Unused money to garbage: why?

I could take the pessimistic approach: it was easier to code waste than to recycle the money. But I don't actually remember if I read any justification from on high as to why the money just vanishes into a pit. Time for the more experienced forum dwellers to fill the knowledge gap here.

My question is, lets say I put 100 percent of my income into 'social', but only one out of my ten colonies is actually making a building. Does that mean 100 percent of my income is going into the construction of that building -and thus it would be built relatively fast- or does it mean that 90 percent of my income is being wasted?

Yes, 90% is being wasted. You'll notice that even if a planet is building nothing, its screen will still show output in the ratios you set--output that does absolutely jack squat.

OMFG! THATS *EVIL*! I'LL NEVER STOP BUILDING AGAIN!

Then again I suppose thats one way of preventing players from stopping production on all but one planet, then making that planet build a trade good and jacking up the 'social' resource bar.

On the other hand, Sephlock, it's better to waste money by not building something than it is to waste money building something that you don't need, that has a maintenance cost associated with it.

Sephlock -- It still wouldn't matter that much, since planets do have limited production capacities, so unless that world was incredibly built-up with insane PQ and numerous starbases, it wouldn't use that much of the overall empire budget (at least for larger maps). OTOH, the global treasury does act as a universal super-construction method if you quick-buy.

I believe the rationale, such as it is, was this method made things simpler, both to code, to write the AI for, and to play.

It bothers some people because it seems unintuitive, but it has no effect in terms of gameplay.

I've read that it's because its easier to make the AI competitive with the current, simpler system.

Personally I would MUCH prefer each governor to have its own set of sliders--that would mean that you could actually have meaningful differences and make specialized planets for research, ships, etc. But I've given up hope that this will be implemented.

Well if money could automatically be injected into research/bank, it would be perfect with me...

But I know nothing about coding so I can't say if the time it costs is worth. In an expansion perhaps? :notsure:

Coding recycling the money is trivial, coding the AI to weigh whether to build something versus getting "free" money is the difficulty. Weight it one way and the AI is still behaving the way it does now - always building something but now being really disadvantaged towards the human who's rolling in money - or an AI who's chasing the money to exclusion of building needed projects.

The way it is now, the human is always at an advantage but not a remarkable one; introducing money recycling could upset that balance by a huge magnitude.

Then it should imperatively be known by players!! It should be written somewhere, anything!


Besides, wouldn't the computer deal correctly with it if the money was simply trnsfered to reserach? In such a case, it simply brings a higher % in research, which the computer already deals with. But I guess someone already thaught to it so I'm wrong?

For the same reason it does not deal with it correctly already.

Currently, the computer, as best I can tell, never chooses to build 'nothing' unless it's economy is completely in the toilet. This is why you find such great wastes of money as VR centers on long held AI worlds when you conquer them.

You already have an advantage over the computer because you can accurately choose when it is actually to your benefit to 'waste' the money going into the social queue because although that money does not contribute to anything, it's not causing further drains on your econ by building things you don't need but still have maintenance costs.

It's a kludged system, admittedly, but it's balanced out by the fact that the AI is superior in terms of futzing with its sliders turn by turn to maximize its econ so currently your advantage is only a small one.

But, actually change that 'wate' from a null process to a gain one and the AI *must* be changed to know when building nothing is better than building something and, frankly, I don't see that it's worth it.

Another thing that would help the AI out is if every social improvement was actually worth building.

Based on interviews with Brad, it seems that the amount of schmutz in the social queue was intentional: punish the gotta build one of everything players.

Unfortunately, it seems to have backfired in that the only entities building a lot of this crap are the newbies and the AI even on the higher difficulty levels. Reasonably intelligent humans figure out that Infonet, Propaganda Centers and VR Centers are just code for 'money pits' but the AI never does.

Perhaps these things could be made so they would really have some good effect, even if they would be worth mostly in certain situations. For exemple, propaganda is ALWAYS useful for other things than against an enemy. Like to make bad situations look better or making so that certain things are not known (so less problems with Fundamentalists, the League...). More morale... (?)
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Yep, you should find yourself destroying a whole bunch of social projects when taking over some AI planets. Lots of research buildings, moral, buildings are just junk because their upkeep costs is so high.

Others you might as well keep because although they were really expensive have low enough upkeep to justify their existence.

I think I find myself destroying cheaper buildings with same or higher upkeep costs when I find them.

Entertainment Network when I find Harmony Generators??
quite a few other social projects have identical characteristics.

Fusion Power Plants on a low PQ planet if both Antimatter and Manufactering Centers are present.

After I finishing building social projects, I end up stopping constructing Fusion Power Plants or Manufacturing Centers and Antimatter Plants for that matter.

