O.K., I'm wanting a solution to this *NOW*. It's making it to the point that I want to give up on the huge/challenging/tech victory I'm working on, because I'm tired of moving around an average of 8 new constructors a turn, all because I don't want to waste the constructors if I build them, and I don't want to turn off military funding because my core planets (high productivity with large starship quality bonuses) are popping out a few Avatars (the first combat ships I've built, I have *NO* military, so I'm not going to give them up). I thought this game was supposed to avoid this kind of engame micromanagement

I'm currently running a 10/10/80 split, even though I'm not doing anything I need on 90% of my planets.

The lack of resource management in this game in general is a big problem. I much prefer how MOO2 or Civ worked in this regard. I am going back to MOO2 for now.

I also favour a morale bonus approach.

My logic is if people aren't working they have leisure time, which makes being there an attractive option, attracting more people, etc.

Perhaps limit it to the square root of the unused production to limit its effect. Besides it "simulates" the marginal diminishing returns and all that - even permanent holidays start to get dull after a while.

Not spending the money is a good second choice.

Sorry if this has been suggested, but here is an easy (and sensible) approach.

When a planets military que is empty, then resources are allotted behind the scenes to "military spending" for the planet - just like in real life, troops are trained, barracks are built, ships are put out to sea, training exercises are conducted, military recruitment gets a boost to funding, etc. etc.

This would translate into a bonus for the planet to resist invasion. Heck invasion is too easy now as it is... with the invader often getting a 3:1 bonus in their favor. This bonus would be to ground troops only not spaceships in orbit.

The bonus applies only while military projects are NOT being built and increases/decreases steadily not abruptly to avoid cheesy tactics like stopping production 2 rounds before a troop transport hits your planet.

Inversely empty social ques redirect "social spending" to improve the quality of life for a planets inhabitants creating a small boost in morale and/or culture. Again this boost would gradually ascend or descend as spending was applied.

The designers would have a better grasp then I do of how much bonus should be available to not unbalance the game so I won't even suggest any numbers, but obviously the larger a planet that you have - the more resources (shields / hammers) it produces every month, so the larger *potential* bonus that planet could have.

These bonuses will also need to appear on the planetary details screen so players can see where the money is going and what it is doing for them.

If done in moderation this solution provides that:

1) No production is "wasted"
2) Production isn't unrealistically shifted to a future project (or worse to another planet!)
3) The AI can use it too... and probably will!
4) It has the added benefit of making some invasions and cultural dominations just a *little* bit more difficult for the player.

One caveat - I'm not sure the AI ever lets it's military production que empty. I notice minor civs especially love to build colony ships to keep their morale manageable and will always be building a scout, battleaxe, or whatever is the current ship they have access too. Not sure about major civs but they ALWAYS seem to have tons of starships!

I wrote this in another thread.....

"Idle Factories Debate"

Economics show that something needs to be created for consumers to "consume" A factory doing nothing is a factory doing nothing.

Social factories would have the option to create trade goods for a small fee. Create a small cash flow that way. A little...not a lot.

Military factories would be able to create spare parts and such for fleet maintenance. Thereby reducing fleet costs some. Again a little....not a lot.

Thrull-

oops...didn't read your post till after I did mine I posted in the "suggestions" thread and then came here. I like your ideas more I think Maybe have a mingling of the two ideas?

Chuck1es - heh no problem Your suggestion follows a lot of what others have thought... that unused production should translate into small amounts of cash and / or maintenance. I think this comes from Moo/Mom/Civ where you can just set planets on "Trade Goods" or somesuch and get cash each turn.

Personally I'm not keen on adding more money, but that's because I don't understand the macro-economics of the game in detail yet.

After thinking over my post above I think social production might be better as a "defense" against cultural domination instead of a morale booster. Morale seems pretty easy to keep up as it is.

So my suggestion is that non-production be converted into a planetary defense bonus - military as a bonus verse invasion, social as a defense vs culture influence.

Example of implementation (numbers COMPLETELY arbitrary for demo purposes only - Devs to come up with most appropriate numbers):

Planet XYZ does 10 shields of military production. Game allots/allows a maximum invasion bonus of 1% per shield. When game checks planets build que if nothing is set in military AND planets current InvasionBonus is less than it's shields of production (10) then InvasionBonus is increased by 1%, but if planet *is* producing a military project then InvasionBonus is decreased by 1% (does not drop below zero obviously)

Thus Planet XYZ has a maximum InvasionBonus of 10% and this number shifts slowly up or down by 1% each month.

Thoughts?

Thrull-

Hmm....thoughts thoughts.....well I think my first thought is that you're smarter than I am!

