New feature idea for spending sliders

This is actually a very good idea IMHO.

Yes, after reading docs and replays it occurs to me that *maybe* the economics management is tiresome, if you have only 1 global slider telling "X% to mil, Y% to Social, Z% to Science"...
Not only you can't adjust to local situation (frontline vs rear..) but also you can't really specialize any planet in anything : if I put lots of Science improvements on a planet, which give me say 200% research, but I'm at war, as I will globally have to put much on military and few on science my planet won't perform well, and will waste Mil prod that should get elsewhere (a system which has Mil improvements)...

Maybe I'm wrong, but I've understood that how GC economics worked, and it's a real problem IMHO.
Your suggestion will just solve it perfectly.

I agree. Perhaps have sliders on the Planet Details Screen that are "greyed-out" by default and are only available if a "Use Global Spending Ratios" toggle is turned OFF. On the same note, add a "Force Spending Ratios" button can be added to the Domestic Economics Screen by the sliders to switch all planets back to "Global Spending Mode".

Just my idea on the topic...and agreeing that this would make late game social building alot less frustrating.

If only Brad would comment this

Thats a good idea BoogieBac.

~SDC~

Sounds like a really good concept but I wonder how the AI would react to those individual sliders. Could be hard to implement them so that the AI makes good use of them.

But let's hope that Brad WILL comment on this, so that we know if it's possible to add.

Fear the AI that gets ahold of these. It can sit there and optimize the spending each and every turn on each and every planet if it wants.

And since the AI can do it at computer speeds, we human players would have to spend most of our time searching through each planet each turn to try to get the optimum spending on each planet. Sounds like an awful lot of micro-management.

~SDC~

The AI could be set to manage this only at higher levels (or have to make a roll to determine whether or not it will manage them), making it just another way that the higher level AIs are more challenging.

-Dave

~SDC~

Since BoogieBac is a Stardock employee, you can be sure this suggestion is getting Stardock's consideration. I just wanted to point out that one of the side affects of this idea is contrary to the overall phylosophy: don't *force* micromanagement on the human players. Since the AIs and the human players have access to all features of the game, my opinion is that this feature, even if implemented only at the highter AI levels, would force a human player into a very intense micromanagement mode in attempting to counter the AI's use of it. In other words, I think this would provide the AI with a "cheat".

~SDC~

Brad will see this. He reads every thread. There is always another feature we can think of to add to a piece of art, but at some point we have to get it out to the public. We can look forward to more features and tweaks in the coming year.

~SDC~

Perhaps rather that 3 sliders per planet, the developers (or even the player) could define sets of settings and give them a name (e.g. "70M, 30S, 0R shipyard", or "0M, 40S, 60R geek hutch"), then planets could be set to shipyards or geek hutches or left on default as needed. It'd keep the interface twiddling to a mimimum while reducing the AI's MM advantage.

Nice idea Cataleptic
In fact you advocate for "Spending Governors" ! Nice idea.
Other possibilily would be to be able to set the sliders as "Governor" data, so using a Governor would set the sliders along to what the queue needs (even if the queue only entails Social Projects there should be a larger vision behind...)

hehehe....geek hutches....heheheh

Or have it as a game setting that you toggle on/off when you first startup. If it is on EVERYONE can use it. If off NO ONE can use it. That way if you don't want the micro-management aspect of it you are not at a disadvantage to the ai.

I'd very much like to be able to individually manage production on my planets. I think that having this as an option wouldn't hurt as long as the possibility to "Macro manage" the remaining worlds remained. As it is now I feel that I have to build every improvement on every planet and will still be wasting resources and my time trying to manage the 20 or so constructors being built each turn in my vast empire.

Secondly, a large empire will almost always have worlds in different stages of their "life cycles", some will be sprawling 25+ havens of economic activity while others will be little 15 just colonized backwaters. It's just bad management to have the same resource allocation on both kinds of worlds as their needs differ. Let's assume that our empire is at war, we are threatened by the drengin - they want to eat our skin - so we jack up military spending to 80% - really need more of these battleships fast before we are overrun. Well - earth will of course go into a manufacturing frenzy - spitting out a new ship every few turns and still be able to do some research and social works, backwater on the other hand will be approx 150 turns away from building even a small cap-ship, and will be making no progress whatsoever on the locally important "soil-enrichment" project.

My point being - I'd really like to have a global spending ratio that is active by default - and a local spending that overrides the global. If possible I would like to be able to set the spending ratios from some screen containing a list of all my colonies, a list which could be sorted by different factors including but not limited to: Population, planet value, research, mil prod, soc prod, research %, mil prod%, soc prod%, military presence in system, constructors in system, (I can think of a million more

hm, this turned out to be a rather more lenghty post than I had intended, I hope local resource sliders can be implemented (work required to code AI/interface and gamebalance wise), I'd be really happy if they were


~SDC~

bump

~SDC~