It's pointless if you consider it. No really need to hurry the production and spend more money if in the end you are just going to waste that production by building nothing.

For the AI it doesn't matter that it is actually building the project, but keeping it. Maybe the AI can build it and then immediately destroy it. :notsure:

Propaganda: It should raise your moral regardless. Less effect than a tax of the same amount, suggested for only a small fraction of planets. Might also increase cultural resist, but I can't confirm this.

I tend to discourage propaganda except in very limited emergency cases. My approach is to identify who is likely the one who is doing the destab and destab them instead. Then they will divert money from destab and into reinforcing their own morale and military to counteract it. Whether they build expensive warships or expensive morale boosting projects, I do not care. It costs them money either way. Of course, this relies on having a stronger economy than the suspected alien. If they are stronger, then a nice limited war to take a planet or two away from them might be in order to reassert a dominant position.

Side topic on propaganda

Personally, I have not used propaganda in my games because I find them to be too much micromanagement. I have problems remembering which planets have them on and would not remember to remove them when unneeded.

It would be great if propaganda could be a empire-wide setting where I could set a condition to apply propaganda to all systems with morale in their 90s to bump them up to 100%. I do spend time adjusting the tax rate in the early game to ensure that most if not planets are at 100%.

One day this will be fixed, until then there's a terrible pain inside my head whenever I play this game

I posted some ideas to fix this without adding more sliders a while ago - my first post about the governors is probably too complicated, but check out post number 9.

http://www.galciv.com/forum.asp?BID=GF&id=66132

(and just to repeat - it DOESN'T need extra sliders, those values at the end are calculated for you by the computer.)


re:propoganda - the same idea is easy to put in for propoganda spending if we had an empire-wide propoganda fund. Splitting money evenly on the lowest planets isn't enough, though.
If there's a tiny planet and a huge planet with 40 morale and propoganda money is split evenly, the tiny planet needs a lot less, it's morale could go to 60 while the huge planet only goes up 1 or 2 points. The ideal outcome would be to bring them both to, say, 43.


How's this propoganda algorithm?


start:
if propoganda_cash = 0, or all planets at 100% morale, quit

else // there's still work to do

find the lowest and second-lowest morale levels
(e.g. if your planets are at 40, 40, 50, 50, 50, 60, 60, then the lowest if 40, second is 50)


total_needed = total amount of money to bring ALL lowest-level planets to the second-lowest level (bring all 40-morale planets to 50)


if there's enough propoganda_cash for total_needed, spend it on that, and go back to the start to spend the change (if any)

else // we don't have enough money to bring them all up, so
bring them up as much as we can

for each planet {
amount_planet_needs = amount needed to bring this planet up to
the next morale level

available_fraction = amount_planet_needs / total_needed

spend (available_fraction * propoganda_cash) on this planet
}

after this last allocation, there must be no propoganda cash left, so quit



Example: 1 tiny planet (1 billion people) at 10 morale,
1 huge planet (9 billion people) at 20 morale,
all others at 100 morale.
1bc will bring the morale of 1 billion people up 1 percent. (I just made this last number up, but you get the idea. Please don't flame me for it )
The starting propoganda fund is 60bc.

cash = 60bc
lowest = 10, second = 20
needed money = 1 billion people on tiny * 10 points = 10bc
Do we have this much? Yes -> spend it, go back to the top

cash = 50bc
lowest = 20, second = 100
needed money = 10 billion people (both planets) * 80 points = 800 bc
Do we have this much? No ->

tiny planet: amount needed = 1 bill people * 80 = 80
available_fraction = 80/800 = 1/10
spend 1/10 of 50bc (5bc) on this planet -> morale goes to 25.

huge planet: amount needed = 9 bill * 80 = 720
available fraction = 720/800 = 9/10
spend 9/10 of 50bc (45bc) on this planet -> morale goes to 25.

no cash left -> quit.


I worked out the splits by the money needed, since the devs might base the costs on more variables than just population. If they do, then my 1bill/ 1bc/ 1morale assumption is out the window, but they must have SOME fixed method for working out the gains you get. As long as it's linear, this'll work.

On a gameplay note, I don't have a problem with propoganda being much more expensive than raising morale with buildings, since using this slider to run morale is like sub-contracting out the secret police.


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Yes anything without adding more sliders would be great! On a side node putting the propaganda slider on the planet screen instead of details would help a bunch

Yes, I second the propanganda slider suggestion. It's hardly used by me because I'm forgetful.

I'd still like to hear some more ideas on exactly how this stuff should be done - the way I figure it, if we put together a fully worked-out algorithm here, people look about it, and it does what everyone wants, the devs are more likely to put it in.

Well, it's more likely than if we sit around saying "i don't like this! fix it! make it, um, BETTER!"
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