I like your ideas a lot. Especially for unused military production. I'm assuming that, with slow shifting percentages, this would keep races from immediately dumping whatever they were doing to get a quick bonus when they see a transport on their door step?

How about also letting unused social production go towards influencing a neighboring alien system in the same sector? Or is this already being done? I don't have too great a grasp on all the dynamics this game is offering yet. I'm currently just shy of wining a game by cultural influence (huge map/INT). So I'm biding my time and tinkering here and there.

>Hmm....thoughts thoughts.....well I think my first thought is that you're smarter than I am!

HA! I think not!!! Proof of that is how much time I am spending thinking about GalCiv... it's a sickness I tell ya!
(The worse part is I PAID Brad, Cari, Scott and the others for this... I thought crack was supposed to be free... at least your first time! LOL )

Anyway the culture thing would be easy to implement because there is a culture ability in the game (that's the one used for cultural domination)... I dunno if this would be too powerful a bonus though so the devs and others woul dhave to weigh whether the bonus should be simply defensive or both offensive and defensive (i.e. via standard cultural domination)

But first I wonder if this idea is even any good to begin with... like does any else like the idea or think it's too mild a solution or too unrewarding to players (or even just silly! )

Thanks for the kind words though!

Whats wrong with simply not spending the wasted money? Or atleast not spending most of it? It seems like the obvious choice, and it makes complete sense without any complicated formulas or justifications.

~SDC~

Just rename nothing in the build queue to Merchandise and let it pump money back to you. The funded production shields that costs 1 bc will give you 1 bc back, but each bonus production shield will give you an additional 0.1 bc so you get a small surplus. Might be a little too powerful with umpteen production boosting starbases in the sector, but that's going to be nerfed anyway so I don't think so. The military production queue will then be building high-tech toys for boys and the social queue will be throwing exhebitions, printing books and making art for the cultural "elite".

~SDC~

re: Whats wrong with simply not spending the wasted money?

Nothing in my mind.

I strongly dislike linking "unused" social production to either morale or influence (and military to defer maintenance). In my mind this solution complicates economic unnecessarily. The planets in which I have no social projects to build are my "core" systems - systems in which influence is largely irrelevant. Morale has it's own set of sliders, techs, and tax rates - it's complicated enough in my opinion.

As for playbalance - this keeps economics effecting economics (and also influencing morale and/or influence). And it certainly seems like the AI knows how to spend extra $.

Let's keep it simple. "No project" = "no spending" is simple and makes sense. Why complicate it?

If there is no active project don't "spend" the $.

If the consensus is that we "must" spend the money (for whatever reason) - at least let it count for other "active" projects on that planet - preferably by the % of the remaining (active) sliders (including planetary tech contributions).

At least with my Near Omniscience and Near Omnipotence that's how I see it, but I'm far from Beyond Human.


~SDC~

My only issue with simply not spending the money (which is better than it is now, and definitely better than morale-boosting) is that it means that there's going to be a lot of wasted production capacity. In my current game, only about 5 of my 50 or so planets are actually building anything in their social queue, but the 5 that are are building important stuff, so I don't want to drop the social slider very far. However, if I set social to 33%, I'm wasting almost 30% of my production capacity. Of course, at least I'm not paying for it. Not really a big deal. Of course, my earlier suggestion (about shifting the money that finances production) wouldn't have improved this situation either.

The excess production should simply go back into the general fund. One old solution from older games is to store these productiton points into a general fund at a 50% reduction or more. Money is the fastest fix and works the best I think.



~SDC~

Let me add another vote to the don't spend the money side. I set my output to 100% at the beginning of the game and never lower it so I am always running an deficit (trade, tributes puts me on the positive side).

The penalty would be that you always lose the free production. So if a planet social spending is (8+2) and you set productions on nothing your expenditures would be reduced by 8 BCs. So you would be giving up 2 free social points.

I ideally would like to see this applied to all expenditures. So that if you have a planet that military is (50+20) and you build a sensor drone you are only charged 10 (the real cost) not 50. Same thing with excess research.

But highest priority is simply fixing excess social project.

Different sliders per governor is an acceptable solution but hurts the simplicity of the game.

~SDC~

Unfortunately, most of these ideas require massive rebalancing of the entire game.

I don't think people realize just how finely tuned the play balancing is.

Imagine players who could find themselves being 600 in the black going to being 900 in the red simply by building something.

Going back to the OS/2 method isn't an option (i.e. when you're not building anything, the resources simply aren't spent). We switched it to the way it is for a reason.

What I was thinking is that maybe like a percentage of your unused resources could go back into your treasury. And this could be based on an ability.

The thing is, we have to come up with a rationale. In the real world, your factories cost money whether they're building something or not. You can't just fire and rehire people instantly.

And someone who was building a factory cannot instantly be switched to building an interstellar battle cruiser.

