To translate my typos above...

First paragraph:
"ecomny" means "economy"
"have just been setting" means "have just been set up"

Food for thoughts
I see the wasted resources issue as an opportunity to maximize the production of a planet.
It is one of the challenges of the game.
The solutions proposed here are to eliminate the issue.

This issue of minimizing waste is everywhere in business, industry, and certainly in computers. (SMP ouput units per cycle, Queue management, etc).
The most prevelant solution to problems of that nature, is to stack work in units that are in proportion to the processing capacity.

The challenge is to determine how efficiently you minimize wasted resources.
The AI's do micro-management at the planet level to acheive this. The more difficult the level, the more thouhrough the AI'S is at doing this.


~SDC~

From Popup Target: "(H) Distribute the money to other planets that *DO* have something in the social/military queue as appropriate, and if it maxes out every planet's queue capacity, don't spend it. They say that there is no corruption in this game, but they're wrong. Our planetary govenors are pocketting the taxpayer's money if they don't have something to spend it on.

Definitely don't bank it, not even at a depreciated rate, that would screw up wonder/trade goods races.As it stands, there's no reason not to have something in the military queue, and the only reason not to have something in the social queue is if you're out of things that don't have a maintenance cost. "

The simplest, most enjoyable and best answer.

How about that 'wasted' money being spent on morale?

Since the empty project represents people not going to work, they are being subsidized to loaf around! And certainly that should make the unwashed masses happy.:D

This means a planet in trouble of a revolt could be put on vacation for a while. Not a gamebreaker, but something I bet would help reduce headaches in many circumstances.

Yin, for the love of life, *NO*! If that were to happen, the population of the planet would go up until the morale came down far enough to compensate for it, and then when you assigned a newly available project to that planet, morale would plumet!

I have a hard enough time with the morale/population feedback loop without throwing that variable into the loop, thank you very much

My $0.2 ...

For social queue, unused resources are used to build housing and infrastructure, improving the growth rate.

For military queue, undirected resources boost repair rates in that sector.

Windscion, on the social side this still suffers from the same problem that Yin's suggestion has, only worse. I don't want my population to spike because I'm not building something there. I don't even want my population to spike like that even if I'm not paying for it.

This could be handled one of two ways: The amount of morale needed for growth could be lowered, which would have a devestating effect on morale when a social project is started.

Or, we could simply increase the growth bonus of morale. While this gets around the problem I'm bringing up, it does nothing for anyone who's morale is already just about dead center, so it would only benefit the happy planets. Trust me, by the time you reach endgame on an 8x8 sector map, even with a +159% morale bonus, there were no happy planets. Every one of them were in the 51-53% range.

For the most part, morale/population form a feedback loop, with the steadystate at 50%. Any suggestions that impact morale or population need to take that into effect.

I vote for (B). Possibly with a cross-platform penalty of as much as 30%. There has to be a sweet spot where ppl won't build a project they don't need to avoid waste, yet they won't leave queues blank just to beef up the other queues. :notsure:

~SDC~

(B) vs (H) Basically comes down to which is more important, that each planet get its share of the money, or that the % division between military/social/research follow the leaders desire on an empire-wide level. I like (H) better because if I want to spend more money on research, I'll move the research slider higher.

I think we might want to lay out some examples, and see what the effects are.

Let's take a hypothetical empire consisting of three colonies, each with an equal production value, lets say 12, with no freebies, and they all have all the social projects they need, except for a new wonder. Lets also say that we want to continue pumping out constructors from as many planets as we can without slowing down construction of the wonder.

In both cases, you'd want to not build a constructor at the same planet as the wonder. You only have 12 production points to distribute, and any that go to military can't go to social.

In case (B), the other planets don't matter, so if we're funding at 50% with a 1/3 split each way, that would be 2, 2, and 2. With no military queue, you get 0, 3 and 3. The other planets would wind up being 3, 0, and 3. This gives us 3 points per turn towards the wonder, 3 points towards each constructor, and 9 points towards research., for 6, 3, and 9. So each planet still produces 6 points, but the division between military/social/research is nothing like the imperial budget dictates.

In case (H), the wonder planet gives it's military money to the other two, giving them both 3 military production points, and both military planets give their social money to the wonder planet, resulting in 0, 6, 2 for the wonder planet and 3, 0, 2 for the miltary planets, for a total of 6, 6, and 6. However, the wonder planet got to spend 9 bc towards production and the miltary planets only spent 5.

