The problem with "collecting the peace dividend", I've found, is that sooner or later, the AI will try to squeeze you for money because you have a substandard military due to the insane maintenance costs (40bc for a Thalan Corvette?). Eventually, they will stop taking your rejections and simply rush you with swarms of defenders and frigates. Then you are left scrambling for ships.

Well, I actually like the changes. It's made the game a LOT more challenging. I can't just set and forget the economic sliders anymore, and I think that's a good thing. Economy was sort of a given in earlier releases, now it's a factor that has to be weighed in with every turn. With the current AI, is has made for difficult games, but the AI is getting reworked for each race. I imagine that once the new AI is written, we'll see a much better fit. Those races that tended to flood the skies with ships will start to spend more of their resources on the new buildings and the new ship components. As I understand it now, they don't take advantage of the new techs as they should.

I just tried another game for the past few hours and I had to give up. The pain was too much. I also always play with slow tech and no trade to boot.

On immense if one does not specialize in econ almost exclusively and from the start when playing a full-boat of AI set to "intelligent" the game is nearly a lost cause from the get go.

I really think the maintenance costs need to scale with galactic size or better yet, number of planets divided by number of players added to the base value.

I agree ship maintaince is way out of control, This game is becoming not fun anymore. Whats the point of all the new components if you can't use them without bankrupting yourself.

I'm playing as yor too. The secret is to trade for the Republic ect goverments. That pretty much put the Yor On top for Econ. I'm making so much money now I don't know what to do with it all.

And I have 50 + War Vessels to boot.

That would be my normal strategy. I trade for every possible bonus. But, to see how immersive it is, I'm playing with tech trades off (for the first time). I've been pleasantly surprised. It's fun to keep each race unique, but the new economic rules have put a serious hurt on some of the money-marginal races.

Yeah without trade, I would say its very hard.

Also the extra money, is the fact that you can trade for more Econ Bonuses. Since every race has seperate ones, and extra ones. So if your civ takes them you get the bonuses added to your own.

So maybe they unwilling defeated the purpose of the No Tech Trade Options.

Really only two options.

When you chose No Tech Trade you get the old Ship Maintance.
Or disable the ability to take other civs econ trade.

If they did not do this with the ship maintance the game would be hugly unbalanced in favor of the Player.

I'm at the start of of what I think of as Colony Rush Phase 2 (starting on exotic environments) and I have the Thalan "economy" going, but something about the TA framework plus the details of my current map have yielded something I've never seen before: Drengin at the top of the economic, research, and *popularity* charts. Apparently all the computer players really enjoy being regularly extorted--lots of notices about so-and-so paying off the Drengin to maintain peace, and no wars so far.

BTW, the shudder quotes on economy are b/c even though I've gotten a fairly stable cashflow around 100-200 BC, I have nowhere near what used to be "normal" levels of development on my colonies nor of my fleets. It probably doesn't help that I started in a map corner with no resource mines, but I'm going to hang with it until I win, lose by other than conquest, or end up in a war I can't handle.

GW Swicord, also the one thing I've noticed in TA is that the Dregin seem to be the only AI actually researching their respective morale tree consistently. Playing as most races w/o a good morale building I keep a watch on the Dregin to build their 20% morale building. No other races seem concerned about morale, just more concerned about weapon techs. The entire "yellow" tree just seems far down on the priority list for most.

Having their morale higher than the other races due to better building I'm sure is helping their economy as well as the extortion.

As for the whole ship maintenance out-of-balancing. Some races this was needed for due to the econ changes, however, the races pre-b4 were struggling with their econ already and now are severely hurting.

What was the reasoning behind increasing the maintenance of ships w/o weapons anyhow?

I really liked the Beta 3 econ, but I'm not liking 4 at all, it's way too much.

im not thrilled with beta 4 period now. not only does the econ situation suck coconutz with the ridiculous upkeep and crippling "features", the pathfinding bugs that keep poping up that makes the game lock up forever drive me insane. at least i could finish a game in beta 3 but beta 4 just makes everything painful. ughhhh

Just a random thought here, but has anyone else realized that this whole ship maintenance increase is SD's way of nerfing the SB array for score? Imagine having a few tiny 1/1 fighters in your SB array and having to pay huge amounts of maintenance on them......

If so, it would seem an admirably subtle way of doing that. I remember balking at the very notion of a quadrant cap for bases (not sure whether that was early DA or GC1). Making them harder to build bothers me much less than forcing me to build them in unaesthetic places just because there's a random line across space.

But maybe I'm still less interested in scores than the rest of the game despite checking my empire's AltMeta standings every several days. I guess I don't really understand why Stardock would be worrying about scores more than playability and their notion of keeping the game interesting. IIRC, this forum has seen many indications that the devs almost wish they'd never added the Metaverse to start with.

Yea i agree with you, it does seem that the MV no longer holds any interest to SD, which is a shame. I think the outcry from certain users over the Stock Exchange nerf was all Brad needed to no longer care...IMO. I do doubt that we will see a MV in GC3.....pity though.

Stock exchange nerf?

I'm really not sure why the economy in this game is supposed to be:

Negligible (until starting cash runs out)
CRITICAL (insane panic trying to keep the economy afloat)
Trivial (As soon as the crisis has passed).

I suspect the change in ship maintainence was intended to address the later-game overabundance.

Hi!

In very early GC-2 games Stock Markets used to give (IIRC) 40% econ bonus AND 10% morale bonus. Now multiply that with easily-achievable 100 B pop on a planet, and you'll understand that the nerf was almost mandatory.

BR, Iztok

So far, as Terrans playing with the settings I've always used, I've been able to work with this new economic model and come out of it. My strategy is definitely different, but I can make it through and eventually prosper. In the games I'm playing I don't see that the AI has been crippled either. What I do see is fewer ships for all sides, which given the memory issues some players have experienced might not be a bad thing.

The Terrans have a huge economic bonus however.

Trading for economic bonuses usually helps me, however IMO the game should be perfectly playable for each race without needing to trade for other race's unique bonuses.

That said, this is beta. I'm patiently waiting to see what comes up through further testing. The races all need a little or a lot of rebalancing and I'm pretty sure SD knows this.

Perhaps this is what the insane tourism income from a couple betas back was intended to finance, and Stardock simply fumbled the timing by releasing them separately?

Makes sense, if the tourism was put back to previous levels the ship maintenance would be affordable.

I don't know about making managing the fleets and planets more crucial, but it sure makes micromanaging essential to get by.

You mean to tell me you dont get a 25% econ bonus for a Gal Stock Exchange? That just screws up the whole game mecanics. All a planet would need would be factories farms and science buildings. If the rest dont do anything. Sorta sad it sounds like.

Duh

I'm having a hard time telling if that's sarcasm or not, there Duh.