by itself, as planets started finishing these. It's not an issue on ships because ships keep building forever until you manually turn them off. So in that case, the economy stays reasonably straight forward. I have yet to see a good alternative other than "put social spending back in the treasury" which I already know won't work.

Well, I guess I am unlucky: I have participated in the beta and hasn't played on gigantic map to experience this behavior.
BTW, it would have been nice to have an official statement in the forums during the beta when the behavior has changed. And I don't remember seeing thread about those big budget shift.

Isn't it working due to the fact that spending growth rapidely in one turn? If it is the case, why not issue a popup telling that due to new technologies, expense have greatly inccreased, when a big shift is detected in the budget?

With the hypothesis of behavior corresponding to the manual (no waste), if you go fastly in the red, that mean you are affecting lots of money to social production. Since you didn't produce anything, this money was spared. But you didn't use them for military production or research. And this is pretty annoying if you are at 100% spending and generating lots of money: your aren't using efficiently your BC. When using the above numbers, if you go from 3000 BC to -3000 BC in one turn, that means your spared social production is 6000 BC. That is a pretty nice amount of BC that could be used each turn but aren't since the social slider is set to sometthing. If it was reduced, the spared social production will be less but the military and research will be greater. So you BC will be better used.

Consider another case, if not wasting your BC on social production.
If, for avoiding deficit, you need to have a general spending less than 100%. When emptying social queue, some planets will spare BC on social production, allowing you to spare BC on your budget. And you will be able to raise the general spending ratio while avoiding deficit. In this case, that would mean that the spared social production has been diverted toward military, research and social production on planets where the queue isn't empty.

And if your spending ratio is at 100%, I am pretty people will redirect spared social production since the treasury will go up to much. And don't forget that you have income penalty if your treasury is too important.

BTW, I don't see really a difference in micromanagement between avoiding to waste BC on empty queues and trying to use efficiently the BC spared on social production: the problem is the same: trying to boost non social production on planets that have an empty queue while keeping social production on planets whose queue isn't empty.

And I am wondering if the problem will be the same now than during the beta:
- the AI is tougher
- economy has been tweaked, especially colony maintenance
These 2 points prevents the player of overextending too fast and obligate the player to build a strong economy fastly. And this happen while all planets have something in there build queue.

So it may now work due to all others tweaks made in the game. Who knows?

@Citizen Need3Lives

you are at a point of the discussion where everyone has already been. There is no one on this forum stupid enough not to draw that comparison, beating it to death doesn't contribute to the discussion. If you spend $250 on gas and only drive $50 of it, I would check with your neighbor he might be syphoning some off in the morning.

I personally am beyond that poitn already, I just wish the money was better allocated because I had a game where all the money I assigned to social spendign was being used up by planets with no porjects and the oens that did have projects were getting none of it. Retooling the priority of the assignment of funds so the neediest worlds get the cash first this woudl not affect the overall cost and it wouldn't cause any swings in spending either.

Once agian get behind the whole concept of the system because that was discussed exhustively during Beta to no avail. Live with the system it's part of the game.

I would like to say that my comments were not meant to be disparaging of the economy system, but more of a heads up to anyone who hadn't noticed that there is a drawback to the bonus tiles. Strategically speaking one could reserve bonus tiles until the economy is ready to handle it and then use it to jump ahead unexpectedly. My gripe was more that "bonus" implies getting something for free and here that is not the case(unless you count maintenance, which I don't).

That is precisely the reason to do it. No matter what your justifications are for the system, if 90% of your players (my guess is this number is actually even higher - I would be surprised if any non-developer actually understands the system 100%) can't understand the system, it may be time for a new one.

Oh I think there's some projecting going on there my friend.  I suspect it's a much smaller number.

You have spending. Spending goes into 3 areas, military, social, research. You have 3 sliders.  I don't think that many people are baffled. If they were, you wouldn't have the occasional post about it, it would be everywhere.

I think most gamers prefer being able to build one or the other.  But I think in GalCiv III we should revisit the whole thing.  Besides, it makes coding the AI easier.

Oh I think there's some projecting going on there my friend. I suspect it's a much smaller number. You have spending. Spending goes into 3 areas, military, social, research. You have 3 sliders. I don't think that many people are baffled. If they were, you wouldn't have the occasional post about it, it would be everywhere. I think most gamers prefer being able to build one or the other. But I think in GalCiv III we should revisit the whole thing. Besides, it makes coding the AI easier.

