Wasting money when not building anything?

Yes money is allocated to all worlds even though they are not building anything.. (Is that a double negative?:notsure:)
Think of it as giving the workers a Public Holiday. They get the day off and still get the same pay.
Or as someone else put it, You still gotta pay for rent and land tax of the factories even if nothing is happening.

One way to just get what you want is to set the slider to zero than then just purchase what you need, but I'm sure this ends up more expencise. I find in my games that i always need more constructors so the worlds not building my "peace keeping fleet" are building constructors..

This is one of those long standing annoyances for me...

Although the point that it bothers me most is late in the game when I'm conquering alien worlds. They tend to raze their own planets when they know I'm coming and I need to rebuild the infrastructure. Unfortunately, all my own planets are already all built up, so if I allocate money to social I'm wasting lots, and it's a real pain to visit each planet individually to buy the upgrades.

Interesting how blind we can be to our addiction to "efficiency". Yes, it's inefficient to have empty queues, but in certain situations the reward for absolute efficiency is far outweighed by other circumstances. For example, if you have an important planet that you’re about to lose due to unrest, it’s a good idea to quickly build a colony ship and relieve some of that pressure. Now if you’re also in a situation where you already have an extremely high ship maintenance burden, you don’t want to construct any other ships. Thus you leave all other queues empty. You end up “wasting” a lot of your revenue, but you save that important planet. Sounds like a rational tradeoff to me. I have to admit, however, that I too get a cramping feeling in my stomach just like everyone else because the revenue was used “inefficiently”.

The best way to avoid wasteful spending is a method I call "growing up together". If you run 100% military to start, until you have all the colony ships you need in the land grab phase, then you run 100% science (spending only what you need to make key early discoveries as quickly as you can manage), you buy time for the latter colony ships to arrive, or at least get closer. Then you start your social spending, at max, with all planets starting on the same footing. The smaller, slower ones can catch up a bit when you build wonders and trade goods at your best worlds, and you can build some optional/low-yield items like Advanced Quality Control and Economic Exchange at any planets that "finish early" while still building essentials at your other worlds.

Up until the time that you do terraforming, you can still "add new planets" to your "core" and at least have them build a few items. After that, though, your global social spending is done. Costs you less to rushbuy a few cheap, key improvements (PQ boosters, cheap morale boosters) than it does to waste countless monies at planets that are finished building.

You just have to accept that it's not worth the expense to build up planets that you acquire or settle too late into the game. Managing your planets and your economy as a whole, at the macro level, is what sets this game apart from all predecessors, where nitpicky little endless tedious minutiae occupy hours of the player's time, in pursuit of efficiency. Here, you can only manage a few priorities at a time, and choosing which to prioritize and when is the heart of the game.

Yes, the money is spent whether you are building anything or not. For military spending, you can always build more constructors, or at the very worst, sensor probes and freighters which cost no maintenance. So it is only the social spending that demands, at some point, that player stop spending, because the value on the few items you are trying to build no longer outweighs the value lost to most of your planets pouring your cash down the drain.

You will have to adapt your strategy to a new way of thinking if you want to maximize your success.


- Sirian

Thanks for the answers. It's a design decision that I disagree with but since I'm not the designer I'll just find work arounds - as everyone else has apparently done. I bet this was done to make the AI easier to program.

To the guy who pointed out just buying ships - I took a look at that and it's very very inefficient. A colony ship that took 50, if I remember correctly, costs >1000 to instantly build. Otherwise that would have been a perfect work-around.

The best work-around seems to be the previous post, where you put 100% into what you want and 0% into everything else, keeping all planets roughly equal.

I play gigantics most of the time.. I have 30 planets
spending 10-100 bc per turn on military. Make military 100% for one colony ship and I waste more than 1000 bc. (assumeming i'm not building constructors every where else.) Your point is valid for smaller empires but for larger I would buy instantly.

Good point. Another approach is to leave everything at 30%. Then you would reduce waste by 2/3rds on average. But then you wind up with three things 1/3 done, rather than having one thing in 1/3rd the time and choosing to build something else. So you're hurting your effectiveness.

