Hi Phoenix,

You got an interesting point there - if I may expand on it a little:

As I see it, when your planet is not producing anything, it's a little like a company that does not have any projects to work on - what do you do with your employees? you send them on vacation, tell them to take care of some company-internal tasks that you don't usually take care of... but your spending stays the same.

This means that you can't really cut down your costs, but you can still use that time in a useful way: converting those funds to research funding is not very realistic, as the spendings go into paying off the workers. Using the manpower to aid research or military production is more like it.

Also, that should not really be micromanageable, to keep it simple: when you are not building any military projects, a percentage of the idle workers gets reassigned to aid in the social production and research, and vice versa. If you don't have any social or military production, a percentage of the workers gets assigned to aid research.

Of course the percentages have to be realistic too - you can't have 100% social workers be reassigned to military production, and the scientists only need that much lab assistants... but that way all players on a quest for efficiency would be happy (I guess) and the others have even less to care about, knowing that everything works just like it should.

Just my two cents...

It is the idea behind the special improvements I have mentionned: to be able to reassign the social production manpower


I disagree with you: I want to offer the choice to have the same micromanagement level that any improvement. That why I was speaking of being able to put them in the goveror queue. More, it is simplest (and easier to understand) to say that all social spending go to military or research than to split them bewteen the two (and you need a ratio, the obvious one will be deducted from the global slider for military and research). More, with the proposal I have made, you could set 100% social spending globally for new planets and have planets dedicated to military or research.

The rational behind my proposal was: having a mecanism that is simple, easy to understand and to use and that allows to specialize some planets, since it is a common complaint in the later stage of the game.

I like this idea very much. Additionally to the original idea that if you don't have anything in the queue you loose only half or 20% of the money.


This definitely is unrealistic. You must have very kind (or stupid) businesses in your country when they do have the same costs and wages independent of their incoming orders.

Speaking of realistic. How realistic is it to switch the complete output of the whole economy from research to production turn wise

What is all this focus on realism? It's a game. We play for fun.

The reason many players complain about the waste of social, is that they'd rather not spend it, or have it spent on research or military.

Realistically, it seems to me that the maintenence cost of a social product should already include the staff to run it. So you are only missing out on raw material. You cannot just law off all your factor workers for 5 years, then bring them back in 1 month had have the factory running at 100% production, after all. The reason certain facilities don't cost anything is purely due to them skimming off the top of the extra money they create (Economic Exchange).

From what I've read here, I'm generally a moderate expanionist. Even though I try to keep my first yellow rush together, the difference in PQ between worlds lead to some worlds easily finishing their queues then others. Add in slow military and cultural conquest and I get plenty of worlds throughout my game that start off from very few or too much on it. In low improvement models, they get a chance to moderately catch up when I go heavy on social to make some trade good or such on my big worlds. Otherwise, I tend to look over what they are building next, and if it isn't an "important" local item to them, I go social of 20%, 10% or even 0%.

Now, I find I run 2 governors. One for "simple" worlds (all free and low cost items in its queue), and one for "best" worlds (most items, leaving out ship yard types and defense... ship makers will get all ship making improvements by special order as needed). I've found I don't need any more then this in 999 out of 1000 games. When terraforming comes along and my simple worlds cross the PQ threshold to prior "best" levels, I swap them over to the other governor and let them catch up easily on the difference in improvement.

Just my basic experiences with the game.

I like several suggestions. From having "Capitalization" and "Luxury Goods" and "Private Yatchs" (with level/% improving based on tech know), to the redirects, to the governor sliders. I think individual planet sliders go against the spirit of minimal management of the GC game. Just my opinion, but as such, I would rather not see that even if you have all sorts of check boxes to over-ride governor settings and such. Other then that... I have always liked simplicity as well. That means, I would be fine with the "if you don't have anything queued, you don't spend anything/x percentage on that planet".

But whichever we are talking about, it isn't about realism. It's about beating the computer faster.

i agree on the individual planet sliders, but i do think an option should be put in to basically "turn off" a planets spending. I know that on some of my less important worlds, i tend to not build anything once im about 50% through the game on them, military or otherwise. Their basically useless to me, and i know id love to save the money that is being spent on them.

