Jonnan001

Join Date 05/2008

+37

Quick Stupid Slider Question

I'd been doing this for some time before my PC died, and haven't quite convinced myself either that I'm being smart *or* stupid, and might as well ask as I start a new game.

Sometime back I started locking my military slider at 1%, and just adjusting my research and social sliders as needed, on the theory that any unused social spending went to military at 100% efficiency anyway, so this meant any colony improvements, factory upgrades, et al were automatically prioritized, while if you weren't doing that, the colony would happily pump out whatever ship you had it set for.

At 0%, it doesn't work that way, but anything over 1% just means your colonial upgrades don't go as fast.

It feels so obvious to me, yet I haven't heard anyone else mention it, so I kinda suspect I must be missing some obvious downside to this equation that everyone else has noticed?

Jonnan

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The downside is slower ship building if there is any social building. That means much longer times to get those colony ships out there, or ships to defend against attack, or constructors to get those much needed resources.

I usually leave Military around 30%, at least.

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Oh, that's the intended effect - {G]; I prefer to set the shipbuilding on standby and get the colony upgraded.

I'm just double checking for any other loss of efficiency I may be missing.

Jonnan

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WIllythemailboy

Join Date 03/2006

+70

The only real downside is loss of bonus production. I've never tested exactly how the bonuses work, but building ships is faster at 40/0/60 than it is at 1/39/60. I seem to recall reading that the production transferred from social loses any +social bonus, and might not benefit from +military.

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I seem to recall reading that the production transferred from social loses any +social bonus, and might not benefit from +military.

Correct.

Production transferred via focus gets the bonus of the production that it goes to, but production transferred from social to military when the social queue is empty loses the social bonus and doesn't get the military bonus.

Technically you're also losing either one or two production to truncation, depending on circumstances, but I'm one of the few who cares about that. (For the record, I'm also one of the only ones-in fact the only one I saw-who complained about the DL/DA military/social rounding error, which was fixed for TA and subsequently for DA 2.0, thank God.)

I've personally been running 25/75/0, 50/50/0, or 75/25/0, depending on my bonuses and specific playstyle for a given game, but then again I tend to do all-factory, or close to it. Each of the above minimizes the truncation loss and the bonus loss as much as possible, given the circumstances.

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Ah - I suspected the fact that no one else has mentioned this meant there was something relatively obvious I'm missing, and a complete lack of production bonuses would certainly qualify.

I'm still not sure going by the Wiki just how this works - I may need to look at this carefully, and figure it out, but at least I know what i'm looking for (I think)

Jonnan

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Look at it this way-say you have 100 industry, and you're running it at 1/99(/0), with a 50% military bonus and a 30% social bonus. You get 1*1.5 for 1 when truncated, plus <-- 99*1.0 for a total of 100 military production. If you had funding at 50/50/0, you'd get 50*1.5 or 75 and <-- 50*1.0 for 125. And then of course there's 100/0/0 funding for 150 military production. But should you add something to your social queue, your military/social production becomes 1/128, 75/65, and 150/0 respectively.

This is neglecting focus to make things simple, particularly as TA complicates this further.

However, as a side note, running high social funding with low military funding is preferred because you're charged for all funded military, even over what you use (for instance if you build a 130BC ship at a planet with 160 industry, you spend 160BC that turn to produce that ship), but unused (nothing in queue) social is firstly transferred to active military production (only when a ship is building) and secondly if that is not the case it is returned to your treasury.

Simply put, people prefer to run high social/low military funding so as to not bankrupt their empires, even though they suffer some loss of efficiency for doing so.

A classic example of this is using an all factory strategy to focus research-assuming an empty queue, if social is funded you're only charged for the social that goes to research (25%, or 20% in TA) whereas with military funded you're charged for all military that is funded. The primary difference is of course when you're not actually building anything (either ships or improvements), but most of us aren't building something on every planet all the time. Except I'm pumping out ships on every planet anyway, so it's all the same to me

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Okay, I looked at my capital city, fiddling around with military/social production, and there is definitely *something* going on with the bonus for focus as opposed to no bonus for straight overflow, but trying to do this with pencil and paper was driving me insane, so I set it to not use full screen, and this post is half taking notes as I go along.

