change from military to social production, or to research, etc. The cost would be higher for larger changes, of course.

SMAC had such a system, and imho it felt natural without subtracting from the fun.

I like Psyringe's idea. It's realistic, not overly complicated, and effective in fixing the problem.

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the Bureaucracy statistic. The lower the number, the more flexible the empire.

Am I making this too complicated, or is this a good idea?

me change. Makes sense to me. However this addition would complicate the formula a little.

I hope I make sense, my head feels a little muddy today ...

ing is even sorta correct, GC2 will end up with a completely different budgetary system. But maybe I'm just way too far out today.

Is it just me who doesnt want all this efficiency, wastage and all that stuff? I like it to be really simple. I'm not making money, reduce the government spending slider or raise taxes. My research is falling behind push up the research slider. I've built nearly all of the improvements I currently want/have room for, reduce social spending. Easy. Unlike the original poster, I dont shove my spending 100% into anything, then shove it 100% to something else, as I dont want to stop researching/building ships just to get that factory built faster.

Civilization-3 handled budget sliders on an empire-wide scale, with a simple percentage of income going to research, another going to morale, and any leftover percentage that you didn't assign going to the treasury. You could also go into individual cities (planets in our case) and assign people to different jobs--tax collector raising money, scientist increasing research, entertainer boosting morale. The combination works quite nicely.

A counterpoint about moving all finances around: We are moving only those finances that we can move, and the sliders are there so players can decide how to spend their money. There is a sense of worry over moving the sliders "too much" and I think that is a healthy thing. It should be possible to do exactly that. For instance, if I decide as Grand Poobah of my race to stop all expenditures of money on ship manufacturing and devote my entire economy to research, then there will be consequences. The enemy will be pumping out ships while I race up the tech tree.

One place that I've felt comfortable with modelling wasted effort is rush-production queues, where you have the option to hurry a given item/queue along for a price. I liked in SEIV where he did rush-job production queues that increased the cost, and then charged recovery time penalty of building at 1/4 production rate for an equal length of time. Then there was the hopelessly convoluted MOO3 which tried an economy-overdrive slider on their worlds and for me it was just a chore tweaking it to the edge of a color change, while the other sliders changed in oddly disproportionate ways, then erased my decisions a few turns later. I wasn't a player in that game, I was just one more hint for the simulation. I give em credit for guts though, because they didn't just pump out another formula game.

Well biggest problem is no one knows exactly how the system works right now. I mean if you do plz let me know! Either way and I'm only mentionign the unclean game for a point, Moo3 had an efficency system, it made the whole budget allocation more barable, but I hate sliders. Funding levels seem more accurate with a maximum funding lvl, cause 100% it just isnt realistic. And 05? Wouldnt that cause the infrastructure to dissipate? My biggest problem is that my colonies are always at different levels, not all of my colonies are 100% built up, so I can never put social to 0%, that causes stagnation :/ The only one you can usually put to 0% is research,a nd that's just a bad idea. Yeah soem say military to 0, but you are always buildign atleast one or two ships, even if 90% of your starports are idle. Anyway it may be too much to as for a finance system both as sophisticated and at the same time as easy as the ship creation system. But these guys showed us what they can do with ship creation, so now they are victims of their own success. Please impress us with funding!