Wanted: Best solution for "wasted" resources issue (Slider allocations to non "active" projects"

Hmm, if indeed the spending is lost (I asked about this in another thread), (B) sounds like the best fix (and yes, this does need fixing!)

If they went with (B), bonuses specific to that type of project shouldn't be transfered obviously.

I don't particularly mind if the *money* that would've been spend on military gets transfered to social/tech in equal amounts.

It definitely shouldn't be cash back or stored. I think that would be possibly unbalancing. Also, I'm very wary of creating more sets of sliders. I'm really digging the elegant simplicity of the game mechanics and its interface.

An off your subject rant... obviously there are a lot of people of people who bought GalCiv after being disgruntled with MOO3. I'm one of them.

Anyways, I've noticed a lot of suggestions that seem to be an attempt to... well... "Orionize" GalCiv. More micromanagement, ship designing, tactical combat, multiplayer, individual planetary sliders, planet classes, play as other races, race specific planet quality, etc, etc.

Which all detracts from the main design philosophy, IMHO. They're really completely different games. Same genre but the underlying structure is vastly different. MOO3 tried to have an incredibly detailed empire and simplifying the micromanagement by having it all managed by AIs that you then managed. (Which was unfortunately extremely difficult to do).

Galciv simplifies micromanagement by simply having very little to micromanage. The game design is simple and not that complex so that you can focus on larger strategic decisions.

Both approaches are fine (when done properly) but they're incompatible.

For some reason I have this image of a Hollywood director observing GalCiv's performance and saying "That was great! That was perfect! Absolutely astounding! Now do it just like that again wearing this pink tutu and wig."

I do not want more sliders. I do not want more micromanagement. But I do want unused spending to go somewhere. Simply disappearing is ridiculous.

Spending for planets with an empty military queue should be redistributed to either 1) the non-empty military queues on other planets, or 2) the social queue and research production on the same planet.

It's fine if it's redistributed with a penalty, say a 20% loss, but the bottom line is: HAVING AN EMPTY QUEUE SHOULD NOT RESULT IN A 100% LOSS.

This is driving me crazy. If I have 10 planets, and I need to produce 4 ships asap, turning up military spending to get those 4 ships produced results in throwing away a ton of production on the extra six planets. I am forced to either produce ships I don't need on those 6 planets or leave the queues empty and totally lose the production. I don't understand how this adds to gameplay.

(H) Distribute the money to other planets that *DO* have something in the social/military queue as appropriate, and if it maxes out every planet's queue capacity, don't spend it. They say that there is no corruption in this game, but they're wrong. Our planetary govenors are pocketting the taxpayer's money if they don't have something to spend it on.

Definitely don't bank it, not even at a depreciated rate, that would screw up wonder/trade goods races.As it stands, there's no reason not to have something in the military queue, and the only reason not to have something in the social queue is if you're out of things that don't have a maintenance cost.

BTW, while I'm not opposed to sliders on a per-govenor basis, I am opposed to sliders on a per-planet basis. Imagine you're suddenly having to cut your budget due to an economic slump. Easy now, almost as easy if you have to hit the govenor screens and drop them all. Annoying if you have to hit every individual planet.

The only use I see for planetary sliders is to max out certain projects, so you can leave most of your planets evenly split, but your one planet working on the Galactic Exchange is split 100% social.

Then again, we have to think of what impact this will have on the AI. Extra sliders mean either a good bit of recoding, or the human can do something the AI won't.

Personally, I like the way it worked on GC/OS2 best. There, if a planet was not building something in either or both of its production queues, the unused resources were spread among the other planets.

~SDC~

Now that that's done, I'll address each of the proposed ideas in order:

(A) Dislike it. punishes me for not building something, and makes the planetary govenors look corrupt.

(B) Better, but not very realistic if the money is getting budgeted at the empire level. The Secretary of the Interior, given a budget of X bc, isn't going to hand over Y BC to the Secretary of Defense/Science just because he doesn't have anything to spend money on on planet Z, unless there's nothing else he can spend it on.

(C) Same problem as (B).

(D) Game balance issues, I suspect.

(E) A military cash-back project? We're hiring out our marines as muscle to the Drengin, I see

(F) Too much micromanagement, and the AI would have to be altered to take advantage of it.

(G) Same problems as (F), but not to the same degree.

(H) Of course I like it, I wouldn't have suggested it otherwise. It feels like the way a "real" "Federal" system works, where the higher level government sets out its budget, allocates it, then spends the money based on its needs rather than socializing the subordinate levels of government.

And, one other suggestion,

(I) Just don't spend it. Put the money back into the imperial coffers, maybe after a little graft has taken its toll. Probably the easiest to implement, and has an effect much like (H), but I still prefer (H) because it means that I don't have to micromanage my sliders to keep my budget balanced in the range I want it to be in.