What you stated is easy to understand in it's base form...it's when you start *using* the production with negative results that people get confused IMHO. I understand the concept of the 3 sliders, and then focusing them in the colony screen. What got me (and I play strat games almost exclusively) is why my economy was always failing (one shouldn't really have to rely on tech trading to stay in the green), and how buildings (factories) can get you into trouble. See, aside from paying maintenance, I thought getting more factories/labs would help get me the techs/buildings that would improve my society, and thus, increase my economy and such. This is obviously not the case, as you have to figure out the exact effects of each building on your economy, and I bet the average player's head would explode trying to figure it all out. It hurts mine, even after getting help from the gaming geniuses who hang out here.

I like GalCiv 2 more than Civ 4, but I have to tell you that Civ 4 was much easier for me to understand in terms of empire control. I shouldn't have to do formulaic work to improve my empire, the computer should do it for me, but it should also be clear (easy) to the end user how things work...and I just don't think most players will understand this system.

The good thing is, you can enjoy the game without understanding the micromanagement details. You can build whatever you want, lose all the money you want, have all the waste you want...because you just have to sell techs to stay in the green.

You have spending. Spending goes into 3 areas, military, social, research. You have 3 sliders. I don't think that many people are baffled.

Well, you have one more slider: the general spending slider.

I am pretty sure people would love to have only 3 non linked sliders instead of the current 4 (at empire level):
- one for military production
- one for social production
- one for research production.

That way, they will be able to use 100% military capacity, 100% social capacity and 100% research capacity

In any case, there will always be the problem about: what to do with empty social queue.

Yep. I wonder where the developers left their brains when they came up with this economic model. It's just about as tupid as it gets.

- Social gets downright wasted, if no project is being done. CLEVER - not.
- This mean you will be penalized unless you perfectly even out your projects on ALL planets so that they will be working simultaneously. The absolute worst thing you can do is to make specialize a planet into manufacturing, since the waste will only increase.

They should completely skipped the military/social/research slider as it doesn't make sense, and only confuses new players. So what they SHOULD have done is:

- only have the sliders for tax/spending. These does make sense and you can manage economy and approval.
- The buildings should just be worked if built. If you have a lab, you produce research, similarly with factories.
- If you don't build new constructions or ships on planet, then no money will be spent.

Much easier to understand, and makes much more sense, and requires much less micromanagement.

Congratulations on the WORST economic model EVER in a computer game. It's a shame really since I do enjoy many other aspects of the game. So if they'd fix this, it would be a good game. As it stands now, it's just way too silly.

Congratulations on the WORST economic model EVER in a computer game. It's a shame really since I do enjoy many other aspects of the game. So if they'd fix this, it would be a good game. As it stands now, it's just way too silly.

I really don't like the wasted social production thing - I mean I really hate it, but Luhh isn't this a bit harsh? IMHO, I can think of some very confusing models, e.g the EU series. But I understand and share some of your frustration.

I think we want to encourage measured debate on this issue to persuade the developers to reconsider some tweaks to their decisions around the economy (like the production waste issue), and from reading Frogboy's replies I see he is getting understandably alienated by harsh criticism.

I understand your frustration Luhh, but "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar".

@ Runemaster:

I think either your #2 or #3 or some variation of both would be a good solution to the social production issue, as well as probably help improve the game economics overall. However, I have to disagree with

1) Instead of having every planet "auto-upgrade" based on the latest tech, have the individual manually go in to each planet to upgrade what they wish. This way they could see each hit (to their economy) as it happened.

I personally was VERY thankful to see auto-upgrades implemented. Having to manually upgrade colonies would be a major micro-management pain in larger galaxies where you might have 30-50+ colonies easily.

Someone asked if we could stop planets from auto-upgrading facilities. You can do this on the colony details screen.

I've said before that one of my problems is that a lot of the values are hidden from the player. Here's an example. You can see how much social/military your colony is producing by looking at the shields/hammers at the top of the screen. But you can't see what comes from your facilities, what comes from capactiy bonuses, and how much you're actually paying for and how much is granted by abilities/specials...

I think it is important to have the following information made available to the player:

- For factories/labs, the cost of driving this facility at 100%. This can be roughly estimated from the industrial power of the factory, but isn't stated explicitly. If a bonus increases capacity, it's not reported anywhere and we have to infer it from the total spending going up.