That's why I was kind of thinking that you'd have some sort of labor law or something. That when your workers aren't working, you can lay them off, temporarily and they only cost 90% as much as normal or 80% like how it works in the real world depending on the union or contract in question.

Actually I'd guess that the rationale is the easy part, and the play balance the harder issue.

Today an "idle" (automobile, for example) factory saves significant $/resources when "idle" by:
* not buying building components/materials
* not paying transit costs on both materials and finished product
* uses far less resources (electricity, water, waste management)
* is likely to be heavily automated - therefore human manpower is probably a minor cost percentage wise.

Also consider the reduction of the "per" product costs such as licensing/safety/inspection/waste removal/pollution cleanup and other taxes/costs which are reduced are eliminated. I'd hope workplace accidents would go down as well - that's a major cost. I'm sure there are more.

Not spending resources when factories are idle, with perhaps a 10% or 15% "charge" to keep the idle factory staffed and maintained, seems quite reasonable to me.

I notice that this thread has become "unstuck”. Should we be reading anything into this?

Thanks


~SDC~

I'd use it to pay off infrstructure and maintenence. Your planet won't be happy if you idle it's entire military industrial complex, but what if you set it to "logistics" so the unused miltary production is applied to pay for fleet maintenence. Likewise, unused social production is set to pay for social project maintenance.

quoted:

Brad:

"What I was thinking is that maybe like a percentage of your unused resources could go back into your treasury. And this could be based on an ability.

The thing is, we have to come up with a rationale. In the real world, your factories cost money whether they're building something or not. You can't just fire and rehire people instantly."

AND

Nomikos

"Actually I'd guess that the rationale is the easy part, and the play balance the harder issue.

Today an "idle" (automobile, for example) factory saves significant $/resources when "idle" by:
* not buying building components/materials
* not paying transit costs on both materials and finished product etc. etc. etc."


I agree that the rationale is easier than the balance. I feel that it would be a nice touch if a percentage of your money would flow back into your cash reserves. But it should never, never disrupt gameplay balance.

" Going back to the OS/2 method isn't an option (i.e. when you're not building anything, the resources simply aren't spent). We switched it to the way it is for a reason.

What I was thinking is that maybe like a percentage of your unused resources could go back into your treasury. And this could be based on an ability.

The thing is, we have to come up with a rationale. In the real world, your factories cost money whether they're building something or not. You can't just fire and rehire people instantly."

That analogy just doesn't work, on most of my planets, the factories haven't been building anything for years, _decades_ in some cases. You can't abstract production out to an empire-wide rate, and then make restrictions based on individual planetary concerns.

I don't see why earth can't fire everyone and shut the factory down just because i want Planet X to build a Manufacturing Center.

If we could set the scales at a planetary level, i'd set Planet X's social productio at 33% and Earth's at 0%. Instead i end up at some half-assed 15% that screws over both Earth and Planet X in different ways. If Earth is illogically going to be forced to keep it's factories open because i want to have factories on Planet X, then i should at least be able to do something _usefull_ with it! Some kind of trade good i can resell to get cash back or _something_!

*sigh* Maybe i should just zero out social production, reduce spending by an apropriate amount, and buy any improvements i want on developing planets, although that must be hellishly inefficient. Sorry, everyone on Planet X (and every other planet) is out of a job cause Earth doesn't have anything left to produce! See, i _can_ fire _everyone_ instantly!

I think you are thinking more granular than the game actualy is Frogboy. The way you are explaining it is that all factories, or a vast majority, on a planet do nothing but build spaceships and thats the only kind of job people can get. Right now lockheed-martin isn't pumping out fighters as fast as possible, no one is making dozens of nuclear carriers, so why isn't there some massive outrage from all these out of work people? Because most people are employed by companies that have zero to do with such things. When these defense contractors aren't building their latest machine, they are researching new ones.

Social projects (highways, subway systems, dams, etc.) are built by private companies. If there wasn't a government social project to build, they would be building something else like apartments or office buildings or something.

~SDC~

While I agree with most of Frogboy's decisions, this one rubs me wrong. The whole argument about having to support workers who aren't doing anything doesn't wash, as there are already major exceptions to that in the game.

Grab the funding slider and drop it to 0%. Congrats, you just laid off an entire empire, and don't have to pay anyone anything. Grab the social slider and drop it to 0%. Congrats, you just retrained every non-military factory worker to be either a researcher or miltary factory worker. Saying that it can't be done on a planetary level, but can be done on an empire-wide level doesn't wash. I'd expect it to be harder to do on an empire-wide level.

Now, if you implement a "rubber-band" effect empire-wide, where it takes time to cut the funding or to retrain all those workers, then you'd have a valid argument, though then I'd ask why that couldn't be done on a planetary level (aside from UI issues, that is).