Seems to be no perfect work-around. Would be best if we just got the extra money back. Oh well.

I love this design decision. In my view, it is what lifts GalCiv head and shoulders above all similar games. If there would be gains to be had by managing each planet individually, I would feel compelled to pursue them. This way, I cannot manage more than a few things per turn, with everything else along for the ride. That is immensely more fun for me, because I spend my gaming time gaming, not housekeeping, chasing pennies and nickels via micromanagement.

You get to be the executive making big-picture decisions, rather than playing god through thousands of bean counters and button pushers at low levels, managing the local stuff. If this design doesn't suit you, you could micromanage development and production to your heart's content in Civ3, and there's always MOO3 - Return of The Spreadsheet. LOL



I don't consider the advice I gave you to be anything remotely resembling a "work around". That implies a broken game element, a problem. I could not see it more differently. I can't describe how grateful I am for this spending system. GalCiv delivered what MOO3 promised: bona fide macromanagement controls. You can do anything you want, control anything, choose any priority, but you cannot have it all, so you must choose. Managing that takes strategy. Managing production centers independently takes only dilligence.


- Sirian

Preaching to the choir, brother! LOL

My worst experience with MOO3 was the lack of control. Colonies popping up everywhere! Governors changing my building queues! Do I rule my empire or does my empire rule me?!?!

Back on topic (not trying to flame MOO3 )...



This is quite effective, but there's another solution - FREE YOUR MIND MAN!!! Forget about "efficiency" and "waste". In this context, those are merely social constructions (HA! LOL No, pun intended.) If you can enjoying kicking alien butt without the hassle of "optimizing efficiency" and "waste management", which is much easier to achieve than you may think, more power to ya!

(edit: spelling goof - looks like I need to free my own mind some more LOL )
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Well, I for one think the people who see this in a positive light are deluding themselves. The waste here has nothing to do with an 'obsession' with efficiency, it's plainly illogical, and an aspect of the design I also disagree with.

The only benefit is, if you don't care anymore, it makes managing the empire simple. If you do care, then it's almost like MOO3 because then micromanagement is forced onto you, going from planet to planet to buy production to save the thousands of BCs (in my usual gigantic games) that would otherwise get wasted when a flipped planet has to build a stadium.

I respectfully disagree with the Gentleman from Maryland.

If we prioritize the techniques that are required for winning GalCiv, from cakewalk to masochistic, from tiny to gigantic, we find that efficient management of empire revenues is rather low on the list. I contend it is timely and strategic management of one’s revenues that is essential for winning a difficult game. In other words, I have found no loss in my empire’s ability to crush alien civilizations when I regularly waste revenues. Taking the proper action at the right moment and developing a long-term plan have been crucial components of my victories, not efficiency.

If we instead prioritize the techniques that are required for enjoying GalCiv, that is of course quite subjective. So let us then turn to those who feel they must manage their revenues efficiently in order to enjoy GalCiv. If efficiency is itself point of pleasure, and it is sought for that pleasure, then the quest for efficiency is purely a quest for pleasure. Because it is not a path that leads to victory, it can only be justification for its own existence. That is to say, a player seeks efficiency only because it is a point of enjoyment. It can therefore not constitute a design flaw.

Frankly I would think that if there wasn't anything on the Social queue then those BCs should be considered to have been spent on constructing domestic luxury goods. I.e. contribute positively to the planet's morale. This would both make sense and be useful.

I must say that I don't buy into the concept of having to pay for land, taxes, power and such. While we might be paying for worker salaries, though someone will have to explain all those "slave" situations in this case, that total could not possibly equal the funds spent in global social spending. At some point the factories should be either put on half-shift, doing something useful or closed down.

This situation doesn't seem to me to have anything really to do with game design but more likely a way to simplfy programming.

Another possible way to get around this, though no less tedious than the other solutions, would be to destroy some constructions on your developed planets and then go ahead and rebuild them. Seems pointless but who knows, maybe it would work.

mcdeath

This actually generates some loss too: if you run 100% on any single production type, you take an income hit (and lose a small amount of production, I think, but I'm not certain about that part).

