Just to contribute to the original topic (Do you really think I read through all of the five pages?! )
"Wasted resources" should be spent in the same category (social or military) on the other planets, just like Popup Target originally proposed. Thus you get the money spent for what you wanted with the least amount of micromanagement. For me, there seems to be no alternative.

I just want to make another push for an excess production priority list, at least the idea behind it. The principles of this suggestion are:

1): Excellent control over individual planet development in large empires
2): No added micro management (avoid planetary level controls)
3): No wasted resources (auto-divert production)
4): Easy implementation (minimal AI change)
5): Exploit free (no inter-planet resource sharing)

If you think one small window with four drag and drop items will make this game too complicated, then just remove the option to adjust the priority list completely and go with a built in social -> military -> research -> cash back order. Eliminate the research option if you think that can lead to abuse.

Yes, a simple cash back program as we see in so many other games can suffice in GalCiv, but why should we be satisfied with that when we can give the player far more control of their planets' individual development with one empire wide control and no extra micromanagement at all? Let's compare these two programs again:

1): Simple cash back

Some developed planets with empty social build queues contribute extra cash so you can purchase items throughout your empire. Production to cash conversion will probably have to sustain a penalty to avoid exploits. Players are discouraged from emptying their military build queues since constructors are far more useful than cash back with such a penalty.

2): Empire wide excess production priority

New planets automatically build lots of social projects. Developed planets automatically build lots of military projects. Players can designate research or cash generating planets by purposely emptying both social and military build queues. There is no penalty to reallocation of production on the planetary level. Inter-planetary resource sharing is still tied to cash as a medium.

Za H:
1) If you put any kind of penalty on a cash back program, players will simply not use it. That is effectively what is happening now, except the penalty is 100%. But we've all developed coping mechanisms for this (personally I just go like 60/0/40 or 0/60/40) so why would I change my pattern if there was still a penalty?

No, I'd use it even with a small penalty (provided it was very small). It'd be worth it to me to lose 10% of my cash-back so as to not have to always have something in the queue, particularly for social production. Eventually one runs out of 0-maintenance projects for a given planet, and most colony worlds don't need the costly improvements.

As a side note, purchasing should probably be disabled for Wonders and Trade Goods. If it's to be the only one in the galaxy and hasn't been built yet, it doesn't make sense to be able to buy it.

~SDC~

Okay, I feel as if I don't understand something here. Some people are suggesting that if I were to shut down all my production (both mil & soc) on all but one planet then the one planet producing would crank out mega-stuff in no time flat.

I thought the individual planets each had their own max prod limit. Going back to my illustration above, the one producing planet would easily max out in production and the rest of the UIs would remain as cash. No? :notsure:

Haven't read your situation above, but that's how I perceived it, yes. Basically you're just shutting down production on that planet as if that financial drain didn't exist.

~SDC~

er, on the other planets, that is.

~SDC~

TheRealChronus, I've been saying that I don't want to transfer production between planets, just the money financing the production, but a few people are so stuck on that point that they don't see the difference.

I just want a solution, and at this point just about any solution. My current game has a bunch of planets that aren't building anything in the social queues, but I almost always have one or two planets working on wonders or trade goods. My current choice is 1) to loose the race to the wonder/trade good, 2) throw away 20 times the value of the wonder/trade good by having empty queues, or 3) go ahead and build stuff that I don't need/want on all planets and wind up with an upkeep bill that will make sure that I'm not a superpower.

Has there been an offical word yet? Will this issue be resolved?

I doubt it'd be stickied if they weren't going to do -something- about it.

~SDC~

Okay, I haven't read through all six pages of comments, but I still feel compeled to ask, how is cash back unbalancing?

You'd probably want some kind of penalty on it, but all this is really doing is giving you back cash you _already_spent!_

The social side is more difficult to do with, but you can effectively do this already for the military side. If you only need x number of ships over a period of time, but you have x*2 planets, instead of having half your planets build ships, have all of them build ships, then once you've produced all the ships set the military slider to zero and boost social and tech production, and reduce the overall spending rate.

You've now got twice as many ships so you should be able to survive for twice as long without any military production, during which time you'll be collecting extra taxes.

True, you have to do some planning ahead, but it emulates the cash back idea perfectly on a large scale (yet while at the same time being a micromanagement hassle.)

I think that either having the production points go to other planets (what I had thought originally happened) or have it go into a sort of "trade goods" sort of thing. The idea being that the money/effort is going into a sellable effort and so the money is either being returned at 100% of the value or maybe even higher.

On second thought, that would be a great researchable option. Start out with the money going down the drain, until a trade option is available through research to allow low trade goods which returns 50%. Further down the research tree is high trade goods which returns 100%, and later still supreme trade goods which gives 120%. That would be pretty cool, and it shouldn't unbalance the begining game play from what happens now.

~SDC~

I'm still against returning cash to the treasury or spending it on other projects.

First, it's simply not realistic idea for a goverment's operation.

If you have a roads department with a budget surplus at the end of the year, what do they do? Do they return the cash? Do they give it to the health department?

No, they buy new computers & stationery or just paint the lampposts, otherwise they get a budget cut next year.

Secondly, and more importantly, it does not punish poor play.

The budget sliders are there to set you're overall spending and EMPIRE WIDE spending levels & priority.

By moving cash to the treasury, you could effectively set the spending level to 100%, set you're research level, then manage you're spending by leaving empty build queues.

By moving cash between queues, then the distribution slider becomes less important in a similar way.