But It *looks* like you get some kind of bonus using focus, but I'm having a heck of a time working out the rhyme/reason of it -it *looks* as if you get a social bonus before the production goes to the military - *if* and only if you are also building a building.

Civ bonuses: Military 45%, Social 65%, Research 88%

Homeworld:31 maintenace

Capital: 24 research, 24 Industry

5 Xenofactories: 30 Industry

Asteroid mines: 11 Industry: Total 65

Biosphere Modulator: 10% Industry Bonus

First of all, I was under the impression that bonus production was paid for at half price - maybe I've concatenated multiple conversations from different versions, but that doesn't appear to be the case

With both ship and colony production in use

25% 25% 50% --> 26 29 22, for 46 production; Cut off industry, and only 12 inbeing used to produce that 22 rp, so the research bonus is being generated for free, not half for free. That leaves 34 bc used for industry/social, 17 each. 65/4 is 16.25, so it looks suspiciously like a rounding issue, and we're getting the other bonuses for free as well.

Maybe everyone but me understood that, but it's not the way conversations have implied it, so I wanted to mention it.

From there; the question of just how the money moves around doesn't look clear to me.

Knock off either the social or the shipyard production item; and you get 17 points added to the other side, so it looks like the budgeted production get's bonuses, but not the overflow production.

Then we get to the *really* confusing issue, what happens with focus - and all I know for certain, it that it definitely gets a bonus, but it looks like the bonus is from the originating side, *if* that side is already producing something.

Given 0% military, 50% Social 50% Research

Producing no social and a ship gives nothing to military production; it gets refunded to the treasury.

Focusing to the military side give 20; 3 rp and 17 Social, no bonuses produced. Interestingly enough, the other 17 from social is refunded to the treasury.

Producing a ship *and* a social construction howeverwhile focused however; and you get a production of 29 social, 29 military. Take away the 3 RP, and you get 26 military production, the exact 9 bonus production you had before with 25% 25% 50%.

But wait, there's more, because it doesn't work quite the same way with 1% 49% 50%. If you do that, then you get the bonus production with focus irregardless of whether you have a social item being produced - 29 each with focus if both items are being produced, 29+17=46 if no social item is being produced.

At this point, my conclusion is that I still think having it set this way is worth it since I can get the bonus on specific planet with the focus sytem as if I had that planet at 25% 25% 50%, but the exact way it decides to whether to allocate bonuses is definitely odd, perhaps even buggy - perhaps we can safely blame the bureaucrats toiling in little dark rooms deep in the bowels of the empire for the oddity of the system?

Jonnan

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On further thought - it looks to me that the prgramming logic is that 'focused' production counts as baseline production for the particular system, social or industrial, but that the subroutine that handles focus is downstream from the subroutine that toggles on the production bonuses.

So, if that 'bonus' routine has been accessed by either having an initial budget on the focus side, *or* having something built that initiates the bonus production routine on the side that *has* a budget, then the new focus points benefit from production bonuses as well.

If it hasn't been accessed before that (0% budgeted, and the side that has a budget isn't actually building anything), then the focus points are treated just like overflow points, with no bonus.

I think.

Jonnan

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Quoting Jonnan001,

reply 8

I think.

Jonnan

What?

Focus takes 25% of A and B and gives 25% of A and B (20% in TA) to C. The bonus for C applies to any focus.

If you have 100% social funded and have 100 industry, with a 30% social bonus and a 20% research bonus, focusing on research will net you 100 * 0.25 (focus) * 0.8 (TA waste) --> 20 * 1.2 --> 24 research.

The problem in seeing this is that it gets especially complicated when you're running finite positive values of military and social alongside research and you choose to focus military while not having anything in the social queue, because first focus happens from social (and research), for which the bonus from military (C) is applied, and then the remaining -base- social is transferred over to military (with no bonus).

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Well, looking at it, it seems to be 50% rather than 25%, going from the social <--> military, either way. crossing from either of these going from either of these to the research queue or back is 25%, which matches the Wiki.

