How about a "Federal Subsidy" project that can be added to either the military or social queues. What's different about this project is that:

(a) Upon completion, it generates an immediate discount that will ONLY be applied to that planet's maintenance costs.
- When added to the military queue, the rebate will only be applied
to the maintenance cost of military-related social projects (ship
building, etc.)
- When added to the social queue, rebate is applied to the maintenance
of the all other social upgrades.

(b) It always takes a fixed amount of time to complete (probably 1 turn, though it could be more.)

(c) It can always be re-added to the queue after completion.

Benefits:

- Money saved is naturally capped and has a very logical local benefit.

- Does not necessarily require new AI reasoning. Of course you could have the AI be more willing to build things if it knows it can defray the maintenance cost later.

- Corresponds to the many facets of the real-world concept of subsidies. For example, it encourages the building of items by making them less expensive to run.

- Does not require massive UI changes

The cons of course would be possible game balance effects. I think this will avoid some of the issues with some of the other ideas in this thread, but I really don't know enough about these types of games to say much more.

Sorry, if something like this was already posted. I did a quick search on the pages of this thread, but did not read them all.

~SDC~

Oops, my manual line wrapping seems to have made my post a little unreadable. Here it is again...

How about a "Federal Subsidy" project that can be added to either the military or social queues. What's different about this project is that:

(a) Upon completion, it generates an immediate discount that will ONLY be applied to that planet's maintenance costs.

--> When added to the military queue, the rebate will only be applied to the maintenance cost of military-related social projects (ship building, etc.)

--> When added to the social queue, rebate is applied to the maintenance of the all other social upgrades.

(b) It always takes a fixed amount of time to complete (probably 1 turn, though it could be more.)

(c) It can always be re-added to the queue after completion.

Benefits:

- Money saved is naturally capped and has a very logical local benefit.
- Does not necessarily require new AI reasoning. Of course you could have the AI be more willing to build things if it knows it can defray the maintenance cost later.
- Corresponds to the many facets of the real-world concept of subsidies. For example, it encourages the building of items by making them less expensive to run.
- Does not require massive UI changes

The cons of course would be possible game balance effects. I think this will avoid some of the issues with some of the other ideas in this thread, but I really don't know enough about these types of games to say much more.

Sorry, if something like this was already posted. I did a quick search on the pages of this thread, but did not read them all.



~SDC~

I think the solution is to add more stuff to the game such that it's simply not desirable to ever not be building something, and impossible with any reasonable research strategy to have ever run out of things to build.

I have changed my mind on this topic. After more game experience I deem it most appropriate to choose a "you don't buy it, you don't pay it" approach. Meaning: If a planet doesn't build on social projects, there just shouldn't money be spent, meaning a reduction in the overall money allocation for social projects.

It would be a little unrealistic to divert production from one system to another. You could easily save money by chosing "nothing" for social project, which would be very helpful in dire straits, while you could still build the important ones unhampered/unhelped like normally.
That's what I'd like to see most.

A (B) type of option is best.

Shift the unused general purpose production into the the production queue that is being utilized. Keep this per planet however, not galaxy wide.

QUESTION: are we actually PAYING for production we don't use? Ie if I set military spending to 100% and have ZERO military projects, I still spend that money? If so, that's just seems silly. In that case we should NEVER have an empty production queue, right?

Hi Bob

Yes, I believe that's what is happening. I've found that I often want *some* military spending, usually for a key planet or two to build warships... but the rest of my planets would wind up wasting that. So I now have these extra planets work on Constructors all the time. It takes awhile, but Constructors are almost needed and it's nice when 4 or so "lesser" planets crank out a batch of Constructors.

I vote for option B as well. No to spending sliders per planet though... maybe give each Governor a set of sliders? (Think this was suggested before but I've long since lost track.)

OneInTen: I disagree. Because of maintenance costs, I'm not building everything available already, having more things to build isn't going to change a thing for me unless they have no maintenance cost.

