Slide-bar Math

Couple of things.

1) Maintenance. Your buildings that you're using to produce your hypothetical 100 production and/or research have maintenance, which is counted in your spending. Therefore, you'll never be at 100 anyway.

2) Build queues. If you're not building anything in your starport for that planet, the money that would be spent on military is returned to your treasury...and isn't actually spent. Also, social gets a larger piece of the pie, although the math escapes me at the moment (it's 4am here) for exactly when and how and why military and social get their piece of the pie, and exactly how large it is. This also works in reverse, except that unused social is diverted to military before it itself is returned to the treasury (though it's only the base value, which makes me question the 1/99 strategy a number of people here use).

Suffice it to say, if you want a ship built faster, stop building social improvements, and by the same token, if you want that factory to build faster, stop building that ship. This is of course assuming you aren't running at 100% in the given category to begin with.

3) Rounding. I've noticed lately that there are slight "rounding errors" within the game. While rounding can and does happen, and one would expect, say, 25.6 to be rounded down to 25 (and as such due to rounding and percentage spending you could wind up with a net difference of a bc or two in each direction...possibly per category, but I'm too tired to figure that one out). However, I've been seeing, for instance, 25.0 get rounded down to 24.9 and then get rounded down to 24. I'm not entirely sure what causes this, but it's annoying. I posted a bug report on it, and verified the problem exists in TA as well, but apparently no one else is bothered by it. 25.1, however, is rounded down properly to 25, rather than 24.

4) Output. (This is the big one.) You're only going to spend 100BC/turn on research if you have (total output of research buildings) * funding equalling 100. This is discounting focus for the moment as that tends to complicate things, but if you count production rather than base then you can account for it, and that's probably a better way to do things as then you don't have to multiply in production bonuses (rings, planetary improvements tech, nano recorders, hyper computers, production modules on economy starbases). If you have 120RP capacity and you set it to 100%, you're spending 120 on research. Alternatively, if you only have 60MP capacity and you set THAT to 100% (let's assume this is one planet, for simplicity's sake), then, assuming you're building something on that planet, be it a ship or a building, you're spending 60BC.

I hope some of that makes sense.

I agree. The yardstick is not what you are spending but what you can spend. With a Research slider at 50% you're paying to power 50% of your factories, etc. This mechanic poses a particularly annoying problem: since two sliders power factories and one powers labs, and the three sliders' sum must always be 100%, you can never use your factories and labs to their maximum potential. It's like you're building all those factories and then a third of them remains unused; likewise about half of your labs will be constructed than then stand, abandoned, while you're happily paying maintenance on all of them. Though I circumvent this conundrum with an "All-X" strategy, I can honestly say that I think it's a bit of a design flaw. Perhaps it was intended, though.

Anyway, perhaps if you want to fiddle with the sliders and have your expenditures not go up you can set the overall production lower.

J.

I have heard folks say the factories/labs "stand empty" before when discussing the all-X strategy, but I find this is slightly mis-stating the case. It seems to be that when you set your budget sliders it spreads the funding across _all_ your factories (or labs) but they are just not 100% churning stuff out if the funding is not complete.

I look at the lab or factory mp/tp per turn as a "potential" only reached if/when the empire puts the resources into it.

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But there are quirks certainly. If you are spending mostly social with some planets getting military focus to build ships... you probably realize that you actually will build the ship faster if you are actually building a social project at the same time? The focus only shifts funds that are actually being spent, I guess, so if your improvement queue is empty that money goes to the treasury and the military factories never see it, so they siphon off only what you are spending on research. Weird stuff. I would think it would be much more straight-forward to just give you sliders for each planet but can you imagine the micromanagement burden that would create with a large empire.