That said, re bonuses - nope. It may be a bug, or something odd about my update, but just testing it here, that's not the way the bonuses are being added - but as long as you don't budget 0%, you would never come across it.

To reproduce you have focus the military queue and both:

A- have military budgeting set to 0%, and

B- have nothing in the social queue

then two things happen. The military queue gets the 50% it is supposed to get from the social budget, with no bonus (In my test case - 20; 17 from the social budget, 3 from the research budget) and the remaining 17 credits of the social budgets 34 credits go back to the treasury unspent.

If "A" and not "B", the focused units go from the Social and Research budgets to the military budget, are added to the allocated budget, with bonuses applied as normal, resulting in this case in a total ouput of 29. Then the remaining social budget (17) overflows to the military queue and is added without bonuses for a total output of 46.

If "B" and not "A", the military queue get it's 20 bc, applies it's bonus the way it's supposed to and produces (in this case 29) units, meanwhile the social queue retains the remainder of it's budget (17), adds it's bonus and produces it's 29 units.

But if both of those apply, then it allocates the budget from the social and research queues, but neither adds the bonuses, nor does the remain overflow from the social queue get added to the total military budget - it goes back to the treasury unused.

It also seems to do the same thing focused the other direction. I suppose this could be a corrupted install on my game, but I haven't had any other indications, so I honestly think it's a bug. But it's easy to work around (just leave at least 1% budgeted.), doesn't seem to be related to anything nasty like a memory leak, so it it's really just an esoteric oddity that was confusing the heck out of me when I was trying to verify exactly how 'focus' works.

If you can't reproduce it, tell me, but dollars to donuts you'll see the same thing with those starting conditions - I think it just tests for 'add bonus' and 'return overflow to treasury' in an slightly out of kilter way that flags them wrong if both of those conditions are met

I'm kinda glad I found it - it could mess your economy up in head scratching ways, but it's not really a big deal.

Jonnan

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Jonnan,

I, too, have been playing with my military slider locked to 1% for several weeks. I rush buy a couple of factories on my home planet and then leave my social queue there empty so production goes to starships. Ergo, my home planet pumps out ships, and my colonies rapidly improve. This seemed to improve efficiency on my games considerably and I just beat a suicidal level game. I don't take any starting racial military bonuses so I wasn't worried about losing military bonuses to the 1% setting: I didn't have any.

Reading all of the above was making my head hurt and eye's water....so what was your emphatic conclusion after all of your testing? Are we doin' good with the 1% solution or were we messing up?

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Right...neglected that somehow. What can I say, it was 4 am.

There's no reason why the behavior you're seeing would be a TA change, and in my testing in DA a few months back, focusing while having something funded at 0% still gave me a bonus.

Checked in TA and double checked in DA. It appears the scenario you've stated is one I never bothered to check. I guess I was more concerned with research, and, as stated, I prefer to run at 25/75, 50/50, or 75/25 for minimal efficiency loss.

Interestingly, the same thing occurs with 0% social spending and nothing in the military queue-which happens to invalidate my first theory, that it had something to do with unused social being returned to the treasury.

In any case, as you say, you only run into this when you are funding A at 0% and have nothing in B's queue.

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Yeah - I was mostly documenting the bahavior because it was just confusing as hell for me when I was trying to verify the way focus works - once you know what's going on, it's no big deal, although I concede I didn't realize it was TA only.

Regarding whether it's a good strategy - well, I concede I think I like the end result - I tend to do a fairly slow colony rush and build up my economy as I go along, so running with military 'off' except on those specific worlds where I'm building ships at works well for me - I only build starports on planets near asteroid belts or with a factory 'multiplier' tile; otherwise I build four factories at the colony start, get my research or econ colony setup, and pave them over in favor of the colonies best buildings when everythings upgraded.

So, for *me* it works. If I were playing the Drengin or something, it might well work better the other way, but I tend to just build huge numbers of high pop colonies and setup Psilon Public TV stations all over the place.

Jonnan

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although I concede I didn't realize it was TA only.

It's not.

Apologies for the confusion-part of my post was written before checking it, and part of it afterwards.

The anomaly you've discovered exists in both DA and TA (and presumably DL as well).

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