I'm sure it's meant as a "pheature" but...

i have no idea what you are saying, the sliders are easy to figure out, you set an overall spending, say 10bc, then you determine how much of that 10bc go towards research, military or social. 50% research, sends 5bc to research, and then 25% for social and military mean 2.5bc to each of those, so im not sure what you are saying.

I dont think it work like that, because it would mean you cannot use your research center at maximum efficiency.

Well...

The OP didnt make sense to me.

The original post was a bit odd... but it is true that the economy sliders work a bit unintuitively.

It's quite possible to have two sliders all the way at maximum, and the third one at about one-third along the length with the actual ratios being 50, 50, 0.

The position of the sliders have only a vague resemblance to the numbers they are supposed to represent.

The position of the sliders have only a vague resemblance to the numbers they are supposed to represent.

Especially if you lock some the move the sliders around then un-lock and move them.

You CAN actually move the slider to the right and have the % go down.
Because... Well just as Raywind says.

You know what, I don't think the OP realizes that the economy sliders control percentages rather than numbers or how color mixing works. Its either that, he was saying something in such a weird way that I don't get what hes trying to say, or he randomly threw words together and they somehow formed a semi-coherent idea.

is it THAT difficult to actually look at the numbers? so the slider is a bit fucked, so what get over it. The sliders work just fine if you have an IQ above 60

I can't believe that you actually bothered to complain about this. It's quite obvious that the slider work in relation to each other and not in direct relation to their position from either side. It's quite easy to see the relative percentages change as you move the slider. The system works perfectly.
Having said that, I wouldn't mind having the research slider be seperate from production, so that you could truely max-out your spending.

I'm with the OP, and Raywind covered it pretty well, they do not behave in an intuitive manner.

I understood Ken Kofman perfectly fine. It's called a metaphore for those who don't get it. (They probably won't quite know what I'm saying either because they played games instead of studying while in school.)

I agree with you Ken Kofman. The sliders behave strangely. Try to move one slider's percentage down and it jumps up like 25 percent sometimes. You have to lock one and then move the other slider's percentage up to force the original slider to move down correctly.
Also, like you were expressing, push the arrows and it moves by one...except when it moves by two... and you can't get the exact percentage you want without experimenting again.

And when it does the jump thing you sometimes are unsure what percentage it was at...it's annoying if you are trying to be delicate each turn.

Now let's see who responds with, "What the heck are you saying? They work perfect!"



-Wade

I never touch those sliders, so they work perfect!

I've never run into any issues with the sliders at all...

What are you doing with them to mess them up like that? Do you use lock/unlock?

I understand how the sliders work, and I'm used to them now. However, I don't see why we can't set Military, Social and Research spending independantly. It seems like it would be easier. I don't think the system should change now, because changing the AI would take too much time. Maybe in GC3.

Hi,

I'm the guy who wrote the original post.

Yes, I realize that the sliders work in percentages. Yes, I can read the numbers. Yes, I am aware that the sliders work in relation to each other.

I *do* mind that I can slide a slider or click the corresponding arrow that ought to increase spending in a category, only to have spending decrease for that category. Or decrease spending, only to find spending increase. There's really no excuse for this.

I *do* mind attempting to decrease spending in a category all the way to 0%, only to discover that I cannot decrease spending that low. I don't like it, and consider it a bug, but there is an excuse for it.

Nice to have this stuff addressed, though I don't expect it.

===

I have even less (as in no) expect that the following might happen, but the desirable guns vs. butter effect and the other desirable global economic management effect can be achieved more cleanly.

1) Kill the per-system focus ability.
2) Kill the 3 percentage sliders for Research, Military and Social.
3) Change the overall spending percentage slider to an Industrial Utilization Slider. This governs how much money shall be spent to power factories. At 100%, every factory (or equivalent) runs at full capacity. At 0%, no factory runs at any capacity.
4) Add a "Guns versus butter" slider. When the slider is in the middle, industrial production is split 50/50 between military and social. Moving the slider towards guns increases military at the expense of social. Moving the slider towards butter increases social at the expense of military. Unused industrial production (because of overflow or because a planet isn't producing anything in that category) in one category does not get added to the other, but the corresponding cost is refunded.
5) Change the research percentage slider to a Research Utilization slider.

The effect is guns vs. butter with far less micromanagement. No finicking with cost overruns because there are none. No messing with focus. No slider causes any other slider to change. Guns versus butter remains, on a single slider. One less slider in total. On most turns, a player is likely to touch only the Guns vs Buttter slider. On some turns, he is likely to touch the research slider, and need only consider his overall spending ability. Every now and then, he may need to adjust his Industrial Utilization (though most players will want this at 100% whenever possible.)

Oh, and to be *really* awesome, put a copy of the Guns vs Butter slider at the top of the planet list (the one reached from F6). A player can then see what changes on all of his planets as he plays with the slider, all from the same screen. Now *that's* galactic management !

Anyway,

Ken

@Ken - Why on earth, heaven or hell do you want to kill the focus for? It is an invaluable feature - let me explain:

Imagine you are at war with a hostile race who has vastly more ships than you. You need ships, so you set the sliders to high military output and start churning out ships - job done....But you want to keep up in the tech race (Or keep the lead - if you're playing well). The focus abitlity allows some planets to concentrate on research, thereby allowing you to keep up your research points. its brilliant.

this can also be applied when you are flagging in research, but need a steady supply of fighting ships to keep the vultures at bay.

And also if you want to build wonders or trade goods before anyone else - focus on social production.

I only found out about focus, when waiting for a game to load and read the tips, I was blown away. It allows you to set an overall research/production policy while allowing for considerable flexibility - and you want to kill this feature????

And as for "guns versus butter"

The jump that happens with the sliders sometimes 'is' a minor irritant, but that is all it is.

As for those that do not move the silders at all: its not cool, its like having a really, really powerfull car and just doing the weekly shopping in it. a waste.

The sliders are quite intuitive once you spend some time thinking about how they work. They are relative motion sliders, not absolute, as you would see if you saved a game after a lot of fiddling with them, reloaded it, and the looked at the sliders again.

If you are having trouble with their not responding when you move them, be more careful to stay within the are of the operational bounding box of each slider, don't go wandering off to the top of bottom. I find the way Microskunk sliders work counterintuitive, because if you go out of their bounding box, you can slide all over the place, and then let go of your mouse and have them randomly either stay where they last were, or snap back to the position they were in before you started fiddling - now that makes no sense whatsoever.

If your sliders are jumping more than 1% at a time using the end arrows, it is because the percentages you have set on the other two are set to points where when one changes, the other has to also, thus making the slider you are adjusting alter by two points, so go make a slight change to one of the others first. At least, that's what it sounds like, as I have never seen this behaviour. Instead I get annoyed by having to click twice to see a one percent move, but I understand why it has to work that way: when you adjust one percentage up, it has to figure out how much to adjust the other two percentages down, and the fractional movement that 1% on one slider would have on the other two cannot be properly displayed on a scale with no places after the decimal point.

P.S.: Wade, if you are going to use big words like metaphor, you should learn how to spell them first. Metaphore is only a word in French.

Go mistoffeles! Wade - you got off lightly man....

I didn't think it was that hard.... it takes maybe, what.... 5 seconds to get them right, even if they do act a little quirky?

The usage of sliders is easy to figure out, even babies could do it. What's slightly annoying is that their still somewhat unresponsive to dragging, even after Stardock fixed that somewhat in one of the first patches.

The only thing that pisses me off about sliders is that they aren't unique to a save game. My slider settings in one game affect another, or when i start a game.