EASY IDEA: Pay for soldering bonus

Too easy to exploit. Turn up, invade, turn down. Rince, repeat as needed.

Okay.. what about:

You can increase the bonus only by +1 soldering a week?

exemple: you invest 0$ right now. You have 10b population. The max you can raise the military budget is +10bc/week.

the next week, you still want more, you raise it a +10bc more.. etc..

eventually, with constant increase, you reach +50 soldering, which cost you a big (relative) 500bc/week. The problem is, now you need more $, can you simply turn it down, flushing your military bugdet down the toilet? NO! You can only lower it by 1x "+1"/every week. So you would need 50 turns to actually lowers it to 0.

No flash-supertraining.. I guess we could also add that:

- The Pacifist Party can lower by 2x "+1" soldering bonus every turn, but can only increase theirs by 0,5/week
- The War party is the opposite. They can increase their soldering budget twice as fast as other parties, but lower theirs only half as quick.

Seems like it might be a useful option when gearing up for a war, provided the exploit mentioned above can be fixed.

Too easy to exploit. Turn up, invade, turn down. Rince, repeat as needed.

I believe it could be easy to work around and a nice feature. Apply it to some real life thinking... your military needs training and equipment, so you toss the finance department 1 million dollars. The results one week later is not going to be astronomical, but with time you will see your soldiers improved.

In game, you spend bucks per week, but the improvement comes slowly. Once you turn it off, the effect does not magically disappear but also diminishes over time.

I just think there should be an option for the defensive minded players like myself who prefer to build up the infrastructure over going to war. When you invade you have all kinds of options, but if you are the defender you have none. Not very realistic either, if we were to find out today that there is alien life out there and whoa, one of them is planning to invade Earth in six months, do you suppose the human race is just going to kick back status quo and wait?   

Too easy to exploit.

For offense, but if each planet had a slider wich increased its maintanence cost but then that xtra micro management plus having to program it and on top of that having the AI cpabale of handling it. Too small a feature for the extra work probably.

This would give the A.I on huge advantage posssibly, up its defense on border planets and pay nothing for non-border.

The reason humans fight frontal warfare, as the A.I. takes whatever opportunity it gets. what- what- what was that.... the A.I. snuck a transport past my fleet.... past 20 planets used planetary bombarment on a class 10 taking it to a class 6 in the core of my empire. That's it your butt is mine lord Kona and don't expect any vaseline.

Ok, I like it, but one thing. Make it so that if you turn up the military spending it lowers your peoples moral not as harsly as the tax rate but still affects it in some way

Also you could have military opions to maximise your military rating like:
- volentering + 10 soldiering, + 5 planet defence. tech needed - basic propaganda
- country pride + 5 soldiering. tech needed - advanced propaganda
- wanted conscription + 15 soldiering, - 5 moral. tech needed - expert properganda
- militia army + 15 soldiering, + 5 planet defence, - 5 moral. tech needed - ultra properganda
- wasteful conscription + 20 soldiering, - 10 moral, - 5% population. tech needed - ultimate propaganda

Do really people want that the rich get richer? A greater soldering bonus means that more people will survive the fight ...

You already pay for bonuses to boost your chances of successful invasion. That's what tidal disruption and mass drivers are for.

But except for some techs, there is no way I can increase the defensive capability of my planets.

And I never use Tidal Disruption or Mass driver, btw. If I can't conquer a planet without blowing it up, then I shouldn't.

And I absolutely REFUSE to allow planet-by-planet soldering training. It's empire-wide, period. If we didn't do that, we would be able to exploit the AI's weaknesses. Right now, the AI sits on huge amount of money he could spend on more soldering (since soldering techs doesn't seems to be that much of a priority for him). It would be more balancing for the AIs.

And as a final +, the MINOR AI would get incredibly insanely high soldering bonuses, since they have HUGE money and low population. They would be more of a prize to take than right now, don't you think?

But except for some techs, there is no way I can increase the defensive capability of my planets.

Hence the comments in another thread regarding more improved, realistic, and functional planetary defense systems. The only one available really doesn't seem too effective and could be improved upon tremendously, which may be and option for the expansion (doubtful) or maybe GC3. Alot of these posts seem to miss that this game is not tactical in it's nature. More emphasis is on economy/morale and basically alot of micromanagement. Soldiering bonuses, starbase features, etc, etc. We could all go on forever with "tactical" enhancements and upgrades but I doubt that we will ever see them.