I saw this labeled as a "feature" by Frogboy last time it came up, but I kinda think he didn't really understand the problem description. It's clearly either a bug or a serious exploit to credit the player hundreds of thousands of BCs in one turn.

Some places in the game disable rush-buying when you're below -500BC (planet screen, planet shipyard, ships from F2 list). Other places allow you to keep spending money (ship upgrades, social production from F2 list, invasion tactics). I think at a minimum they should disable all buying below -500BC, allowing you to buy one expensive thing, but not dozens of them.

And really, they should just implement -2000BC as a "credit limit". Any spending that would take you below that point is not allowed to occur, and the player is notified that they cannot spend past their limit.

Calling features you don't agree with bugs is rude.

I don't agree with it either, that said.

It's even worse than it sounds because, lets say me and you are competing for a metaverse score and you *choose* not to use this exploit, I can choose to use it and you may very well be forced to use it or never *win* score wise. So the idea that you can simply not use the exploit yourself and that fixes the problem is naive at best.

I look at it this way. The ship upgrade costs are suspect, at best. They seem like they might be higher than intended (higher than the cost of a new ship?). If this is the case, then the -2000 barrier is a bug to cancel the effect of another bug

Please note I have no idea what I'm talking about. I just thought I'd throw it out there

The ship upgrade costs are suspect, at best. They seem like they might be higher than intended (higher than the cost of a new ship?).

Well yeah you can turn your outdated junk into frontline units again in 1 turn rather than building a new ship every 10+ turns 1 at a time. It costs but is immediate satisfaction.

I have always wanted to see defecit spending in a game... Economics are a powerful force if used correctly, and the ability to run your economy far into the red during war times and recover with realistic penalties would be great. Of course, the AI would have this ability too, anf could get their calculate of to rock your face on tougher difficulties...

The problem isn't the fact that you can go into debt. As Frogboy has said, that's a cool feature, one obviously used by real-world governments, and it's kinda unique to GalCiv. I like it a lot.

Calling features you don't agree with bugs is rude.

The problem/bug/exploit is that you can exploit this mechanic to get unlimited amounts of cash, in the form of free ship upgrades or free planetary improvements because anything you spend beyond -2000BC is credited to you on your next turn. There's no way that can be a "feature" of the game - Team Stardock didn't sit down and decide "we'd better have an obscure mechanism to make sure that players can get milions of BC per turn in an economy that typically produces a few thousand per turn". It's most likely an unexpected consequence of other design choices they made, but it needs to be fixed all the same.

The solution is either to remove the debt cap, or to prohibit the player from spending beyond the debt cap.

Any changes to the system still need extensive testing to avoid new unintentional exploits. I like the idea that the devs plan to limit the current options to easier levels. An example of a elated exploit if economic penalties are intoduced would be that if you GIFT lots of expensive ships (that you dont need) to the AI then this can have the effect of crippling the economy of that AI race. This was an exploit noted in GC1.

The AI already needs the ability to refuse gifts which could be calculated as 'damaging' to its economy.

Any changes to the system still need extensive testing to avoid new unintentional exploits. I like the idea that the devs plan to limit the current options to easier levels. An example of a elated exploit if economic penalties are intoduced would be that if you GIFT lots of expensive ships (that you dont need) to the AI then this can have the effect of crippling the economy of that AI race. This was an exploit noted in GC1.

The AI already needs the ability to refuse gifts which could be calculated as 'damaging' to its economy.