IMHO, doing that actually goes beyond abuse. It'd be almost game-breaking. You could funnel the output of your entire core into a frontier world which cranks out a dread every turn. Ewwww... nasty. The only way to stop this would be to nobble to system so badly, we may as well be back at square one.

No sir... I don't like it.

~SDC~

The problem with per-planet sliders isn't so much the MM per se, it's the fact that the AI is intrinsically better at *doing* that sort of MM. Also, there are really two problems there... the first is optimising the output of a planet (which is best solved, IMHO, by having a few 'spending governors'), and what to do with production dumped into empty queue (which is best solved by turning it back into cash at a significantly reduced rate, which could be mitigated by tech advances).

Whatever the solution turns out to be, it ought to be completely automatic. Otherwise you've just shifted the problem from mechanics to interface.

~SDC~

I vote for excess production on a planet being funneled into whatever projects are being built. Basically, since every planet contributes to technology, unused production will always be split between military and technology, or social and technology.

Grifman

Suppose you could funnel enough cash back to the empire by not building in your core, such that you really could build a dreadnought on some frontier world. Is that so bad? So unrealistic? You mean, an interstellar empire with a whole bunch of heavily developed worlds couldn't assemble one or two ships offsite if it wanted to? Come on. It's not even an exploit. It's just realistic application of available resources. We do it all the time right here on planet earth.. factories in Ohio and Kentucky, etc build stuff to rebuild various countries we invade. Ahem.

Sure it's possible, but at a 1 to 10 rebate rate, it's not an exploit, it's just a nice side-effect of having a huge empire. However, at a 1 to 1 rebate rate, it'd be a whole different ballgame and *would*, IMHO, unbalance the game.

~SDC~

Yes, you could build it up so you could create a high level ship at a 'frontier' world every turn. Just like you could do so now if you bumped your spend rate way up high and put your military spending on high and had a highly profitable economy.

And, again, if you can build a high level ship on a frontier world, so can the AI, so it's not as big an "advantage" as you might think. It would also have the DISadvantage that you couldn't be building constructors in your core worlds to set up starbases in sectors closer to the enemy, while the sectors closer concentrate on building the actual warships.
So it'd be a balance - do you build ships on every planet and get a greater number, and variety, of ships every turn OR do you funnel as much of your resources as necessary to frontier worlds and build one or two very large ships every turn, but miss out on the support/continued expansion infrastructure?

~SDC~

FWIW, in my suggestion, when I mentioned "Trade Goods" as an item that would allow the funnelling of produciton to another area had nothing to do with MOO3, or whatever other game used this term. In the woprld of GalCiv, Trade Goods are things you can build that give you certain bonuses. You can also trade them to other empires. I would like to reiterate my feelings that the addition of additional Goods that give you the option to convert wasted production to other areas would solve this issue while keeping within the confines of the current game. It would use EXISTING tactics and strategies in a new way. I see this as the best approach to take when adding/changing game features.

-Dave

~SDC~

If you're buying one dread per turn, you need to be making about $7000 per turn, and in *that* case the only real question is "why hasn't everyone already surrendered?" AFAICT, direct-buying (or even leasing) seems to be only for emergencies.

However, the *resource* cost for a dread is only 380... that's only 5 core planets churning out a poxy 76 shields per turn. Normally, that production is diluted by the spatial separation of the sources, but being able to concentrate even a small percentage of your production into a single colony could be highly abusable even without punishing transfer penalties.

In either case, obviously a world should not be able to produce at more than 100% capacity. In which case you're still left with the question of where the surplus goes if your spending is *already* at 100%. Production could end up bouncing around and doing all sorts of wierd things, which could end up making it somewhat intractable.

Automically transferring (militarysocial)->tech raises the possibility of tech-progress going berzerk in the late game, and is probably functionally equivalent to spending governors (minus the micro-management).

The only two options which seem guaranteed to retain stability and balance are a cash-back system (at some finely-tuned reduced rate), or leaving things as is and chalking the loss up to administrative inefficiency

Perhaps now is the time for Brad to chime in and give us a quick run-down of whether or not he sees this as a something in need of fixing, what (if any) solutions were tried during the beta phase, and what (if any) solutions are being considered by the dev-team now...

~SDC~

I think the fact that this topic has been stickied shows that even if 'they' don't agree it's something that needs fixing, they do agree it's something that needs thrashing out to decide if it's really better to just leave it as is.

~SDC~

Cataleptic, please read what I said. I'm talking about shifting the money, not the production itself. Which means that we still can't finance more production than is available. I don't know about you, but my funding varies between 50% and 100% throughout the game. Giving up all the production queues but one to get at most twice the output just isn't expliotable to any usable degree.

If only one bug is to be fixed in the next month MAKE SURE ITS THIS ONE.

If only one bug is to be fixed in the next month MAKE SURE ITS THIS ONE.