Doh! I didn't even read option (G) close enough until PopupTarget's post. PER GOVERNOR ECONOMIC SLIDERS, for taxes and spending, it's a fantastic idea. I hope they do it. Some of us micromanagement freaks need more control! (and less caffeine)

Now that I'm done furiously typing and can slow down to read what others have been typing at the same time, I see that what I mean with (H) is the same as Augusten's option 1 and what Lucky Jack says was done with the OS2 version of GalCiv.

This is a good topic, I've made it a sticky.

Oh, and FFAristocrat, I agree that we don't want to make this game MoO 3.5. There's a happy medium somewhere, and I suspect it's closer to GalCiv than MoO 3. I'd like to see some more complicated things in GalCiv, but not necessarly all of MoO's features.

I'd really like to see MoO3 with a cleaner UI and a GalCiv-quality AI, but it would still be a different game. I can't see playing a game of MoO 3 in less than a week's worth of free time, but I'll probably be able to fit in 2-3 GalCiv games in the same amount of time, and I *LIKE* that. Every time I get up from MoO3 for more than 1-0-15 minutes, when I sit back down I have to go over things to figure out where I left off because I'm always in the middle of something. GalCiv just flows quicker.

Augusten, yes, I'd like to see per govenor sliders, I just don't know how doable it is. I don't want it if the AI can't take advantage of it, and by that, I mean use it effectively. I'd still like to add the caviat that if bc aren't used for production then the bc should go back into the treasury. It would drive me batty treaking the sliders trying to find the sweet spot where I'm not spending too much on my social or military queues.

E) kinda...

i think you should be refunded the cost of the production being wasted minus a small penalty. any "free" production should go to waste. this would be a nice micromanagement free approach.

cheers

h

I like (G) the most... it's managable, intuitive and has low potential for completely messing the game's finely tuned design

Pooling for later could also work if there was a cap (say pop/50 units) to the amount you could store, but it's a bit more arbitrary.

The cashback and tech dumping are bad ideas, IMHO, as both of them could completely blow-out the game's current mechanics (and therefore, presumably, the AIs)... unless the rebate rate was 1 to 10 or something. Even then, it could have some pretty big impact on gameplay.


~SDC~

More micromanagement (MiM) **won't hurt you** if the same MiM function can be controlled with a MaM function. That way, you keep both styles of players happy.

And even if there isn't a MaM function to control it, or even if there is:

As for the excess resources, it is appropriate that ALL resources generated by your empire should be *utilized* by your empire. They should go to an empire wide bank account that can be distributed to your other worlds' agendas as your strategy may deem fitting or needful.

So how do ya'll know there being wasted anyways?

Wow... good discussion. I'd like to point out that several of the ideas are not exclusive.

My preference would now be to "roll" type X (military or social) unused production to other planets producing type X projects (possibly with a roll over to other projects if no type X projects exist empire wide). The way I see it "govenor based sliders" would *also* be a great secondary addition, but dosen't really address the primary issue - and as a "primary" solution would incur much more micromanagement.

~SDC~

(B) Would be my choice. Assuming (B) means that if you have 2 planets building ships, 2 planets with empty military queues, then instead of the money being divided 4 ways, with half of it going to waste, it would instead be divided 2 ways, with no wastage.
It seems wrong, to me, that "the government" wouldn't be able to work out such simple economics and maths and instead choose to just throw money at planets, whether they're using it or not.


As for a (H) idea:
Offer a couple of other choices, that would have to be researched perhaps, that would allow you to divert the funds into things like increasing morale for the planet? Call it "Free Lunch" or something, offering your citizens a months worth of free food at their place of employment.


Great topic Nomikos, summed everything up nicely.

~SDC~

Foodcraver Jackson: We know because on a planet without any buildings that is not building any military or social products, the spending is exactly equal to the production points not being use.
This is quite annoying because it means that you cannot use a planet just to pay taxes because a lot of taxes are being wasted on building thin air.

(I) I think it would already be much better if no money is spent on not building stuff. This way it's much easier to balance your books for the entire empire.


(A) Please don't!
(B) I like this idea. The cross platform penalty doesn't even have to be very large. It just means a virtual automatic adjustment of the 'spending slider' on a per-planet basis. This does mean that specific bonusses to a queue are lost right?
(C) Prodcution into tech? If only things were so easy But really, as far as the game in concerned it is much the same as (B)
(D) This is more or less the same as just not spending the money on an unused queue. After all you cannot produce more than 100% what your facturies support and just setting your spending at 100% does that.
(E) For a military cash back project you are essentially building ships and selling them to someone else. You can already do this in a way that the ships actually mean something (you can make big bucks by selling your Battleships to the enemy) so I don't think it should be made abstract like in Civ, where production x factor=$$

For social cash-back there could be such a product. After all your factories can build nice homes, or cars or whatever for your people right? (this could just be a queue item as in Civ3)
(F) I'd like such power but I would get really bored with the MiM, so I vote against
(G) Nice idea , which I would like to see combined with
(H) This is quite a fun idea, but indeed possibly unbalancing. I like the idea where each planet stands on it's own more or less, only linked through the empirial coffers.
(I) My favorite really.