Hasslmaster: Again, I'm not talking about moving production around, that would lead to planets cranking out Overlords in a single turn. I'm talking about moving the money that finances the production around, which because of planetary limits, is capped far more reasonably. However, that said, I'd agree with you that just not spending the money (or a large part of it) would be nice, because then I could compensate to some degree with the sliders, though still not as much as I'd like.

Daveman: Definitely agree on no per-planet sliders. I'd like to see per-govenor sliders, but that's enough of a UI change (and AI for that matter) that I don't think we'll see it.
Having a project that reduces maintenance costs wouldn't be bad,, though when I get certain techs (like Terraforming) my budget would go down the toilet, but doing the "trade project" doesn't work in the GalCiv model because early on the funding equals the amount of production, so you're at best breaking even, maybe even loosing due to rounding, and later on you've got such a large production bonus that the available money will go through the roof. I've had earth to the point that it was producing hundreds of military/social production points and *THOUSANDS* of research points (was running a 10%/20%/70% split, and I think I peaked around 2100 research points). If I had played with the sliders, and had a way of turning 1 point of production into 1 BC, I could have financed half of my empire just from Earth itself.

I think that B sounds good. It just makes sense

Popup Target:

That's why I said the game needs to be changed to make it such that you'd never be in the situation where there's nothing worth building because the maintenance costs would outweight the benefits.

Of all the great ideas I've seen suggested here, I like Thrag's best:

"Add the following options on the Military production list:

(Social Production)
(Technology)

Choosing the option transfers your military production (with a possible penalty reducing it) to social production or technology.

Add similar options to the social production list."

This strikes a balance between a one size fits all solution and micromanagement. Sure you *could* micromanage each planet if you enjoy that (and why not let people indulge their inner accountant if they wish?), but most players would probably let the governors use these new options. So my Research Governor would build A, then B, then C, then (Technology).

Next best, I like ZaH's idea for an empire-wide "excess production priority list". Simpler than Thrag's, but less flexible, but still a very nice and balanced solution.

Failing that, I'd vote for "B".

I'm definitely not in favor of spreading unused capacity across other planets. There's already a mechanism for rush building a project (buying it), and it's expensive so it isn't abused. Adding this ability and letting the AI match the human by funneling all his production into a few planets just means both sides will be playing an unbalanced game, and that doesn't sound fun.

I have read this entire post, this should be a (nearly) new idea.

This problem can be summed up in two words: Income Tax.
Just think about this for a moment, we give our money to the government and what is not needed comes back to us at the end of the year.
So what needs to be done is all the production spent on nothing should be tallied and a percentage is given back to you after 12 turns (a turn is a month right?)

The AI has no problem spending money so there would need to be no change with the AI whatsoever.

This would be the simplest idea possible.

I don't believe we should get all the money back, just a small percentage. I can't say what % would work though, that would be upto the patch testers.


(personally, I would cap the total payout as well so as not to unbalance the costs of items; i.e. "allright! Free Dreadnought on every world!")
This should only need to be for Social anyways because as someone posted earlier, at least militarily, you can never have too many Constructors

I like the idea of recapturing most of these wasted resources. I'm all for keeping it as simple as possible, however. I'd like to see option B selected, as it also has some precidence being found in the OS/2 version of the game.

~SDC~

I think idle production should cost only 10% of the full production cost. This wold be the cost to keep iut idle but ready to start up again.

As for redistributing production points from idle to non idle queues, isn't ths like how Airbus works? They build pieces of an aircraft at different plants in different countries and assemble it. Maybe they could have some kind of freighter move between systems (that could be shot down during war) that distributes the excess points. Then there would be some delay between creating and using the excess points that would be more valid. You could have other planets listed in the build queue list as the mechanism for selecting where the production goes.

~SDC~

My vote time:
I think it should just roll back into the treasury, done and done. If the Alliance government has no intention of building any social programs on planets X, Y, & Z, why would they have sent them the money? It's simple, it makes sense, and I can't why we need to try and make something as simple as not spending the money as complicated as some of the above suggestions.

