Ok, let's simply this a bit though. Let's leave the starbase out for a second.

Base freighter: 149bc
Cost to get it to a world 3 turns away: 21 (7bc/week * 3 - there's no maint after the route is established.)
Total cost to establish the route: 170bc.

Let's say the route is worth 4bc. Is that 4bc/turn or 4bc every time the freighter makes a transit (so 8bc each trip)? I think it's 4bc/turn, but I've honestly never been sure. For this at least lets say it's 4bc/turn.

That's only 42 turns to pay for itself, or less than a year.

Did I miss something important there?

Reading this thread it sounds like way too much focus is on 'surviving' the economy by having to rush for high-end economy buildings.

While they help a lot and are a valid tactic, the point of the game is that I'm not railroaded into a single method of playing the game. For the same reason I don't like the Thalans, being forced to do certain things a certain way just makes it feel like a clunky, boring RTS game with build orders.

I think the economy squeeze that's in effect right now won't last, as the game and races are balanced out.

On the other hand, while I agree that it would be terribly unfortunate if a particular race required a specific build order just to survive, I'm not opposed to different play styles required for different races (for example, tech focused or econ focused or industry focused, etc). If they can all be played the same way with the same success then there's not much point to having them be different races

Well sure, that's the entire point of having the new tech trees - you find what suits you.

Right now, we're just seeing different ways per race of doing the same thing, even going so far as it becoming nearly mandatory to trade for techs you aren't really supposed to have (ie: the Yor and government).

Yeah, runaway economies suck and trivialize the game, but there really should be another way of doing things, like inflation. After all, that's the nature of economies in the world NOW - the more money you have, the less it's worth. The trick is doing it in such a way that it doesn't feel like you're climbing up an escalator - the better you play the more the game hurts you. That's not fun either.

But I shouldn't really be FORCED to rush certain techs - that's just amateur.

I don't see why they don't add an option when starting a game to change the ship maintenance. I personnally would like to see ship maintenance pretty low so that wars would be really epic, but thats just me

Because frankly that'd be like playing HL2 and having sliders for how much damage each gun does, how much health each enemy has, etc.

Well, it depends on the accuracy of all the numbers of course. I rarely have a route that I put no resources towards defending.

The bigger problem for me is a rarely have a route stay up that long. I'm pretty aggressive in my games, and pretty much like the universe conquered in 75 turns or so.

Assuming you are never attacked, never declare war on your trade partners and you just sit peacefully and don't do anything else to your starting freighter (no adding engines, range)... you CAN get it to break even in just under a year.


I rarely have a peaceful year where I don't have to pay something to upgrade or defend my routes though... the AI always has something to say about my trade. And, that's the reason why my break even point ends up going so far out there. Its a product of my playstyle and play environments.

It's not impossible to start to make a profit at just under a year, but that's a best case scenario with no frills. More likely in my experience it takes 1-3 years to break even, and when you consider the amount of money spent and time I wait to START making any profit, the realized gains aren't that good. IF I had a trade route up 5 years, maybe the income I made year 5 would be worth the investment... maybe.

My games almost never last 5 years. Now, as for the diplomacy modifiers.... that's another story altogether. You can't put a price in being able to control who wants to go to war with you...

~ Wyndstar

I agree Beta 4 economy has gone too far in that it forces you down a road that is verging on "not fun" any more. Balancing is always a nightmare as clearly many play on many different levels of difficulty, and what works at one level may well - often doesnt - at other levels. Economy has always been a roll-a-coaster depending on your experience level. One thing is certain at any level however, it must remain Fun, or the game dies.

A "one size fits all" strategy to balancing economy at the Dev end of the equation does not necessarily fit the need. Arguably, the economy model should be graded by level of difficulty, so that as you move up the difficulty ladder, it gets tougher to run. At the mid range and lower levels, economy must not be a limiting factor - at present it is. The overiding motive must be to keep the player interested and having "Fun". Beta 4 is arguably not Fun for mid and lower levels of player experience, and ultimately that will kill take up of the game.

What to tweek? Probably write a book on that and still get it wrong, as there are so many things one can tweek, but we are not aware of the over-riding design drivers and the real reasons things are set as they are - only the Devs really know, we can only sratch the surface. However, the bottom line is the game Must be Fun for lower and mid range difficulty levels, and arguably Beta 4 is not Fun for lower experience level players. If its not Fun, you lose the players before they even get a chance to get the needed experience at managing economy.

TA is an incredible game, and a marvellous testiment to Dev inovation and dedication. Please dont wreck it by implementing a "one size fits all" economy. The latter is the over-riding limitation for less experienced players who want to get into the "fun" stuff - but are zapped before they get a chance. The end result is obvious, the game goes back on the shelf, and that would be very sad as they will never know what they missed.

Regards
Zy

So what your saying is that adding one slider or one more option when setting up a game would put it over some mysterious limit and the screen would suddenly become cluttered?

One slider, no. But there have been requests for habitable planet sliders, extreme environment sliders, economy sliders, maintenance sliders, asteroid sliders, anomaly sliders, anomaly respawn rate sliders, etc. Basically anything and everything you can think of has had someone advocating a slider for it.

To be honest, I wish there was a slider for all these things... more choices when setting up a sandbox game is never a bad thing.

As for screen clutter, they could always make a separate pop-up window brought up by a "More..." button.

Still, I'm kinda wondering what the blank space for Game Options (where the Blind Exploration, No Surrenders, etc check boxes are) is for... hmm...

