Build Que Question

As you get towards the end of the game, it is definately possible to end up with planets that are not building any social improvements. At that point, you might want to consider setting the social slider to about 10%. It is not so much 'wasting resources' as it is 'not building things you don't need'. Social improvements cost money in maintenance, if your morale is already over 80%, you probably don't need the added cost of building a Harmony Generator on a planet.

On the military side, make sure you are always building a ship, if unsure what to build, build a constructor. Worst case you can always build trade enhancing starbases. Another possibility is to build freightors - they make excellent gifts.

Oops - forgot the shameless plug: Feel free to join the Republic of Aldar.
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Yes. If you are building no social improvements then you are not increasing the financial burden of maintenance costs on your empire. Different players prefer different approaches but when money is tight, we all agree that the zero maintenance social builds are most attractive while the social builds with high maintenance costs require careful selection. For example, high planet quality (PQ) planets may need little or no morale boosts but low PQ planets may need several morale boosters (entertainment, stadium, teleporter, harmony generators, etc.). Or, if you are only buiding your big warships on your best planets, then don't waste money to build ship quality boosters on planets where you don't build ships.

Aldar's comments about the constructor were *very* true with version 1.05 and prior versions where constructors were zero maint. Now on 1.1, constuctors cost 1 bc per turn to maintain so I quit building constructors too after I have built an adequate number and pretty much have the game in the bag. At the end of the game when you are taking over the opponent's star systems you will probably lose some trade income so why build (and pay for) anything you don't need?

Freighters are still zero maint so they are always fine to build and park next to potential trading partners and as Aldar says, you can always gift them. They also have good range to explore but are slow. The bottom line is to watch out for the cumulative effects of maintenance costs, especially at higher difficulty levels.

Oh yes. Many of us think it is a good idea to destroy un-necessary social builds on recently captured planets. The AI often builds everything and you can save dozens of bc per turn by destroying things you don't need on your recently acquired star system.

Hope this helps.

To sum up, if your social queue is empty and you're allocating resources to social production, then yes, you are wasting resources. Likewise for military.

However, it is better to waste resources than to build things which actually harm your empire, as many improvements do.

Didn't realize that Constructors had maintainance costs. I have learned my new thing for the day

Transports acquired a 2bc maintenance cost, too. Now it costs me money to have those morale-boosting transports hanging around.

Transports boost morale? By how much? I currently build constructors all through the game. Can't have enough party palaces and/or future terror stars.

They boost morale by taking population off the planet. So it's kind of an indirect effect. They don't do anything if they're just sitting in orbit, since all those marines apparently go on shoreleave the entire time.