My second choice would be to redistribute within that system only. Again makes some sense - the federal gov't allocates X bc to foosystem based on the projected needs of the planets there, and their individual governors work out how to share unappropriated funds. In this case if there were zero projects going on, I guess they'd all figure out how to build some new summer homes and hide the graft

Perhaps it's been suggested already but here's my solution:

Add a 'culural' slider so that wasted production be spent on cultural endeavours (film fest, art shows, etc) - thereby increasing your cultural and influence output. Couple that with system spending.


MG

Whatever you choose, please hurry up and add it. It's definitely the most tactically annoying part of the game. When I get a new planet mid to late game, I pretty much can't develop it with out retarding everything else I was doing.

I don't know if I'm playing optimally, but I do less percentage balancing and more choosing of when to overload one of the items b/c there's a lot of important things in that queue. Though it is still requires startegic choices, it doesn't seem analogous to any interesting real-world decisions. And I think AT LEAST half of my time in this game is wasted on getting around this annoying resource allocation issue.

p.s. Zeus, your idea about income tax is kinda reversed. You play the government in this game, so giving back income taxed mean losing it, not gaining it.

~SDC~

I was looking at it as myself giving the money to the virtual game government to spend (which they are not doing) so "I" get it back to give to them the next year

I too like Thrag's best:

"Add the following options on the Military production list:

(Social Production)
(Technology)

Choosing the option transfers your military production (with a possible penalty reducing it) to social production or technology.

Add similar options to the social production list."

Due to the number of complicated suggestions people have been throwing out, I'd just like to add another vote for one of the simple solutions already suggested: divide spending only among the planets actually producing something, putting all unused credits back into the treasury.

This is in keeping with the simple, elegant design principles employed throughout GalCiv. If it doesn't have to be complicated, then keep it simple.

~SDC~

Also, to help avoid the empty queue, how about popping up the planet, like happens when a project is completed, whenever a galactic doodad or trade good is completed so we're not left with an empty queue planet to search for.


~SDC~

Actually all those sound great. If you implement social project for cashback thou you have to make sure AI always sticks it in there when queue is empty. Or you can have three project, one is to move the production to military, one to reaserch and one to cash. Ofcourse it will have small penalty I would imagine. However what about if you dont wish to build any military projects????

I like 'H'. I don't want more sliders. Too many posts for me to read. 'H' would actually make it worth my while to turn off production on other planets to maximize the production capability on a few. Due to low production capability in the early game it won't be a big deal till around mid game though. Anyways all unused allocated cash should be placed back in the galactic coffers as if it had never been allocated.

~SDC~

I have not read all 8000 posts, but issomething going to be done about this? I think clearly the best options are cash generation or shift to other production (AND research IMO) on that planet. I shouldn't need to have military or social programs going on a planet if I want to focus all my efforts on reasearch.

Fixing this would go a long way to discourage people from building endless amounts of constructors. Right now I put that in the military queue of every planet (even lousy ones that have no business building any ships) since I can use them right away and they have no upkeep.

Bob Smith is right!

Constuctors do need some upkeep!

If constructors had even a 1/turn upkeep, more people would be interested in this thread and we wouldn't have a mere 174 posts (which yes I have read).

On a more serious note - I too would like to see a solution soon (well, actually a change - sorry Frogboy). It would be nice to get some official take on the conversation going on here - or perhaps a poll on the issue.

And for the record my "current" stance is:
* No New Sliders
and one of the following (Automaticly occuring solutions - ie, so built queue items):
* Refund of Cash not Spent
* Auto split between other *active* projects (incl research) on same planet only

Thanks.


~SDC~

My stance on this issue would be to have the funding spill over to the *active* projects on the planet.
It is discouraging when I'm playing to know that "hey, if I don't build, I lose that money... so what can I make that I MIGHT need far far in the future?"

I never knew Constructors had no upkeep though....