- For factories/labs, the amount of industry/research that can be produced by driving this facility at 100%. This is not always the same as the previous value, as you may have bonuses to production/research. If a bonus gives extra productivity for free, it is not displayed and the player has to try and figure out what's going on.

- The number of industry points required to build the facility. I can't see this anywhere. All I get is the time to build it, which doesn't always seem to be correct This sort of info would help players keep their upgrades in perspective. Right now players don't really know what their upgrades are costing them, and how much they are getting. They just see the new buildings costing more and their spending going up with each upgrade. GC2 will tell you that the first factory upgrade took 4 turns and the next one took 6 turns. But how can I put that in perspective, unless I remember how much I was spending/producing at the time of the last upgrade? Was the new upgrade more expensive? How much more? Who knows? These are all questions that players are trying to answer.

I think it is great that Civ4 tells you in no uncertain terms that a temple costs x hammers and a cathedral costs y hammers. As it is now, the tech tree descriptions never tell you what the social improvements are going to get you. Remember MOO1 where it told you that getting Robotic Controls 5 means that you get 5 factories per population unit? GC2 says "This factory is cooler than the last one. [Insert joke here]."

----

Someone asked why you can't run industry and research both at 100%. Keep in mind that military and social draw on the same resource, which at first glance appears to be your total industrial capacity, but this is not the case. If you do ANY research, then you cannot use your maximum industrial capacity and factories are under-utilized. Anyone who does not figure this out is guaranteed to be confused. If you want to know more, read my giant comment in the post that I link to at the top (Warning, it is huge.)

If I had to summarize what I think are the real problems with the system, in rough order of severity it would be:

1. Lack of transparency on costs, bonuses, and breakdown of 'summed' values. Every beginner understands that if you push up the research slider you get more research. Unfortunately the player who tries to quantify and ask things like "How Much?, How Much More?" is largely in the dark as to how the system is working. If we can't see how it works, we can't see how to make it work better. Moo2 did this, then Civ4 did this brilliantly and now we're all spoiled.

2. Unused industrial/research capacity. If you run your labs at 50%, you can't use half your factories. Doesn't matter how many factories/labs you have. It confuses many people, because nobody expects it to work this way, because it seems hard to believe that it possibly could. But it does, and once you realize it you can manage it. HARD to realize it, because of (1).

3. Waste of certain quantities in ways that seem artificial. Unused social production is confirmed to be wasted. We think that's the only waste but can't be sure (see 1).

distant 4th: Spending is allocated in % instead of in credits



I don't object to people posting their 'wish lists' of how they would like the game to work (I'm guiltier than anyone). But realistically speaking, it's probably a bit late for SD to change the whole economy of GC2, (and invalidate all their documentation!). Because of that, I'd like to get more constructive posts about how to work with what we've got and actually play the game better!

Finally, please stop flaming SD. I'll come out and say it, a lot of us hate the economy system. But SD can figure out that we hate it without us flaming, and will respect and help us more if we don't question their competence / intelligence / right_to_make_whatever_game_they_want in every post.

This one is to SD - since we can't stop people who want to flame from flaming, please keep in mind that most of us do have respect for your time and your contributions to the forum, and ignoring a poster who made you mad doesn't make it look like they are right

Here are the things that bother me most and how I'd fix them...if not for GC2, then when the economic model for GC3 is forged:

PROBLEM: Ongoing research and ongoing industry shouldn't be straight monetary tradeoffs.

If I have 20 factories and 2 labs, I shouldn't have to shut down 10 factories galaxywide to run 1 lab on one world.

SOLUTION: Decouple research entirely. Rather than splitting 100% of all capacity between s/m/t, make the tech slider independent. If I have 2 labs, the slider should run from 0 to 16 bcs without affecting social or military.

If this provides too much of a balance issue (too easy to max research funding), make research more expensive. One tp could cost 2 or 3 or 10 bcs. Doesn't matter. Use that exchange rate to balance. You're already making a space tradeoff (number of tiles) and already having to spend social and time to build the labs. It's unrealistic and unintuitive to make the -use- of the labs cost a proportionate amount of industry.

This does redefine the role of tech spending and the lab. Tech spending becomes a relatively straightforward bill per month--set and forget. Labs merely define how much you can spend. I think it's a definition for the better.

SIDE EFFECT: The balance sliders now only balance between social and military.

They become industrial budget balancers, essentially.