By splitting the availabe cash between active projects, it accurately refects the way that department would allocate it's resources. It also means the sliders reflect your EMPIRES priorites, overriding a planets priorities, and that's what they're supposed to do.


As for what happens if Planet A is not producing a social project, and project B can't spend the cash? You lose the excess. You should have budgetted better!

I like the idea of individual planetary sliders that can override the imperial sliders, or can be left alone. The way it is now doesn't let you specialize planets. The overall sliders are great for the majority of your planets, but I'd like to be able to make some research planets, etc.

I also like B.

~SDC~

I've been thinking while reading over this thread and I'm not entirely sure that the real heart of the problem has been identified. So let me state how I understand production to work and then someone can tell me I'm wrong.

As I understand it a planet has a limit on how much production it is capable of producing regardless of how much funding it is provided. For example, Planet Z can produce 10 military sheilds per month, and 11 social sheilds per month. Depending on how your percentage sliders are set and what your spending slider is set too will determine what percentage of that maximum production will be used. Lets suppose for a moment that your sliders are set such that you are maximizing your production capabilities. Lets also suppose that you have either nothing to build in the social queue or nothing you want to build. The planet is going to recieve the funding to produce it's 11 sheilds nonetheless. This is the wasted funds issue.

Now, I think the ultimate solution to this needs to start by addressing how funds are allocated to the planet in the first place and then doing something productive with the funds once they have been allocated.

So, here's my proposition that I have peicemealed together from many of the excellent suggestions so far.

First, I think the allocation division should be unviersally moved to a per planet basis and the sliders in the domestic management should merely be a default allocation if per planet sliders don't have an override box checked. Logically this is the way such an empire would probably be run anyway. The Empire gov't isn't likely to declare 'we are giving you this amount of funding, you are only allowed to spend x% on military projects, y% on social projects, and z% on research'. They're going to say 'here's your share of the empire wide budget, do what you want with it'. This will eliminate the currently tedious micromanagement of making sure your queues are never empty. (most of us probably enjoy a certain level of micromanagement otherwise we wouldn't be playing these types of games, but there is a fine line between useful and enjoyable MM, and tedious MM, which maximizing your queue's and sliders seems to be for most of us).

The second solution is to provide something useful to do with empty queue's other than just reallocating the funds to the other projects. Sure you can just crank up your research if you honestly have nothing else to build on that planet, but thats a less than optimal solution. Personally, I like the idea of having the funding go into some sort of continual morale boosting project. Sort of like the concept of luxeries in Civ. Excess funding just gets diverted into keeping people happy and maintaining their way of life. There should also be an option to have the funding diverted back into the gov't coffers. If you're having maintenance troubles the last thing you want to be doing is building more things that need to be maintained. What you would like is to have that production to be used to produce more funds ala the trade good concept from MoO2 or the capitalism concept from Civ2. However, I don't think there should be a tech required to do these things, just techs that increase their efficiency (ie, economics in Civ3 boosts your production conversion rate from 8 prod = 1 gold to 4 prod = 1 gold).

The morale issue suffers from a similar problem. It is tedious time consuming micromanagement that is at best a fight to maintain the status quo and at worst a fight to keep from losing ground too fast. This detracts from the enjoyment of the game. Most people don't like doing things that they have no realistic chance of succeeding at and so far as I've been able to tell it's only a matter of time before your planets start going rogue, and you are working to win the game before they start doing so. The alternative is to spend prohibitive amounts of the game MMing the morale via Colony Ship stunts to maintain a balanced morale level. Again, not most peoples idea of a good time.

Anyway, I've typed long enough and I have stuff I need to go do anyway, heh.
Ian

~SDC~

ok if somone said this im sorry but i am not going to read 162 posts im not brad afterall. devide the money between the remaning planits. if i am bilding ships on 4 of 20 worlds divide my spending by the 4 worlds prouducing somthing. building building would probilby have to go to tech with a penilty to avoid this becoming exploitive, developing worlds in 5 turns that is. if you are still reading this far down thank you i know i wouldn't. LOL

~SDC~

My vote is if the que is set to nothing, then just don't subtract the money, as has been suggested. This seems like it would have much less impact on game balance then trying to spread the production elsewhere, or re-invent the interface.

It makes balancing your budget much easier, which might throw off game difficulty, but maybe a tweek to lower the tax income calculation can offset that.

I says, if it's not being used then put the otherwise wasted money back into your treasury.

If you have 30% going into social but only one place is working on a project will it pump all the social project money into that one project or will it still be wasting some money?

I may like to micro-manage more than others, but this is very rarely an issue for me (and when it is in the late game, it's not really an issue since I have most likely won). If this is an informal vote, I'd vote to keep it the way it is - resource management is an important part of this game, and there are clever ways to keep your resources from being wasted (if anything, it should slow your economy down to not have active workers).

edit: make that INactive workers

Frogboy, CariElf:
If you code ANY solution to this, please notify us, and tell us how it works. This is a burning issue to me really.

Frogboy, CariElf:
If you code ANY solution to this, please notify us, and tell us how it works. This is a burning issue to me really.

I think that either having unspent money go back to your treasury or going towards other activities on the same planet would make sense.

I propose a poll about this question and here would be my vote:


(B) Divide among ?active? projects. Let these ?unused? resources be allocated across the other
(active) projects. In the example above, the effective ratios would be 45% military, 55% tech.
Perhaps with a 10% ?cross platform penalty?.


Why? Because this is where the player intended it to go. But I don't see the use of the cross platform penalty.