~SDC~

I would really appreciate when Stardock would change that. It would be much better not to waist the money when you don’t build any social or military project on a planet. Or maybe that you loose only half of the money since you still have the costs to upkeep the manufacturing potential …

Thus I ask Stardock to bring it on the feature list of GC2. I promise that I will buy GC2 when this comes.

I don’t like any of the possibilities we currently have
- don’t build anything on planets you got in the later game and leave them in the Stone Age
- buy the improvements on new planets and spend a lot for leases
- waste all the resources by building nothing

The situation gets even worse with AP when you have no need for endless lines of constructors any more due to the logistics feature.

I disagree with Sirian. There is no additional micro management when a planet does not waist money when the queue is empty. You suggested buying improvements on new planets. That is micro management! And "growing up together" works on small and mid size games but not on large/hughe/gigantic.

And I disagree with and KitWarrior. Sure you can still win the game and on a midsize map it is no harm. But I like the epic empire building on large maps. And this is no fun with the current design.

Your game play would not be affected negatively at all. Thus I can’t understand why you argue against it.

Yes, GalCiv is nevertheless a great game and a lot of fun. But for me this detail is definitely broken and reduces the possibilities and the fun I have.

The only argument I can agree it the programming effort. Thus I suggest it for GC2.

Oh I'm not arguing against changes. I just don’t see any real drawback with the current design. I build up my late game planets for gigantic maps and still kick butt. So what if revenues are wasted? Does it have any impact on anything other than my real world desire for efficiency?

Isn't that what's all about

Someone in this forum compared this game to chess. It's o.k. to beat a mediocre opponent in a nice rush. But what I love is a long lasting fight with an equal partner for every little inch on the board.

I don't like culture bombing and other exploits (I don't want to argue on that :D) I want to overpower them. On Maso this bring me all the time in the position that my good planets don't have anything to produce anymore but the new ones really need improvements.

Yes you are right. You can play the game and you can win the game and you can have fun.

But no, I still disagree. It would have a great impact on the game play. It's a matter of game play style. I often have no money to waste even in late games. And I know that I'm not alone with this position.

I can't help. My perfectionism gives me an unsatisfied feeling.

I don't say that it is a bug. It was a design decision from Brad and I have great respect for him. He made a great job and Gal Civ is my favorite game.

I ask for a feature that would make the successor even a better game for some of us and would not damage the game in any way for the others.

I think that Brad is already a bit nerved from former threads on this topic but I still hope that he find some time to think about this issue once more when I ask very polite

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Yes. I’ll have to give you that. This is quite true.



Well as long as we understand each other. I’ll also have to concede that the suggestions being made here would not interfere with my own style of play.

Not so. Works fine on any map size or habitability rating, including gigantic with abundant habitability.


Does rushbuying a few improvements on a few planets in the few situations where you settle planets late equate to micromanagement? Yes, it does. Does it compare to the micromanagement of individually managing production at each planet in the rest of your empire for the rest of the game? NOT EVEN REMOTELY CLOSE.

I never said that GalCiv completely shuts down micromanagement, only that the core gameplay is set up to deliver effective macromanagement. Players can macromanage the bulk of the game and then micro a few rough edges to suit their taste. That beats all other previous 4X games in terms of amount of work needed to be successful. That some don't like it that way is understood. I'm just letting it be known that some do like it that way, and why.


- Sirian

When the original Gal Civ came out for IBM's OS/2, you could micromanage the spending on your planets so that you never wasted money, and people complained that this was not realistic because you still had to pay the laid off employees, taxes and maintenance on the factories and the lands they're on, etc etc etc.  The AI handled it fine.  Computers are great at calculating.  So you have the OS/2 players to thank for your 'wasted' military spending.

I agree with Sirian; you don't have to waste military spending. I always build constructors when I'm not building anything else. Even with logistics, this is still a good strategy because the modules don't cost extra (except for the terror star, as always). So you grab the nearest resources, beef up their defenses, load as many mining modules on it as you can, and others as applicable.  And, if one of the aliens gets mad at you, you can switch planets building constructors to warships. 