SIDE EFFECT: Spend rate should become industrial spend rate.

By doing the above, the tech slider becomes research spend rate. The existing spend rate slider should only refer to industry.

PROBLEM: The balance/rate sliders don't have an obvious relationship to money spent.

I can hear the objections already. "You move the slider, the money changes!"

Theoretically , if you have 120 total industrial capacity, and you put the social slider to 100%, you intend to spend 120bc on social. If spend rate (or industrial spend rate, if you adopt the above model) is at 37%, you intend to spend 37% of 120bc on social.

Why isn't this obvious? Because you might not be spending that much on social.

You're not -really- cutting the money, you're cutting capacity. Since you can't buy a partial manufacturing point, most percentages will end up with a discrepancy between intention and reality...i.e. if you select 37%, and you have 24 industrial capacity on a particular colony, you're really going to be buying 8 sp on that colony (rounding down). Multiply that by a few colonies, and you end up a few bcs off.

For a specific example, 5 of those 24mp colonies at 100% would cost 120bc. 37% of 120bc is 44bc, rounded. But you'll actually only get 40 mp, and will spend 40 bc, not the 44 bc you'd expect, because you had to throw away 4 bcs worth of partial shields.

ONE SOLUTION: Document! This is one of those areas that needs some math in the manual. You're given just enough information in the slider screen to watch that number jump around erratically as rounding accumulates. It's a little difficult to work out exactly what's going on.

PREFERRED SOLUTION: Don't make the sliders adjust capacity. Make the sliders adjust money. 100% allocation and spend rate means spend all possible budget in this area...i.e. 1bc per point, just like they do now. In the above example, that 37% will really mean that you're spending 44bc on social.

But if you do this, GC can't just knock down production by the percentage...you end up with partial mps. You need to buy 40bc worth of mps (spreading it evenly), then go back and apply the other 4 bc among the colonies (presumably 1 more mp in 4 of the colonies...the choice of which ones is unimportant).

To summarize, you're spending money and buying use of capacity, not specifying how much capacity and then paying money. This is an important distinction. Capacity is colony-centric, money is galaxy-wide. Excess budget can carry over between colonies, capacity can't.

PROBLEM: High-capacity colonies starve low-capacity colonies for points when the budget needs to be shrunk.

If you have a mega-factory colony with 240 industrial capacity and three colonies with the default 24 capacity, that's a total of 312 bcs if they're running full-tilt. If you can only afford 78 bcs, you need to set the spend rate to 25%. This takes the large colony down to 60 mp and the smaller colonies down to 6mp. Production on the small colonies pretty much grinds to a complete halt. If you have a bunch of colonies (large map), you can actually get to point where you're at a fraction of an mp allocated for each non-manufacturing colony--suddenly, nobody can build social improvements at all.

SOLUTION 1: Allow a choice of two methods of allocation.

I'm going to talk about this as if we're allocating money per my suggestion above. If you're allocating capacity, like we are currently, the same ideas apply, but the numbers look different because rounding gets thrown away per colony.

Method 1 is the current method. Each colony gets a chunk of the budget proportionate to their total capacity. 240/24/24/24 at 25% becomes 60/6/6/6.

Method 2 works a little differently. Method 2 says everyone gets a crack at 1/num_colonies of the budget. If they use it all, great. If not, it goes to the ones who were shorted. Taking the above example, the total budget is 312bc. Cranking it down to 25% makes it 78bc. Each colony gets a shot at 1/4 of that (because there are 4 colonies), for 19.5 bc. They become 20/20/19/19.

Had you only needed to crank down to 50%, it would look better for the large colony--each colony gets a 39 bc allocation. The three small colonies are fully funded, and their excess goes to the large colony, which is not. You end up with 84/24/24/24.

Would you always want to use this? No. But if you do have a megalith colony that's uselessly eating up the budget, it starts looking pretty good. And it's a realistic option from a managerial point of view...it's essentially a progressive budget hit instead of a regressive budget hit, and accounts for the fact that a colony needs a certain minimum number of resources to progress.

Point is, you can't individually set allocations per colony--it's too complicated for Stardock's vision of the game. So at least let us choose between two different methods that are optimized in diametrically opposed ways.

SOLUTION 2: Allow us to shut down factories without destroying them. Bringup should cost something small.