That's true.


I disagree here. When the AI would learn not to build eveything on every planet it could be much harder in the end game. Currently the AI wastes a lot of money.

And yes it is not about realism it is about fun in the end game. I like long lasting epic games and it would improve my gameplay very much when it would be possible to let new planets catch up the rest.

In "999 out of 1000 games" I have several "old" planets which don't have any trade goods or improvements to build and many new planets without any improvements. To make it much worse the "old" planets have a much higher production. A typical situation is that I have ten new planets and 30 old ones. To get 10BC on the new planets I waste 100 BC on the old ones, thus I spend 3100 BC to invest 100 BC in improvements (:( When the waste rate would not be 100% but only 20% I would still waste 600 BC, but thiw would be acceptable.

Clearly it would be much better to buy them. But this is micro management

Conclusion: For my game play it would be much less micro management when the waste rate would not be 100%.

It is just like the Government. Speend all your appropriations or they are cut back. And like real life what you buy could be useless/worthless.

~SDC~

That's what we ask for. When you don't spend your money the government does save it.


You are off topic. What do you want to tell us?

Unrealistic? Germany... monthly salary for employees, if there are no orders, they still get their salary. Running costs, like the rent for the office: stay the same. Where on earth do you live?

Earth? that crappy little backward class 17ish (and dropping) planet, not me guv.

Seriously though I still think the best all round solution is to give the governors the option to balance their budget as they see fit, this as has been stated allows a degree of micro-management, but at the discretion of the player rather than a function of the game dynamics.

What we have at the moment is the pretty much worst of all possible solutions, I have a game runnung now that has about 22 planets all fully terraformed with nothing of note left to build, when I had a flurry of minors and the simulateous obliteration of one of the other majors so I now have a further 8 planets with almost no development at all, so the only way to develop them is to waste far more on the other planets.

As well as the distribution sliders I would like each governor to be able to return some spending to the center. The rationale for this is that the early planets cost (as a proportion of the empire wealth) far more to develop than later planets, so when they are fully developed it would be fair for them to be able to repay some of this inward investment by subsidising the newer planets.

Having said all that I know that we aren't going to see any of this until the next version (shame), however a simple interim measure might be for the old build/demolish routine to be worthwhile with some payment made for decommisioning old buildings. For example you've built a nice Virtual Reality Centre in the middle of every city on the planet, if you divest yourself of them you're not going to trash them, but sell them on to the private sector in order to recoup some of your outlay.

Have a jolly Easter & try to get chocolate poisoning*

* you can add a "not" to that sentence if you really want to, but for me the phrase "too much chocolate" is nonsense unless prefixed with "you can't have"

Alright, I'll try my take on this whole concept.

First the preamble.
I don't by the theory that the wasted spending is spent on idle salaries.
THis seems unlikely becasue you can shift your entire empire from 100% research to 100% social production in one month with no wasted effort.
I assume all production is to some degree fungible. They use electronics in ships, buildings and labs as an example.
Add on to that that the game only shows govm't spending. We assume there is private spending going on all the time, so any speciallied factories is just going to build private condos instead of stadiums...

Now the pricincples we need to design the system by.

1 emphasis on local effects. both kinds of production have a local effect, research spending does not.

2 no interface changes if possable (if we want to see it any time soon)

3 no big micromanagment burden (only need to do nything in special cases)

4 easy for the AI to use.

My thoughts on how to do this:

First I assume ( and correct me if it is wrong...) each planet has a certain amount of money it is capeable of spending each turn, and what the 3 slider settings are does not affect this much (asside from bonus production). I also assume that the spend rate slide just sets the % of this maximum that actually gets spent...

My idea would be that if a build category has "nothing" listed in it, you transfer all the spending to the other.
As an example, assume no bonus buildings, and a planet with a spend cap of 100.
set the main sliders to (60-30-10) (mil-soc-sci)
Normally we are now spending 60 per turn on a ship, 30 on a building and 10 on research.
If we finish our social queue, and keep the same lsider settings, we are now spending 90 on military and 10 on research.
Set the military to nothing, and we are spending 90 on social, 10 on research. put them both at nothing and we are spening 100 on research.