I don't want unused prod to be automatically redirected to other planets, it'll make the system much more opaque.
I'd really like Planet level Sliders, with an option to readjust them at "empire" levels (for example each planet can have a flag "Use empire slider"/"Use local slider" , and also a Global readjustement option putting all flags to "Empire").

Else just refund unused production in cash, that's the more logical. So I can have "cash cow planets" producing nothing but cash

I was leaving a lot of my planet's queues empty, assuming what was saved there would be redistributed!

I can see you don't want to allow a player to shutdown production on all planets to get one planet really moving, but wouldn't the maximum usable production on a planet be limited by it's population and some other variables anyway?

I think option (B) is about the best, and certainly better than having the production just disappear.

~SDC~

It's not a bug, as such, it's something that doesn't work how a lot of us think it should work, that's all. Even if we can't all agree on a method of 'fixing' it.

~SDC~

How about creating a new type de construction :

Social project : Total war mobilisation, which make workers on social projet works in fact on the military one. (With a penalty)

Same thing in the reverse.

Fabrice.

I would go for the F option (each planet with its own slider), maybe linked to the governor.

Because, I am really dissapointed during warfare to have to put the war slider very high so my planets near frontiers can quickly build defense / attack ships to face the opponent, and in the meanwhile see my planets far from these events being developped slowly from a social point of view (while they need it) and wasting ressources either because they have nothing from a military point of view to do or because I told them to build ships to support planets where the conflict is taking place, while in fact those ships will barely reach the fighting place before the conflict has ended ...

~SDC~

I think splitting the unused portion for whichever project(s) is(are) not being used amongst that systems other project/research alotment sounds reasonable. That way the money stays in the system, but still gets used in proportion to the amount of money that would be afforded that system. Perhaps there should be a slight reduction in its value since it has to be redirected.

~SDC~

Been thinking about this:

1) It's not broken - it's just not like other similar games I've played. Keeping a construction queue empty is now not a way to preserve scant resources. Galciv wants those queues full and producing the whole time. With this knowledge the question becomes how can you turn what you build into cash.

2) Think real life. If a government department allocates x million for road building and that money is not spent then next years (next turns) grant would be reduced, and any excess funds clawed back in one way or another. Therefore the grant tends to get spent on spurious nonsense road projects towards the end of the financial year to ensure continuity of funding. On this kind of model the game behaviour is OK. The local planet ship builders are spending the funds towards the financial year end on repainting their space docks and rebuilding their launch pads.

3) Perhaps a solution to the problem quoted is to simply let the planet keep the first turn of unused grant in its "bank" but not give anything in subsequent years if the bank is full of unspent funds.

4) As an aside - Its a little annoying to to be 50 or 60 turns into producing a galactic wonder only to be beaten to completion by a few turns with no warnings. Am I right in thinking all that production is just lost. In "real life" there would be salvageable components - the whole partly constructed edifice wouldn't be burnt to the ground. Actually unique galactic wonders do not make a lot of sense.(?)



~SDC~

Guys, I think we should more refer to a "reality", I think that the percentages sliders not only concern money but also the workforce.

So what happens if your "military" workers don't have anything to do ?

You can hardly imagine transferring them from one system to another (even between planets of the same system) without losing some time which would depend on the improvements already available and so on...

Even if the game allows you to set global sliders for your empire without any loss in time or productivity (which is obviously a good solution), i can hardly imagine a ship-builder becoming a scientific or a terraformer from one month to another...

So what are doing my men when i don't want them to build any alien-blasting device ???

The answer is NOTHING and they are so happy to do nothing and keeping the same status of life that their morale increases ! yeepee ! and that would also work when you have no social project !

Ok some may object that drengins would definitely prefer designing their own skin-smoothing tool but we are definitely lazy humans ...

So something like if X% is set for military projects, planet morale would increase by X/2 or X/3 or X/4 % (X/3 seems relatively ok) ... but we could imagine that for an EVIL civ, the morale would get down by the same percentage ?

What do you think of this one ?

Sorry if this obvious question has been asked:

Why do your spending sliders let you allocate more b.c.'s to a category than you have capacity to use in the first place? After all, does not your global spending automatically roll extra funds back to you when you don't have enough factories, etc., to use the funds?

Military Social Research sliders should simply work the same way...

Then perhaps you could have a setting that automatically maxes given categories as your capacity to absorb the funding increases...

Actually, I guess what I'm saying would work a little differently.

Your pecentage allotment would be limited to the fund about it could absorb. Where the global funding can be set to 100% with unused fund returned, this would stop your % on a slider at its maximum absorbtion amount, be that 35% or 99%, etc.

Come to think of it, global spending slider should consider this as well since it's somewhat confusing the first few games to have a slider at 100% but only 100% - X actually being used.

The more I play the game, the less I'm worrying about how we fix this, as long as we do. I'm spending more and more of my time with the sliders at 100%, so just getting the waste back would be nice.