You can get around the above situation by decommissioning factories. But then you have to spend the full cost and build time to get them back. Allow an immediate shutdown, with a reduced cost for bringup. The big tradeoff is that you can't reuse the tile in the meantime, and you have to waste some amount of time and production bringing them back up. I'm thinking a fraction of the total cost in mps here...enough to interrupt social production by a couple of turns.

PROBLEM: I have no clue what focus really does!

Is this documented anywhere? I mean, yeah, I know what it conceptually does, but the numbers don't make a lot of sense to me. Focusing Earth on research in turn 1 with default sliders hits social and military for a total of 3 mps, with a 0(!) bump in research production.

Please document the math, or at least a high-level summary of the math.

PROBLEM: Not a huge problem, but the one factory serving simultaneous military and social needs seems...simplistic to me. You shouldn't be able to make all your factories crank out buildings one week and spaceships the next week. They aren't tooled for it.

SUGGESTION: Two types of factories, one optimized for military, one optimized for social.

You could optimize a couple of different ways--one is that a military factory gives you 1mp:1bc when used for military, and 1mp:2bc when used for social. Alternately, you can make the maximum capacity smaller for social--it's good for 8mp total when used for military, and 4mp total when used for social, but retains the 1mp:1bc ratio. Social factories work in the reverse way, of course.

I'm not completely sold on this myself--it might make the colony cost calculations too abstruse. But it strikes me as a really neat idea from a resource management perspective, without needing much modification to the economic model as a whole. Basically, you'd have planets tooled for military or tooled for social (or balanced). You could allow factories to be retooled for a reduced mp cost...some fraction of what it would cost to build a new factory from scratch. I'm imagining all the nylon factories gearing up to make parachutes here

Anyway, hope these at least foster some thought. Heck, by post 64ish in the thread, I'm just hoping they get seen at all.

Geo

Going along with geoelectric,

PROBLEM: High-capacity colonies starve low-capacity colonies for points when the budget needs to be shrunk. SOLUTION 2: Allow us to shut down factories without destroying them. Bringup should cost something small.

I like this solution, but let's make it even simpler. How about a button on the planet screen that lets you turn off social production?

This way once your mega-producers have finished their upgrades, a player can go turn off social production waste and let all of his tech/money/minor-producer worlds have a much larger slice of the social spending pie. The tradeoff for having social production off can be when focusing on military or research, social production cannot be used to assist (since it's off).

A side effect of this is that it will allow for mega production assist of large productions. Turn off social production for all planets except for one, crank the social slider to 100%, and just pump out galactic achievements. Probably not a good thing, unless the AI is changed to take advantage of this as well (maybe it already does).

I like this solution, but let's make it even simpler. How about a button on the planet screen that lets you turn off social production?

If you go that far, you haev to have a way to automatically toggle it on a large scale, otherwise we will go micor crazy again. You guys didn't play beta, you have no idea what it was liek to MANUALLY upgrade all the planets. I now am even hesitant to use the focus buttons at the colony level because I will forget which colony I did it to and to turn it off.

There is no simple solution here. The way it was implemented solved a problem, but it created total whine :/ personally wastign social production doesnt bother me, unless it happens that the big plalents get all the social money and littleones get none, which is a frikin huge problem. I also regularly have to demolish my factories, also stupid.

There is no simple solution here. The way it was implemented solved a problem, but it created total whine :/ personally wastign social production doesnt bother me, unless it happens that the big plalents get all the social money and littleones get none, which is a frikin huge problem. I also regularly have to demolish my factories, also stupid.

Sure. Among other things, it's the demolish/rebuild routine I'm trying to streamline...deactivate instead of demolish. The micro's already there--I'm attempting to work out ways to not make it hurt as much.

unless it happens that the big plalents get all the social money and littleones get none, which is a frikin huge problem. I also regularly have to demolish my factories, also stupid.

That's the exact problem I'm running into my current game. I'm taking over a civilization that is behind me in planetary tech, and I need to build up his captured planets to my level of tech quickly. I can't just demolish my factories on my mega-producers, I need them to churn out warships. So, I'm stuck taking over relatively unproductive worlds and being unable to build them up until I conquer them all.

With my "button to turn off social production", I was thinking in terms of my style of play. I generally have 4 categories of worlds: tech, money, minor-producers (for fighters and low-cost stuff), and mega-producers (for cap ships and super projects). I generally only have a handful of mega-producers to keep track of, so for me at least, those 5-odd worlds wouldn't be so hard to micro. Granted, not everyone does the same thing, but how many mega-producers can an economy support?

