@Roller123
The basic idea is, you already spent that 500 on the NLC-you basically just rented it. Now you're taking that money and, because the game is so nice, putting it towards the Hyper Computers.
The basic idea is sound. There's nothing really wrong with it.
I do understand where you're coming from, as you could get God only knows how much use out of an NLC and then just upgrade it into a trade good for mere pennies, but that's really just how the game works.
The only real problem I see with it is that the current implementation can result in ridiculously low figures, such as the 6bc upgrade cost I presented. A better solution would seem to be to factor in total cost in place of total social production used.
It does, however, intrigue me that the game actually remembers the social production spent (only from the last level, though) for each and every built improvement in the game. On the one hand, this is impressive in and of itself, and shows that there is far more capability in it than (probably) most of us had imagined. On the other hand, I can't help but wonder how much RAM that's taking up.
(As a note-the cost system I've mentioned versus the current total production spent system, due to both using differences from the previous value, have essentially the same RAM usage, if applicable. The only real way to cut down on that would be to change the discount to purely cost-based [basically calculating the current difference on-the-fly, rather than storing it], which I think overall would be good but it would change a lot of things. This would free up some space-though I honestly don't know how much or if it would be significant at all-but would increase the CPU load marginally, but in all honesty, anything above my old 900MHZ Thunderbird probably wouldn't notice the difference.)
-
@Mumble
No. 540-52=488. Computers = 540, rush buy cost = 462BC = base cost of 52BC. This means we need to come up with 488 credit for a 500 project, which means we need the difference to be 12. If we, for instance, have a starport (at 20) and spend 32 building it, and then rush buy an NLC on top of it, we get 32 credit towards it and pay the rush buy cost of 5190 at a production cost of 468. This means if we then build something on top of the NLC, we only get 468 credit towards it. This would result in our Hyper Computers being treated as a 72 production cost, which would become a 660 rush buy cost.
The bottom line is based on the math I don't see a way to do it without a planetary improvement that costs 12 (of which there are none), or, alternatively, two planetary improvements for which the difference is 12 (of which there are, not surprisingly, none). It doesn't matter how many times or numbers you add and subtract that end in 0 or 5, you're never going to get a number ending in 2 out of it, and particularly no 12.
(If you add decommission into the mix, you might have something, but in theory it resets the counter to zero, and in practice decommissioning something, anything, has no effect whatsoever on the build or rush buy cost of something else built on that tile.)
-
I would agree that this is yet another thing that the human player can do (and in fact fairly well) that the AI simply cannot, but this is more largely a matter of the AI not backbuilding/overbuilding than anything else; I'm certain it's intelligent enough to handle upgrades sufficiently, although I've never paid much attention to what kind of rush buy upgrading practices it keeps. But it just won't ever occur to the AI to replace an Embassy with a Level 1 Manufacturing Matrix, for instance (TA Thalans are pretty much the prime example of this, so I had to use them).