With this method you don't have to 'do' anything to take advantage of the tranfer. This also implies that the AI could take advantage of it without major changes (it doesn't have to even know it is using it)
I'm not as worried about shifting research funding,, beasue it does not have local effects, and it always produces something of value.

(the only interface change I would suggest is a "no reasearch here button", but it is secondary)

For handling bonus production:
(I assume the math behind this, correct me if i'm wrong)

say at 100% mil slider, 100% spend we have mil production of 100+50 (made up numbers, paid + free)
at 50% spend this would be 50+25, and say for social full on production is 90+30 (less bonuses)
also use full bore research is 60+15

Now if we did 40% mil, 60% social we would have
mil: 40+20
soc: 54+18
res: 0+0
for a total spend of 94/turn
If we set no social production to nothing, we get
mil: 94+47
soc: 0+0
res: 0+0
again for a total of 94/turn
if we set mil to nothing we have a problem. there is more funding than ocial can absorb (max is 90), i would suggest bumping the remainder to research.
mil: 0+0
soc: 90+30
res: 4+1
total 94/turn
and if we set both to nothing we would again flood research, with no where to absorb the extra spending. in this rare case, i think we can learn to live with the remainder eithe being wasted, or just not being spend.
mil: 0+0
soc: 0+0
res: 60+16
toatl 60/turn, with 34/turn either wasted, or not deducted from your balance.

this situation is only likely to come up with 100% spend rate, at 60% spend rate, in this example research could absorb all the funding.

What does everyone think?
_Ember

Let me expand on the uses of this:

Finish your build queue on a back water world, and set mil to constructors = contructor pump.
set mill to nothing = reserach world (ie, ll resources fully developed nearby...)
Want to build a trade good? set mil to nothing. you still have to deal with the research unless we get an interface change.

I would tend to guess that mid game, sliders of 40-40-20 might be ideal, with the reserach adjusted to give your desired research rate. all interior worlds that have finished their queue (say pq 14-16 worlds) and don't have constuctors to build would give all to reserach, front line world would only spend a bit on research and dump everything else to mil and newly captured worlds would have mil set to nothing , and rapidly build improvments.

This would also generally imply that you would put the research improvments as the last thing in each governors queue

_ember


[Message Edited]

I was playing with an idea like that a while ago -

(sales pitch on)

http://www.galciv.com/forum.asp?BID=GF&id=66132#68130

(mainly posts number 9 and 12 there, not the first one)

(sales pitch off)

Have a look at the maths there - is that the sort of thing you're thinking about?

Wow. That's a bit more thourough than I was looking at. When I designed my system I was not particularly concerened about what the actual empire wide funding split is.
I think it is not usually peoples main concern what the real split is for production, but what the local split is (how fast for mil vs. social). For research the total spending is important.

I guess you could add the "Actual spending ratio" just below the "Request spending ratio" in the slider area, and just fiddle with them to get the research right...

The main goal I had for changing things was as minimal as possable a interface change, and as transparent as possable for the AI to use, in the faint hope that it could be included sooner...

_ember

I still wanted to think about the empire-wide funding split, since I'm assuming the AI chooses its percentages based on the empire-wide situation. Hell, the percentages now don't reflect the actual spending. If the AI requests an empire-wide spending allocation of, say, 40/40/20, and actually gets what it wants, it could play even better than now.


One other thing about waste - I've heard the argument that "you're paying those people's wages - if they're just sitting around, you still have to pay them". The way I see it, I'm paying their wages through the single spending slider, not the Mil/Soc/Res ones - 100% means the government's employing every person available. But these people are super-motivated and cross-trained - if they were hired to work in a shipyard and there's nothing to build, they might help with a social project, or head over to the research labs, without being told. If the factory whistle toots, they all go back to work there. But they never sit around doing nothing. Wow, they're great employees, aren't they?

bump

Any idea how GC2 will handle the queue waste?

In GC2 there will not be wasted production/money. The unused money will go to your treasury.

Sounds quite like quite an effecient way of improving things there Cari

Is this true for the research queue as well?

Yes. 

This is the end of micro management. It's time to be in mourning ....

Just kidding

Thank you very much CariElf and Stardock