What if we had an option for a global cap on social production? Something like "all worlds will use no more than x units of social production"? That would prevent mega-producers from sucking up all the money (but still be able to assist military or research), yet allow for only a single change to shift ALL mega-producers back into full gear.

I read all brads sausage factory post and have read this whole thread. I'd like to give my 2cents.

Techn0mage is a genius. I agree with everything he said.

I hope you can implement these radical economic changes without having to reprogram the AI, perhaps you can just make these changes player specific GUI only changes. I like more transparency, and please change decouple the sliders and reduce social waste and make labs seperate. thanks! love this game!

I like the dual military/social production system, it makes it much easier to have wars, but there really needs to be more transparency in how the production values are calculated. It's not the duality that 's complicated, it's the results that are confusing. That's what great about Civ - you know exactly why your cities are producing what they are producing.

I can't help but throw in another two cents, so here goes:

What about us pacifists? What about those of us who aren't trying to conquer every map? Pursuing a tech or influence victory depends a lot on our ability to manage the economy. Staying competitive in a peaceful way requires out-growing the enemy without actively destroying what the enemy is building. That requires economic efficiency.

I understand not everyone wants to be an economist. But not everyone wants to be a militarist either.

I'm not asking for micromanagement. I'm asking for clearer documentation, and the elimination of waste.

By recommendation: take out the total spending slider. Create two sets of sliders. One is the research slider, where you set the % of total RPs you are funding. The other is the IP slider, where you set the total % of IPs you are funding. Under the IP slider is a breakdown of military vs. social. The two always add up to 100%.

Can it get more simple? And if a planet isn't using military, funnel it all into social. If a planet isn't using social, funnel it all into military. If a planet is using neither, then the player is doing something wrong, so let the funding get wasted.

This also solves the yo-yo treasury problem, since weekly spending won't fluctuate. And you avoid the morale problems that would ensue when social spending kicks up (if you do put that proposed fix in).

Techn0mage is a genius. I agree with everything he said.

W00t! I'm counting on your vote in the next planetary election! Finally a post that I can agree with! (thanks.)

OK, seriously though, someone made a great point.

I also regularly have to demolish my factories, also stupid.

I've mostly played the campaign, but I see how in a much longer-term game, it isn't just the precursor mine that causes problems. You'd be encouraged to demolish factories on developed planets (you are really converting them to trade centers and the like, yes? ) so that your developed worlds get most of the money. Then you rebuild factories when the new planets catch up. Then demolish again to integrate new planets. I guess it encourages acquiring new planets in waves. Contrast that to civ4 where it's preferable to get city #15 built up and profitable before you take over #16. How much does this all cost? Who knows, the game never tells you what it costs to build a factory!


I have a suspicion that [no offense intended] this is SD's poor man's version of implementing both a "Dont expand beyond your ability to pay for it" system and a "The bigger your empire is, the more that next colony is going to cost you" system. Civ4 makes you pay through the nose for building too many cities, while GC has no overt mechanism for doing this. And the opposite of "overt" is.....
Funny how we can live with one way of doing it, but the other way drives us crazy. Maybe because we all feel like the game is going behind our backs to penalize us, rather that just coming out and saying: "You have got WAY too many colonies. The maintenance cost for that is going to be a million ga-zillion fa-fillion dollars."

Note to another poster

What about those of us who aren't trying to conquer every map?

Everything you said, I agree with. Worth noting, that military production doesn't always imply military victory. You might be building all constructors and colony ships

I also regularly have to demolish my factories, also stupid.

You know that instead of demolishing them, you can upgrade to another building, like trade center? As long as you are upgrading, you are using the factory manufacturing power. And once it is upgarde, you get more income

Worth noting, that military production doesn't always imply military victory.

And you may need to build a military fleet to prevent the AI from targetting you as an easy prey

I hate you all. Before reading this post I was blissfully unaware of all this waste. Now I'm in a real dilemma as to how to minimise it.

Should I reduce the social spend and cripple the development of 'young' worlds?
Or focus production away from social spending which incurs waste anyway?
And as for the whole "Don't build factories on tiles with manufacturing bonuses cause it kills your developing nations", well my heads still spinning a bit.

I guess it's just more "strategy" to experiment with.

P.S. I don't really hate you, thanks for bringing this waste to my attention.