I strongly disagree with anything that has to be done on a planetary level, but I'll live with it.

As to the comment that it's unrealistic to divert your military workers to social projects, that happens anyway every time you adjust the sliders, and I adjust the sliders more the way the game is than I would if the (B) solution were implemented, because there aren't that many social projects I want, especially since most of the halfway reasonable ones come with maintenance fees that can add up across a typical empire. I tend to build social projects in spurts empire-wide, and drop the social slider to 0% when done.

LOL OK, I've found a solution. In fact, it kills two birds with the same stone. Literally kills. LOL

I set my military spending between 10-15% and let the rest be equally split between social and research. All planets not needing to build another type of ship build colony ships. I just keep these parked in orbit.

When I need a new planet colonized, I toss 100M into a colony ship and send it on its way. WARNING: If you toss in a % of your planet's population on a colony ship, you'll get a red frowning face on the new planet instantly. 100M seems to be the ideal colony ship population.

Ever so often, I check the morale levels on planets. If any are close to 50, I simply dump a quarter of their population onto a "colony" ship and then explode (a.k.a. disband) that "colony" ship in orbit. Next turn, morale on that planet is back up to at least 66.

As for producing needed ships, I simply don't spend all taxes and thus have a surplus. This enables me to buy such needed ships about when I need them. Basically, the government expenditure bar BECOMES my military bar. Give it a try. It's real easy to start viewing it that way once you start taking this approach. And when you don't need a military ship, you simply increase government expenditure take and it fires up your social and research production.

Another nice thing about this strategy is that small planets don't build any colony ships. Check their shields. Nothing. By setting military spending so low, the game doesn't give small planets any shields. Essentially, you've just been able to set military spending on that low population planet to 0%.

Still another nice about this strategy is that the colony ships are slowly built and if you work the military % bar (the real one this time) properly, you'll have a "colony" ship ready just shortly before you need it to take care of overpopulation.

And yet still another nice aspect of this strategy is that you'll be cranking out new tech developments so fast that your social build queues will never be empty ... even on your most productive planets!

Now is the above a good idea? HELL NO! It is a stupid EVIL idea. We're talking about mass slaughter afterall ... and, even more stupidly, it doesn't affect your good-neutral-evil status. However, it does help deal with two major problems in this game: wasted resources and overpopulation/morale. I suggest it only as a temporary solution until the game designers fix these two problems.

I am new here . .And read most but not all of the 4 pages of posts so please forgive me if I am repeating something already said (just think if me as reinforcing it if so )

Any way there seems to be a few ways to go at this . .
1) Simply do not allocate any money from the global slider to any planet with no projects (this has been said before but I want to clarify). The global military slider 0-100% only includes producing planets . so 100% would be the max the military producing planets can use the non military producing planets are just not in the equation. (This would be the easiest fix, and would not allow a player to funnel resources to a single planet 100% is 100%)

2) Another way would seem to be like other have said to utilize the resources in a alternate way. . . simply funneling, reallocating to the Social queue etc . . I am not too fond of these ways but some have marret.

3) *A interesting way to handle it would be to consider the military producing planets not actively on a project to be prefabing generic military parts (resources) to be utilized elsewhere. This could either be abstracted to become a pool of resources that any planet could use (with a shipping cost) or possible a more up front way . . These “military resources” or “generic prefabs” could be really shipped from planet to planet using the same kind of small ships used for trade. This would have a few good benefits for game play. First the AI would pick and distribute and send the resource trade ships to planets in need of more production (in the middle of a project) Some formula could work out the need vs the distance (empire trade routs). The transport in this way would take time for the resources to move from system to system. . this could cause “realistic” problems with quickly changing (starting and stopping production). By the time the Ship reaches its destination the planet might be not building. So the resources would have to be unpacked and mixed with an out going ship from that planet (this is not a problem but an interesting side effect of opening and closing a production line). Also these ships could get prayed upon in rout. A Well defended empire would also have great integration and shipping of resources, if these get attacked then resources get lost and production slows to the strictly in system/planet level. So, it would be a great boon but also easy pray . . . nice and strategic! (it would also make the game more alive with internal trade and external trade ships busily flying around . . Also this would be a great way to damage production of another empire. .don’t attack their war ships but there trade and supply ships first.
4) Another way would be using the production points/parts (again generic military and civilian parts) in to fully useable and trade able resources. You can trade surplus generic military parts for another empires generic civilian parts. Also you could stock pile and use these parts later for your self. Some interesting modifications could be done here to stop excessiveness. Like Shipping costs, shelf life etc . . . this could be a great buffer for poor times but it may degrade over time and is more expensive (storage and shipping inefficiencies). . . So in the end with the right balancing a surplus could be a money making deal (trade) and a buffer for bad times but the player must also weigh the cost and the possible diminishing returns.

Just some ideas . . As you see I would like the fix to be one more strategic factor of the game rather then a quick number fix.