The new colony negative penalty

Are you saying you don't upgrade your planets to begin with?!?!

Edit:

That said, if planets start at a negative infrastructure level, and automaticly upgrade to 0 for free, that'd work for me!

I usually only bothered to much later when resources were easier to get, military demands were often much more valuable, but that was in a finite economy. (and I would build up trade obviously)

Now I am building up the population upgrades... much to my annoyance. Frankly we need a civ manager now.

We don't, really. I always curb my colonization to make sure I can do a pop upgrade as soon as the planet is colonized. I think this method was mostly put in to curb the rapid Akkan/Planet sucker territory grabs..

I think the penalty should naturally go away as the population on the planet increases. On planets that support a high population by default, this penalty should disappear and the planet could even start making a profit without having to invest in planetary development. On planets that don't support a high population by default (like asteroids) then they wouldn't become profitable until you put in at least one planetary upgrade.

The other thing I thought of is to have the ability to abandon a colony to quickly get rid of any costs it may incur. Perhaps this ability is already there. I haven't played in about a week .

Alas, no such feature. It would also be highly useful to be able to "give" an ally a planet (say because its in "his" space...), but no such feature exists.

well, in order for population to grow you have to upgrade it, which in turn already eliminates the penalty. as for me, I am fine with the current system, although I can imagine it could get tiresome when you own a lot of planets. but then you dont colonise them all at the same time, so I don't see it as much of problem.

its to prevent too rapid expansion which is a good thing and it does it well imo.

Terrible? Where did you think the term 'booting' came from in reference to turning computers on?

Well it was a terrible thing to tell people suffering in the deppression. That the economic recession (of a massive scale and the first for the American People in relation to both banking and industrial surplus) could somehow be solved by people simply 'working harder' or 'keeping resolve' was kind of insulting to the masses of unemployed people.

It certainly wasn't what they wanted to hear, and a 'New Deal' was soon ushered in.



At any rate: I think its good to limit the super expansion, but over time this can be problematic. And Annatar- when we play games with about 60 planets, managing the population upgrades and such on say 20 of them, is a real pain in the but. I either need a screen where I can have a list of all planets, their upgrades, and the ability to que new upgrades all in the same place. OR I need some sort of automatic upgrade manager.

The screen would be easier, and could work Just like the research or diplomacy screen.

Not entirely. Once a planet is first colonized it isn't at max population; with or without a planetary upgrade. There are also research technologies which can increase population. I was thinking that as the population reached its max population without any planetary upgrades it would start to break even.

The system is good, I agree, in the sense that it puts a deterrent on rapid expansion. I also agree that it gets tiresome to have to micromanage your planets. I was trying to think of a way to solve both issues.

60 planets fo every player? wow, big games, but yes, at that scale present tools are insufficient. in some other thread I wanted something similar to your planet manager. basically a sins equivalent to a civ internal/ city manager.

No 20 planets for each is my example. (60 Planet map with say 3 players in the late game)

But you don't get all 20 planets at once and presumably you upgrade as you colonize. But, if you are missing upgrades, hovering over your total credits will give you a breakdown of how much each planet generates, and if a planet isn't fully upgraded to negate a penalty, it will show with a penalty so you know what to upgrade.

Yes I know the list isn't scrollable and too many planets can overrun it, but that's already been mentioned multiple times

Oh yes, please.

Yes Annatar and it should be mentioned again. Are you Opposed to us having extra and easier tools for the management?

Sure I may not get all 20 planets at once, but I may get 5 or 6 and I'm very busy doing other things like handling the conquest of the other 5 or 6. So yeah One Screen where I can do all of that buying at Once is very useful. And hovering over each and every planet to figure things out is time consuming too.

I will say this... it sure has changed since Beta 2 when people were screaming:

"I'm Bored, I don't have enough to do!" The Devs said that this would change, Man were they right!!   

No no, I'm not opposed to tools for management, within limits. Realistically, you're not going to have 20 planets at once with most of them not upgraded, so while it looks like a good argument on paper, practically it has a pretty low chance of happening. Just like you'll never have 5-6 unupgraded planets because that alone will suck all your income from the capital. For tracking down which few planets aren't fully upgraded, I was just pointing out you don't need a new system, just to tweak the existing list so you could scroll through it, or filter what it shows and what it doesn't

But Annatar... realistically I am having that happen right now in several Single Player games!

And I've lost several MP games, partially because I assumed the negative income went away for developing planets! Not all of us used the develop planet strategy, aside form fleet points and logistics later, I always favored more planets over developing them.

Now granted I don't mind the change, I just want a better tool for doing it. And realistically (again haha) big games will get like this for numerous reasons... not just population.

While you may upgrade population as you go (which is annoying too and would be easier with 1 measly screen that summarizes things) you don't do that for fleet supply or logistics do you? You can't always do so either due to resources.

The auto-placement builder is a godsend for larger games... but I need something similar for planetary upgrades too. Even a status report that lets me see the upgrades but not initiate new ones would help greatly. This isn't a Big major change either.

I suppose fixing the scroll list for income will help the population issue, but it wont do anything for logistics or fleet supply. Or hell even tactical slots.

its the whole - devs should be spending thier time on more critical things - with not long to go.

I agree with P5yy.

The current system does not require a significant amount of micromanagement IMHOP. I mean, when you have the money (which the upgrades aren't too terribly exspensive) it takes all of two clicks to upgrade the planet (one to click on the planet, one to click the upgrade). Even in the really large games I've played I normally don't have to deal with upgrading more than two or three planets at a time to get rid of the penalty (and by that point I normally have more money than I know how to spend so that isn't an issue). Bedsides, from a logic perspective, upgrading and terraforming a planet is a big exspensive project which only a government (aka the player) would be able to afford. I say keep the current system.

Okay well I'm betting 10 fun dollars that a screen summary of your colonies will be within the first patch, as I bet its one of the 'tons' of features we are supposedly missing from the game.

Back to on-topic.

I think most of us will be okay if colonies very slowly grow from negative to barely positive income.

If you either mouse over or click on (i can't remember which one) the amount of credits you currently have, it will show the planets and their income rates. The ones in red are the ones that you need to upgrade...

I realize that people are probably using this already and still wanting a new tool, but this is what has been working for me for the basic income upgrades.

I'd like to see the penalty increased a bit.

Really- okay well explain yourself, as your the first to say so lol

do you mean a higher penalty Period with no modifications?

Notably an Idea I had that would really make things different, would be limiting the # of planets you may control by a technology tree just like Caps. Now wouldn't that limit things! lol so wrong... not seriously suggesting that   

I wouldn't mind having a permanent, low drain on the dead asteroids. You're making an effort to make them viable for supporting your defences, so it makes sense to me that they should be a liability. As I mentioned somewhere, I also would like them to not be affected by the TEC technology that increases the logistics points, seeing as they are not supposed to be able to support any logistics, with 0 initial points and 0 available logistics upgrades barring this magical increase of 8 points.

Agreed on logistics for dead asteroids, but the permanent low drain doesn't make very much sense to me. The initial drain on colonies comes from the bare-bones infrastructure barely able to support any population.. but dead asteroids have no population and really no infrastructure. Already their only use is to create a defensive buffer without any logistics slots, if they had a permanent drain I imagine very few people would bother colonizing them.

Vasari might if it's in an advantageous position since phase gates are tactical, but a TEC player would really have no reason to except to slow an attack on their empire by a few minutes

They aren't Planet Suckers they are Space Whales Dammit! lol

Anyway, I like the negative colony penalty but I think it probably would eventually pull itself up by its "bootstraps".