This was a pet peeve of mine a while ago - I tossed around a few ideas to make it better (without putting sliders on every planet, that is), but I haven't thought about it for ages - I might have another look.



Yeah, I do a lot of that myself, but managing all those constructors can get tiring...

How about a build queue for starbases - we could have four pre-set guvs just like for planets, so you just plonk down the first constructor to build the starbase, then choose which build queue you want for that SB. Then, when you start building 10 new constructors a turn, there could be a new "auto-improve" orders option for them, where they just head for the nearest unfinished starbase and build whatever's next on that build queue. If you want to micromanage their movements, you still can, of course.

Off topic, but, Cari, why don't you ever submit your games? The Stardockians deserve to log some points, you know!!

I am glad this thread came up but I am disappointed at what I have read. I was hoping that the credit situation was a little different. What I had hoped for was if I had 100bc going to either Military or Social and I had one planet with something in queue then 100bc of spending would go to that planet. Next I load up 10 planets queue and do not change my spending that the 100bc would then be evenly distributed with each planet getting 10bc...

Now that would be my desire for a spending solution.

later,
oldgamster - the one with the spending solution

Thank you very much CariElf for your statements.


I was one of the OS/2 players and I never complained. Honestly! I don't want to have the OS/2 style back. It was al lot of micro management to set these production points on every planet.


That's perfectly right. But it's the same nonsense as well when you have to pay the same whether you build anything or not. It's even worse since most people like it better to get some gifts as wasting money This is why i proposed a compromise: waist only half of the money ...


I know that :notsure: What I meant that it offers additional tactics and strategies and would give the human player an advantage when the AI does not know how to use it right.

I had games with hundred constructors on their way to a star base. This is unnecessary micro management


Sirian you did not get the point, did you? I have high respect what you have done for the community. But we are not discussing individual sliders whatsoever on every planet. I would not like that, too. We don't like that planets spend the same amount of money whether they produce anything or not. That's something completely different. :notsure:

Conclusion: I still did not hear as single argument which would make the proposed change (a planet which does not produce anything should not spend the same amount of money) a disadvantage for any of us. But believe it or not, it would be a major improvement for quite a view of us.

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I usually let my planets "grow together" after the colonization rush. But I often get many planets later in the game where not a single improvement is build on it. e.g. through a culture flip. But at that time most of my other planets had nothing more to build in their queue. How can these planets grow together with the others?

The only explanation is that we have completely different play styles in the late game. It's fine when the game matches your style. But why do you argue against a change which would not harm you but give us a great improvement? Why should I neglect these new planets or rush for a fast win, when I still could have hours of fun with this game? (:(
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I agree with the majority here, towards the end of the game I find that my highest producing planets have built everything they need, and all the stuff they might need is one month from completion, it seems a waste to have them building nothing and getting no return for the same. This is even more the case when I'm "in conflict" as the trade seems to take a battering, especially if there is only one other culture left.

Someone said earlier that you would still need to pay wages rent etc, this is true but you would not require raw materials and if you gave the workers time off then heating or air-con would be turned off saving more money.

What I would like is a Capitalization Tech working a bit like this:

Level 1 Capitalization - Returns 33% of UNMODIFIED social production.

Level 2 Capitalization - Returns 66% of UNMODIFIED social production.

Creative Accounting (Evil) - Returns 50% of TOTAL social production.

Alturism (Good) - Returns 66% of UNMODIFIED social production + 10%PQ improvement ONLY when being used + 0.05%PQ permanent improvement per month.

Some way of making the Good & Evil techs mutually exclusive would of course be required.

(Neutral players would get nothing as a reward for being so dull!)

These would only apply to social building, as said before you can always churn out constructors from your shipyards.

If this is not possible, how about allowing the social production to produce constructors, perhaps with a penalty, eg 150% of the normal cost of a constructor

Any comments, suggestions or death threats?