Adding a slider for something like ship maintenance cost, or some overall economic difficulty setting, seems premature to me. Let's wait and see how the devs balance the game in the next few updates. If we're all still struggling with the economy when the game is close to release, then we can start looking for band-aid fixes like that. I'm hopeful that we won't need them.

No, it's because eventually when they let you change too much, you begin defeating the purpose and vision of the game itself. Sliders for ship maintenance and the like just goes down the path of cheating, more or less.

By the way, here's something interesting - I got the 5X Tourism mega-event and found the economy rather well-balanced at that rate. It felt a bit TOO easy, perhaps giving tourism a 3.75X multiplier by default would do it, but it certainly alleviated my economic woes.

Heh, that would probably bring it up to what it was in the earlier beta... (beta 2 was it?)

Still, Tourism Income in the larger galaxies is a joke, so this wouldn't help as much there.



The same could be said for the option to disable Mega Events or Super Abilities, but we certainly have those options (although, the option for disabling Super Abilities was given somewhat begrudgingly if I remember correctly).

Honestly, any option at game setup could spoil the "vision of the game itself". After all, the AI is said to work the best at Medium galaxies with lots of planets, and yet, we have larger galaxies, don't we? And, heck, the game's AI functions fully at "Tough" (or is it Challenging?) difficulty without cheats, but there are difficulty levels above and below that, no?

It's all a matter of preference. Some like to play at lower difficulty levels, some higher.



Definitely cannot agree here. If the game allows you to adjust the cost of ship maintenance or the overall difficulty of maintaining an economy, it isn't cheating... ever. It's part of the game at that point. Heck, we are talking about a single player game here, too, you know.

As for metaverse scoring, lowering the sliders down would decrease the overall score of the game, much like playing on Cakewalk instead of Suicidal would.

However, a slider just for Ship Maintenance would be too much, of course. It could be part of an "Economy" slider, though.

I don't see how it is cheating if it affects both Human and AI players. If it did affect both Human and AI players, I can see there might be problems with the AI adjusting for every little increase/decrease in the slider. -- If not a slider then maybe something like is already in the game for number of stars/habbitable plaents ect.
make there be an option for low maintenance, normal maintenance, or high maintenance.

Wyndstar, you are still assuming you have 1 trade route going through that starbase's area. When I am trading for profit rather than political reason (improving relations) I make all my freighters from the same planet, and send them out in a tight cone, keeping all my routes mostly along 1 very long path. It's not unusual for me to have 7 or 8 routes going through a starbase's trade area. And I line that path from planet of origin until it breaks up with multiple fields of interlocking bases. +10%? How about +90% on 8 different trade routes, for more than half their length?

I think Tourism and Trade income should be scaled based on the size of the galaxy. On Huge and up, Tourism alone can support your entire empire, whereas on anything below it is just a bonus. I think Trade should have a 30% bonus for every map size smaller than Immense, and Tourism should have a 50% bonus for every map size smaller than Immense. The bonus is cumulative, 30/50 for Gigantic, 60/100 for Huge etc.

IMHO Trade is a "whore" it always comes and goes. Its best with one minor race that is within your empire. Alot more stable and controlable.

Duh

agreed...but I have a hard time passing up those juicy minor race planets!

The 20k limit, if there, is not absolute in my experience. I've gone into six digits playing the Terrans in Beta 4 and 4a. That being said, I have noticed in some games that right around 20k bc, income becomes restricted or even goes into negative growth so there could be some kind of "limit" there.

It isn't a "limit" and it has not changed since these forums taught me about it (over a year ago?). When your treasury passes 20k BC, your income is penalized (I forget the exact math). Sometimes this just means lower income, but in some economies it means a negative income until the treasury drops back below 20k or other things change enough.

IIRC, the dev rationale here is basically to keep you doing things (spending). I've never loved it, especially b/c I play large games and late in them upgrading a class of ships is too expensive to do in one turn unless you're willing to pay the >20k penalty and save up for quite a while. But I have adapted b/c my momma raised a real pennypincher and once I know about all the BC I wasn't earning, I had to start paying the clicks to keep the cash flow maxed. On generously large maps, the difference can be in hundreds of BC per week or more.

There's "steps" to income, and you take a tax hit at each income. It's basically your populace saying "Where is all our money going? Why do we have a huge horde? I'm not paying this."

And yes, mid-late game, you simply CAN'T spend money on stuff, as buying a large/massive hull ship outright costs over 100kBC.

Then again, if your income is such that you'll hit that 20K limit easily, you're making more than enough to be able to pay off the debt in a few turns.

Besides, at that point you've already WON, the universe just doesn't know it yet.

Um werid guys, is this in the new "cough" features of TA. In DA I am always running between 50k and 100k BC in my treasury about the time in get Disruptors (yeah I know missles weapons are "cheaper" but I like the bright lights beams make plus all my crews are scared of the dark). I wonder if your popluction is happy if your Taxes will go up. I try to keep mine as close to 100% as possible.

Also it should be one of scale. The larger your empire the more taxes (assuming the same tax rate) there should be more people to taxes and there for more money coming in. But it also could mean that you have a growing beauracy that has sticky fingers. There should be some tech or something to work out the corruption.

Duh

OOOh that would be a real sucky event. Your beaurcray has become a kleptoarcy (who ever steals the most wins) your tax revinues have been quartered.

Duh