Now, lets look at what happens when production is funded to 100%. Here under (B), the wonder planet goes to 0,6,6, and the miltary planets go to 6,0,6. Under (H) however, we hit a minor snag, in that the miltary planets go to 6,0,4 each, with the funding for the wonder planet at 0,12,4, which is more than that planet can spend paying for production, so the planet spends 0,8,4 and 4bcs go unspent, either wasted or returned to the treasury.

So (B) has the advantage that if implemented, they never have to deal with that excess money, since it all gets stuffed into research. However, note that it's harder to max out your one important project, because in any case, money that's not being used in one queue will get at least some of it proportioned to go towards research, unless research is set to 0%. It's also easier to focus a single planet's industry on a project if other planets are still working on projects of the same category.

(H) has the advantage that you can fund your planets unevenly, so if you've only got one planet that's doing anything worthwhile, you can fund it at 100% easily and everyone else at 0% just by leaving their queues empty. In the (B) case all that would do would be to emphasise research heavily.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both methods, and once I've played enough games to get a better feel I might change my mind, but so far, I've been in far more positions where I wanted to fund one social project at 100%, all the military and research at 50%, and didn't have many/any other social projects that I needed, so it appears that (H) would suit my needs better.

Unfortunately, those of us in the US can't draw on our own government for examples, because it uses plan (A), where everyone spends their entire budget no matter how wastefull, because if you don't spend it this year, you won't get it next year.

Proposal for an empire wide excess production priority list:

Planetary level production & tax sliders in the form suggested within this thread will be the death of GalCiv. While the integration of production and/or tax sliders with the existing governors may sound like a good idea at first glance, I feel it is more of a post-MOO3 reaction than a practical solution. Keep in mind that GalCiv does not have and was not designed with the AI to automatically assign the appropriate governors to each planet. The micromanaging player will therefore be obliged to create a string of governors representing different stages of planetary development, and then spend the majority of his time manually advancing each of his planets through this list. I do not find the prospect of such tedium very encouraging.

There is a good reason why nearly every empire building TBS game in the past, from the Master of Orion series to Civilization and Alpha Centauri, has employed a cash-back program for empty build queues: currency has always been implemented as a token of production. A cash-back program therefore allows you to save your current production for later consumption, or consumption by another planet/city, with some frictional loss in value. By implementing a cash-back program, we also remove the need for complicated and potentially exploitable empire wide resource/production sharing/storage. The method of resource management and presence of multiple build queues in GalCiv complicates this matter slightly, so I offer the following suggestion instead of just a simple cash-back program.

Allow players to redirect spare production capacity from empty build queues by designating an empire wide priority for such excess production. A simple drag-and-drop interface like the following will suffice:

====================
Priority 1: Social
Priority 2: Military
Priority 3: Research
Priority 4: Cash-back
====================

When a planet finds itself with an empty build queue, it will look up this list and automatically dedicate its entire spare production capacity towards the item with the highest priority. If circumstances do not allow that, it will then go down the list until it finds something to work on. Allow me to demonstrate how this feature will affect the different planets in a growing empire with a few examples. Let us set our empire wide income distribution at 30% military, 50% social, 20% research, and use the excess production priority list above:

New Planets: Empty the military build queue. This will force the planet to look up the priority list and then divert all its spare production towards the social build queue instead. The new income distribution ratio for this planet then becomes 0% military, 80% social, and 20% research.

Developed Planets: Empty the social build queue. This will force the planet to look up the priority list and then attempt to divert all resources towards social spending. Since the social build queue is empty however, it will then direct spare production towards military output instead. The new income distribution ratio is therefore 80% military, 0% social, and 20% research.

Research Planets: Empty both the social and military build queues and the planet will automatically divert all resources towards research instead. The new income distribution ratio effectively turns into 0% military, 0% social, and 100% research.

As you can see, this is a powerful yet simple feature that can be implemented with relative ease, and I believe it is far superior to the seven A to G options in the original post. While we may not be able to fine tune each planet’s tax level and income distribution, we can still manage them efficiently by using different combinations of empire wide income distributions and the proposed excess production priority list. The necessary modifications for the AI opponents should be minimal as well, making this an even more attractive option for the developers to pursue.

