If this is in TA, then you probably picked up some of the techs to reduce the 'buy now' cost...along with picking Neutral in Xeno Ethics.

Check out reply #79 in this thread WWW Link

Nice thought, Loupdinour, but you're missing the point. An NLC costs 500 to build. Rush buying it costs 5580bc.

It seems to be BuyNowCost = 6 * BuildCostFactor where BuildCostFactor = BuildCost ^ 1.1, rounded down. i.e. 500 = 930 x 6 = 5580.

Incidentally, the Overlord design in DA costs 400 to build, and 4368 to rush buy...even when I'm neutral. So I'm going to call that a bug. Neutral in theory gets a reduction on rush buying ships, but apparently not planetary improvements. I'm seeing neither in DA 1.80g. Just checked in TA, and it implements it as a PurchaseNowReduction i.e. InterestRateBonus, and works correctly-for both ships and planetary improvements. I am unaware if the latter is intentional.

Point being, in the examples Boogly provided, you'd need a 97% buy now reduction-for the NLC. I can only assume that constructor isn't the default one, though, as a 97% buy now reduction places it at 47bc (from 1578 initial BuyNowCost at 159 initial BuildCost) rather than the mentioned 40bc.

I'm guessing that constructor costs between 137bc and 139bc. This would also place your medium ship at 330-332bc to build, rather than rush buying. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, Boogly.

One other thought-I've sometimes run into planetary events that provide an InterestRate bonus, and, if I remember correctly, also a couple of anomalies. This appears to be the BuyNowReduction we have been speaking of, based on the values the TA techs in question provide.

Still, 97% is a heck of a lot.

Could you check your Stats & Graphs screen for Abilities, Boogly? Would be interesting to see what it reports, as far as interest rate goes.

@vornskrrr

For TA, as mentioned in the post that Loupdinour linked to:

CutThroat Competition for the Korx, no alignment necessary, 25% bonus.
Hyperion Fabrication for the Thalans, neutral specific, 25% bonus.
Choosing Neutral alignment via Xeno Ethics, 25% bonus (works).
-description for neutral alignment specifies ships; does not mention planetary improvements, yet affects both.

For DA:
Choosing Neutral alignment via Xeno Ethics, 25% bonus (does not work).
-Same appears to apply to DL.
-Interestingly, the InterestRate bonus does show up under stats & graphs-it just apparently doesn't do anything in either DL or DA...even when modded in as an inherent race ability.

I'm guessing you have tech trading on, you're playing with the Thalans and the Korx in the game, and/or as one of them, you've picked up CutThroat Competition and Hyperion Fabrication, you've gone neutral, and you previously got a planetary event in the colonization phase for 22%.

I agree about the major unbalance, and if you'll notice, I did mention that InterestRate/PurchaseNowReduction does not appear to work in either DL or DA, which explains why no one has seen such a difference before (albeit only having the Neutral +25% and colonization events to go by).

There are two main ways that come to mind to fix Purchase Now reductions. First and foremost is to simply cap the ability, probably at 50% so the Thalans don't get screwed over even more (as they'd get 25% from Neutral, but then the tech would be useless if it were capped at 25%). The second way would seem to be to implement it in the same vein as the Thalan's super ability. This would help to alleviate the fact that things wind up costing less to instabuy than they do to build, but with your example 97% reductions, it would still reduce things to 3% of their cost. With the 75% obtainable from techs, a 100bc cost building/ship/etc would be 206bc to rush buy, whereas with your 97% it would be a mere 19bc. Perhaps a cap would help the latter method fare better.

Probably the simplest way to "fix" it is to just remove the colonization (i.e. alignment choice) events (and any such anomalies, if they exist) that grant a PurchaseNowReduction, leaving us with an effective cap of 75%. This would place your medium ship at 883bc-889bc to rush buy, your NLC at 1395bc, and the constructor at 394bc. Still fairly cheap, but no longer cheaper than building.

If you've got a savegame of this extreme situation, send it in with a description or link back here to support@stardock.com and they can pass it on to the devs to look into.