~SDC~

Hi Folks

I'd prefer (B) or the Cash Back Project.

(B) is "something like" (F) and (G), but I suppose it's easier to adapt the AI to it (maybe I'm wrong with that :)). If you want to micromanage a particular planet so that it builds it's battleship faster, just don't build a social project. I think that one is a fine one.

Cash Back Project on the other hand, has many opportunities for further implementions, e.g. you could enhance the social cash back project "furniture" with TV (+5%) as soon as you have the appropropriate technology. So it would be interesting, but it would also be a much bigger task.

Lol.. bread & circuses is it?

I like option G, but then I'm biased seeing I originally suggested it. Grin.

Shipping points to other planets is bad since you can set things to not produce anything of a type, so you could set it up so all your resources get funnelled back to Earth to make wonders or battleships instantly.
Similar problem with putting the money in the bank.
It throws out the _planetary_ balance by doing any of those things.

The reason I suggested sliders per Governor was because I was _already_ having a Governor for good planets and a governor for poor planets that need terraforming, and the ones that need terraforming _really_ need to put all their points into social to get anywhere, otherwise I was having the situation where I'd crank up military for a war and my bad planets would end up with 0 points in social and wouldn't really help building ships anyway, what I _wanted_ to do was to have them focus on social stuff still and have a few other planets focus on the shipbuilding for the war.

Honestly Governors aren't massively useful at the moment since you generally have to direct your strategy on a empire level anyway, and there aren't too many reasons to have classes of planets with different build queues, but if you could change resource allocation as well the governors would be _very_ useful.
The easiest way to implement from a UI perspective is to put a little dropdown list above the sliders (only the breakup slider, by the way, tax and government spending should stay on an empire wide level, you already have propoganda to counteract excessive tax on a per planet basis) that has the governor names on it.
Very little change involved, except it breaks the clarity of purpose that havign a specific "governor" page gives, so it should go there eventually.

You _really_ don't want to allow money transfer between planets or the AI will hammer us with massive ships very very quickly. Also since the AI can micromanage numbers better than most of us maintaining restrictions on the number of breakups is important.

Grin. Actually... You could have the Option only become available with a certain level of government or management research. By default it stays as is, but if you get a particular research option you could modify things on a per governor basis.
If you did that you could have "advanced taxation" that made the tax slider governor based, etc, etc. Have the governors have different types of power depending on research options.


~SDC~

Convert a part into hard cold cash on a monthly basis ? Or maybe some 'devidend' on taxes.. would raise moral on the planet ? Could be used to pay off payments on other planets (like when you buy a ship from Microtif - or something -)

It does seem silly that on a new planet which needs alot of social programs, thatit cannot funnel it's over-production into what it needs. Would it really be building a battleship on a ceta-alpha-3 type planet? Think it would be putting it all into planetary improvements....

ThunderFoot, I'm not talking about shipping production points around. The production points would go unused, the money used to finance the production points winds up financing otherwise-unused production points on other planets.

Mythor, I think you misunderstood me. As I understand it, (B) just redistributes the money to the same planet. What I proposed (H) to be was to ship the money that finances production (not the production) to another planet that needs money for that category of production This wouldn't help in the case of production already being fully financed throughout the empire, which is why I mentioned the condition that if after all production of that type is financed, any remaining money should be returned to the imperial coffers.

I don't see how this would be unbalancing since it's the money being moved around, not the production points. Yes, lumping all of your production into a single project would be unbalancing, no two ways about it. The AI might have to be tweaked to not bother building anything it doesn't actually need, but other than that, I don't see this as a game balance issue.

Every game I quickly reach the point where I have a handfull of built-up planets where I don't want to build more social projects because my ecomny can't afford the extra maintenance costs yet, while at the same time I have a handfull of planets that have just been setting and still need basic social structures (i.e. Entertainment Network).

This situation remains true for much of the game, so much of game my social queues sit empty spilling their spending into the void of space. I find much of my game time is spent playing the game is micro-managing the military/social/research sliders and juggling projects to keep the empty queue cash loss at a minimum

GOVERNORS ARE THE ANSWER. I'd like to see option (G) expanded so that Governors not only have military/social/research sliders, but also a tax slider. These four sliders would be optional, that is you could turn them on and let their setting override the global slider settings for any planet using that governer, or leave them off letting the global sliders hold sway but still use the queue abilities of that governer.