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Me, I made the mistake my current game of letting all my factories start to upgrade, first to Xeno which was not too bad, then to Industrial Sectors - not even bothering to fund the social stuff anymore except for focus on new worlds because the maintenance is just killer when you still have to pay for most of the factory output on top of it. I had thought it would be nice to have the industrial might to pump out warships faster but you really get a lot more industrial power from more not better factories. Definately better to have more low-tech factories, with power plants and mining operations to beef them up, than a few high-tech ones, except maybe for some on bonus tiles where the maintenance is worth the huge extra kick.

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Sorry, this has drifted off-topic. Just wanted to say that I thought 33% does not mean only 33% of your factory tiles get used, it means that all your factory tiles get used at 33% capacity (except for all the crud noted). You can probably see this better if you look at the planetary details screens.

The spending sliders don't allocate a certain amount of bc's amongst your three types of production. The sliders are solely a game mechanic that forces you to make choices about what you need an when.

The sliders determine how much capacity your labs/factories operate at. You will notice a major shift in your spending if either your labs or factories outnumber the other. If you had 100 factories and one lab (lets assume each building produces 10 hammers/flasks), and the sliders set at 10% social, 90% research, you would spend a total of 109 bc:

10% (10 hammers) x 100 factories + 90% (10 flasks) x 1 lab = 100 + 9 = 109 bc

If you then shifted your sliders to 90% social and 10% research, you would end up with a lot more spending.

90% (10 hammers) x 100 factories + 10% (10 flasks) x 1 lab = 900 + 1 = 901 bc

This doesn't even include bonuses from abilities or starbases, which would all have their impact on the total spending.

This is incorrect. If you don't have a social project in the queue, the base social construction is applied to ship construction (if you are building any ships) THEN returned to the treasury. So if you are at say 95% social and 5% military, you will definitely build ships faster if you don't have a social project. The only drawback is that you don't get the bonus production you might have recieved if you applied it straight to military in the first place.

95% social and 5% military is a pretty decent way to quickly build infrastructure on a lot of worlds and still build ships fairly quickly on worlds that don't need to build infrastructure.

Saying that a portion of one's factories remain unused is just a different way of saying that a portion of each factory remains unused. The point is that you might have enough factories to produce 300 mp (and you'll be charged for their maintenance), and yet for the vast majority of the game you probably won't sap more than 200 mp per turn out of them. The only way to get 100% production out of all your factories is to set Research to 0%, which is not exactly the best way of going about winning the game. I.e. factories (and labs, for that matter) become underutilised, which is what I'm saying.

J.

Very interesing and informative discussion...thanks to all.

Definately not. Saying only 33% of your factories get used leads noobs like me to think that production might be occuring on only 33% of their worlds, but at full speed. Yes when I first read that in the all-x strategy discussion I thought that is what they meant. Hey, I ain't the brightest lightbulb on the Christmas tree, ya know. Saying all factories are at 33% suggests all production is occurring but only at 1/3 the rate. And is clearer for people who are not yet comfortable with the intricasies of the game mechanics.

Hi!
You could find wiki pages on production and research informative. It's quite long, but all what's currently known about how production and research work in DL and DA is there.

BR, Iztok

Heh just use labs and run at 100% then you don't need to worry about the sliders. Use focus to build ships and social.

I'm sorry I read this thread. I was okay until I read it, now I'm confused.

From what I understand about the 3 sliders so far, I think they are a bad idea. All three should be set to 100%, period. In other words, get rid of them. Seems to me this game would be a lot better without them. I do not see any advantage to them at all, on the contrary major setbacks, but I guess I'm missing something here.

If I have one planet focused on economy, one on production, and one on research, how should I set the sliders to maximize them all? If I adjust the sliders from 33/33/34 to 5/45/50, will the research planet increase it's research, and the production planet make ships faster (if nothing in social queue)? If so, doesn't this destroy the advantage of specializing planets?

What if I want to increase research, and go 5/5/95. Will planets that focus on economy and/or production be severely penalized by this?

Seems to me I should set it to 5/95/0 for normal play (ignoring research), then every once in a while, when I need to research something, switch to 0/0/100 until research is complete. That sounds terrible too. ARGH! I need a beer.