[Design decision?] - Why no carry-over of production points?

from GalCiv2 Forums

I guess it is a strong design decision from the team. Productions points can't be carried-over the next item (even if the points are not costing BC). I fail to see how it can be good on a micro-management stand point.

Standard example is a colony ship 99% complete which need one more turn to finish. The next ship will restart at 0% completion thus.

In such case the player have two options, depending of his willingness to commit into tedious micro-management: 'laissez-faire' and pray he will still win without optimization, or tweak settings, planet by planet, turn after turn... I guess that for players playing at suicidal difficulty, they even create custom ship design on the fly, to have the production fall right and not lose a turn!

So... why? It is trivial from a coding standpoint and Stardock has the resources to change such things, in the end if this is not done, it means this is by design. But I dont understand how the benfits of this (lack of) decision is better than the drawbacks it inflicts on players.

Thank you for your attention.

7,135 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I completely agree; I also don't like this. I was really happy when Civ4 came out to see that production points *do* carry over to the next item, as do research points. While it's not necessarily the most "realistic", it does, as you mentioned, heavily cut down on micro-management while not being wasted.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Any added insight from the Team, or from a Beta? The question surely must have been raised in the beta phase and answered.
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Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Research points do carry over.

I personally don't see much point for PP to carry over and it would probably eat a huge amount of comp resources.
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
it would probably eat a huge amount of comp resources.
End of quote


You can't be serious.

Do you have any idea how hardware works? Or are you one of those guys who just complains whenever the developers add something because you think even the most minute change is going to have a noticeable impact?

"OMG THEY CHANGED THE COLOR OF THE STARS MY FPS IS GOING TO SUCK NOW WTFFFFFFFFF"
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Nah, you see, every point of production is stored in an extra bit in computer RAM, so excess production, especially on huge maps, means an exponential increase in resource usage...


Seriously, though, a change like that would naturally use no resources at all. Something similar is already in effect: When you conquer a planet, the build queue is cancelled. However, as soon as you start a new ship construction, the amount of production previously generated are used to build the new ship.

I've often used this effect to 'charge up' my production by building expensive (albeit useless) designs, then set the production to nothing until I needed a ship built quickly.