More importantly, I have to agree with those that have said that what the empire is funding is probably a small portion of the local economy, allowing quite a bit more elasticity than has been discussed already.

Hmmm ... I'm somewhat mixed on this though I would have to lean toward Popup Target.

There are many times when I find it fun to try and balance everything out (research, production, etc.) to avoid empty q's and so it doesn't bother me as much. Other times, however, I feel a bit forced to research techs a certain way in order to keep something available for production. Perhaps it could be argued that with no work to do, the people are laid off, and the decrease in jobs turns into an increase in welfare programs having to be supported by the planet (???)

Anyway, perhaps the suggestion Brad made about a tech that returns some of the wasted resources can work. I whole-heartedly agree that any idea which ruins the overall game balance should not be implemented.

I'm going to strongly disagree with Frogboy. The line of thinking that says that the resource loss issue is actually a means of accounting for the cost of keeping idle factories ready seems completely contrived.

As Popup Target points out, you can already instantly make all social, military or scientific funding disappear entirely without any penalty with the current slider system. That means complete ability to lay off the entire infrastructure of your empire without a single person saying, "Hey, what the hell! What happened to my job?!" How realistic is that? Not one iota. But no one wants it changed, because it's an elegant abstract solution. So too are the elegant solutions proposed for solving the resource loss issue for planets without anything active in a queue.

IMO, This issue has NOTHING to do with the frictions of job loss or idle capital assets. It only has to do with the underlying mathematical calculations regarding how resources allocated at the empire level get distributed to planets. For example:

A. Empire allocates 30%/30%/40% to military, social and scientific. Say your turn income is 100 to be split among those allocations. That means 30 credits go toward military and social, while 40 goes toward scientic.

B. If you have 10 planets, those 30 credits each for social and economic get split so each planet gets 3 credits each (limited by planet max values, bonuses, etc.).

C. If all ten planets have social/military items, then all is well. However, say only 2 are producing military and social items. That means only 6 credits each of the social and military budgets actually get spent. 24 credits in each category just disappear without any benefit whatsoever. Not because they are actually spent on anything, but because nothing is being built.

D. If one simple extra step was taken to check for empty queues, then the split could just as easily be 15 each in social and military to the planets producing items. Anything unspent could then go back to the treasury. (say each planet currently has a 10 max cap due to quality, facilities, etc. in each category of social/military, then 10 credits from social and military overflow just stay in the treasury)

The current situation seems to clearly broken and cripples strategic allocation over time without any relevant need or cause.

As for this topic being unstickied -- for the very first time since buying the game, I'm going to sound pessimistic. I think the desire is to have this issue just "go away" quietly since a mathematical fix, while easy, may require significant rebalancing in terms of spending and AI considerations.

This does not mean the issue SHOULD go away just because it requires rebalancing and testing. What it means is that we the players have identified a HUGE (yet simple to fix) problem in the mathematics of the game. The loss of resources should not be happening and a fix ought to be implemented. It is literally shooting players in the foot from the get-go, as literally tens, hundreds or even thousands of credits just disappear each turn just because the empire->planet funding calc is letting money go to planets without anything in a queue.

Please give this item the attention it deserves. There is absolutely no reason for this resource loss issue to continue. The mathematical fix appears exceedingly simple to implement. The balancing may be a challenge, but Stardock has proven they can rise to meet such challenges. Don't let us down by casually and quietly wimping out on something so obviously crippling the basic strategy of the game

~SDC~

I'd like to see a fairly simple addition to the military and social build queues of:

Divert to miltary/social/research

This would have a (50%) efficiency penalty, so that getting a good balance on the econ sliders is still important. And it would mean that cash isn't totally wasted.

I'm really turned off by the way the game forces you to tell *all* your colonies to go mad on social construction just so that one colony can get 'aphrodisiacs' or a wonder built in a reasonable time.

Especially since so very few social projects are actually worth the maintenance so most of that production is just wasted on doing nothing.

I want my super-shipyard planet to build ships, without forcing all the rest of my planets (including the new colonies with <1 billion people) to spend all their cash on military too.

While the wasted production does force some strategic decisions, it just goes too much against common sense for my liking. I just want to scream at my computer, "Is it too much to ask for my shipyards to build ships while my research colonies do research!, [expletive, expletive, expletive]"

The other option I would be okay with would be if unspent production was unspent cash, though this could cause the sliders to lose significance. A refund penalty would sort that out though.

As an extra feature, I would like some techs that reduced penalties for diversion/refunds. Like 'decentralised economics' which could have democracy and large scale building as prerequisites and would reduce the refund/diverion penalty to 33% from 50%.