Is the 2000 max debt limit an exploit or a feature..?

It's a feature to prevent new players from getting too far into debt and never being able to get out and quit playing.

If you purposely abuse the -2000 BC debt limit well duh of course you are exploiting and cheating the game.

No one really cares if you cheat though, but I wouldn't be bragging around about how you 'pwned the gamorz omg'

One accidental click of the mouse can destroy your game without this feature. Specially when your learning. There was talk that at the higher levels they might turn off the feature in the future.

On the other hand the ship upgrade feature is kind of useless on a large scale upgrade. Way cheaper to build then to rebuild. Maybe these two features balance each other?

If the Developers are going to leave this 'feature' in, there needs to be 'Consequences' tm.

Either spontaneous decommission (repo men? ), or diplomatic hit, or restrictions on spending (I believe that you can continue to deficit spend over the 2000bc limit, making you have basically free stuff).

Perhaps the ablity to do this should be turned off once you go past 'Normal' game difficulty? It still help the noobs (who, presumably, are playing on lower levels), but once you get past that point the 'training wheels' are off.

I've been duped! .

It needs to be left in or the ship upgrade feature needs to be changed, because I'll admit it I abuse the feature when it comes to ship upgrades and I usually trash the computer on tough and painful. Its ridiculously and idiotically expensive to upgrade a ship (hell even to downgrade one costs an insane amount of money).

Why is a purchase/upgrade allowed that would exceed this debt limit?! In many places the -0.5 Billion cap prevents further research / social / military spending or starbase upgrades.

When you do a mass upgrade of ships (which is extremely important if you have 50 fighters and you don't want to micromanage every upgrade) the computer lets you do the exchange even though the upgrades at around 500-2000 a pop over 50 ships will put you around a 100000 in debt. This shouldn't be allowed but I find micromanaging in a strategy game the greatest evil. Which is why they need to drop upgrade costs by at least a factor of 10.

Yeah I never upgrade unless I only plan on ever having one or two or I can trade enough tech to make up for it, its just way to expensive. Does the current system make you buy the new stuff outright, or does it make you pay the difference between the current ship worth and the upgraded ship worth? If its the first maybe they can try the second but if its the second one they need to reduce the ship upgrade costs.

As for just replacing the ships, I dislike doing that because then I need to relevel my armada and depending on how long I've been fighting that could take awhile..

its a exploit, if somebody is foolish enough to make a move that put them in outstandiing debt thats there problem


if the want to be easy on the newcome do the sesible thing and put of a warning if it put them in too much debt...


OR better still, dont allow debt al all, or debt beyond -2000

at moment is quite easy to just build lot blank hulls, mass upgrade and get lots of uber ships and a bargin price

Upgrading should be very expensive if you start changing things around dramatically, the only time it should be cheap (perhaps) is when you upgrade from say, Laser 2 to Laser 4. Something within the same technology just smaller. Jumping technologies should be prohibitively expensive.

That being said, upgrading 50 ships to the latest technology for 100k BC and exploiting the negative cap is pretty cheesy.

I would suggest that ship upgrading could use a revisit. Right now, when you upgrade a ship type at the shipyard, all components are stripped out except for structural components.

I would like to see the shipyard preserve the placement of the engines and weapons and everything else, and then give you a dropdown window lising the current components and possible replacements.

Weapons and defenses are a bit tricky, since you have a huge number of competing options, but engines, sensors, and life support are very obvious. And the construction / colony modules arent that difficult to figure out either. If I am upgrading my constructors for speed, I dont want to have to reposition them once again.

END COMMUNICATION

upgrading is expensive for a reason, but there should be an option to opgrade over an extended period of time for free or cheap, just like how you can build for free, of course, this would leave your ships vulnerable to attack, but it would be worth the risk imo

I suppose, rightly enough, the jury is out on whether this is a feature that should be used by the seasoned veteran playing the game or the newbie who presses the upgrade button for their entire fleet without realising the consequences of their actions, although they wouldn't do it twice...!!!
As it has already been mentioned that newbie mistake could simply be avoided by making it impossible to go too much in debt, the amount of debt could be based on your economical position etc etc etc....

Ultimately, unless it is changed, people will make their own minds up whether to use it or not, as tempting as it might have been for me I just couldn't bring myself to do it, as I have worked very hard to build up my economical base and it would sort of 'cheapen' everything that I had done.

I just wish it wasn't so expensive to upgrade my ships.

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I would like to see a better model on upgrades, like buying laser 5 to replace 4 should be minimal. The idea being you get something back for what your taking off your ship. If you upgrade really high like from Ion drive to Hyperwarp the cost would be much greater. This makes sense from a management perspective.........

as it stands now even if you downgrade from warp drive to ion drive you have to shell out money. This makes no sense because I'm sure selling that warp drive would recoup your costs. They need to either decrease the cost of upgrading or integrate it into military manufacturing somehow.

I always use the debt also in GC1. sometimes I was 9800 in debt and had to trade for months selling / bargaining for money. That is part of the game. PPlease get rid of the 2000 limit because it ruines the game. I now can buy things too quickly and expensive.

Frankly, once the difficultly slider is beyond normal, this limit should be removed.

I think there's a reason for it to cost so much. Experience

Upgrading lets you get a new top-of-the-line ship but you keep the extra HP from xp. So yea it cost me 350 bc to upgrade my small fighter but it has 6 times as many hp as any new enemy fighter! It can take one of their fleets on its own! So in midgame, when I spent 1400 bc to upgrade 4 small fighters with 35-40 HP each, I think it's money well spent.

So personnaly, I find experience to be THE reason to upgrade ships.

Well if you try the 1.1 beta patch you will notice that at normal level you are no longer given that safety net of 2000 being your maximum debt, I gave in to temptation, and being desperate as well. I did a mass upgrade to my fleet to find myself in some considerable debt for ages afterwards Then again maybe the cost of the upgrade wasn't as high as it was previously so that did offset the cost somewhat.
Then again I have had to remove the 1.1 beta patch due to too many CTD's.

In Beta of 1.1 this was taken out to my dismay! Low and behold I upgraded a fleet of ships (about 75) and I was 150k BC in debt... Following turn I was still in debt... this grounded my game to a hault for 15 turns! I was angry as hell.

I see it's still in here (the feature). Wish I could remove it. In GC1 it was the fun of the game to go in debt and save the morale situation in time by bargaining your way out.

I see it's still in here (the feature). Wish I could remove it. In GC1 it was the fun of the game to go in debt and save the morale situation in time by bargaining your way out.

It is only present on the lesser difficulties, so you can get rid of it by simply bumping it up a notch or two.

Oh okay, I get it. I've gone a couple hundred thousand BC in debt on occasion when doing mass upgrades. Of course, this is with an economy pushing close to that so it's only a couple turns to get out of hock. So, I was reading this thread thinking this was a change with DA or something because I've never seen it. If it's something that applies only to lower difficulty levels, that's probably a good thing. If you're still learning the game, you need the help. If it applied to higher difficulty levels, I'd be exploiting the heck out of it making the difficulty level somewhat easier.

This is a really old thread, BTW. OP is from March.