I like it, because it minimize waste. The AI's will love it, as they use the same algorythms.
It would also increase the galaxie production level.
A penalty of x should be assigned to each production shift to represent setup cost.
I think it could work.


~SDC~

My solution:

Add the following options on the Military production list:



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

Add similar options to the social production list.

Clean, simple, no extra micromanagment. You can use it however you want, to avoid losing production if there's nothing left to build, to boost social production on a new colony, etc.

~SDC~

The kiss principle at work.

~SDC~

oops, let me try that again.

My solution:

Add the following options on the Military production list:

(Social Production)
(Technology)

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

Add similar options to the social production list.

Clean, simple, no extra micromanagment. You can use it however you want, to avoid losing production if there's nothing left to build, to boost social production on a new colony, etc.




~SDC~

Thraq:

I am afraid I must disagree with your “clean, simple, no extra micromanagement” assertion up there. Unless the planetary governor functions are expanded to include management of a larger military build queue, a player would still have to sift through each of his planets with an empty military build queue in order to setup the proper production transfer. There may also be some extra AI work required for computer opponents to take full advantage of this additional micromanagement too.

If your suggestion is modified to make empty build queues default to a certain type of transfer, then it becomes very similar to my proposal. The differences would narrow down to the amount of micromanagement for planetary vs. empire wide control and how much programming work is acceptable. Which of these is more desirable will be up for the developers to decide, though I still maintain my position that an empire wide excess production priority list would be more practical.

I hope I'm not repeating anything.

My vote would go for the excess going directly to your empire tax income.

That's what I thought was happening anyway.

I really see this as two issues:

1. What to do with empty build queues

2. Planetary Spending Sliders

My ideas:

1. Empty Queues - Similar to what Thraq suggested, but with some gameplay elements thrown in. How about a tech (or even a trade good :)) that provides the option to divert funding into different areas. There could be multiple techs/goods that give you different options. For example, researching something like Advanced Interstellar Banking would give you the option to convert a game-balanced % of unused production to $, while another tech would give you the option the convert Military Production into Morale. This will add a lot of strategy to the tech tree, and possibly add more trade goods (which I LOVE) to the game, placing even more emphasis on Diplomacy (as you will not always be able to build all the goods). Once you build or get the Tech/Good, there would be a new option in the appropriate build area such as (Banking) or (Paid Vacation), or even just a basic description to remove confusion (convert to morale), (convert to $).

2. Planetary Spending Sliders - I like this idea VERY much, as late in games on gigantic maps, my early planets in the corner cannot produce anything that will reach my fronteir, but newly acquired planets will still be called upon to produce military units. The solution, as I see it, is to have Planetary Spending Sliders on each planet's Details screen. Now before you get all excited and freak out because of extra micromanagement , I also think there should be additional Governors for this. I do NOT like the idea of tying these to the existing Governors. How about instead of just Social and Military Govs, there are Social, Military and Economic. This way, those of us who want the option to control planetary spending can do so without the need to edit all 40 of our colonies individually. The Gov (or Accountant/Comptroller) could be selected from the Details screen on a colony. The options could be Match Global Settings - (default, for those who do not want to do any of this), Use X Accountant, or Custom, which would enable those who would like to seriously micromanage planets to do so.

Each of these options would used by the AI in increase levels of efficiency as the difficulty levels increase (a la Louis-gey's statement).

Sorry, this became MUCH long than I anticipated, but I think it gels most of the good suggestions so far, with a my own brilliant ideas . If you read this whole thing, thanks!

-Dave

~SDC~

There would indeed be no extra micromanagement in my suggestion. The two options would behave exactly like any other option on the military or social build list. There would be no new controls to deal with. Since they are build list items like any other they would be available to the governors. If the fact that there is no build time associated with them, make a few options. For example (Technology - 5 turns) (Technology - 20 turns) (Technology - indefinite).

Currently if you want to change things from nothing to something, you need to sift through all your queues (something very simple using the planets view and sorting by project and left clicking on the blank entries). This would be no different since the only change is having the new options on the existing list, so the level of management stays the same.

This is different from your suggestion in that it provides the extra functionality of diverting production whenever you want (not just when the list is empty) and on an individual planet basis.

Any change will require some tweaking of the AI code to take advantage of it, so that's not an effective argument against any suggestion.

~SDC~

oops again

"If the fact that there is no build time associated with them"

should read

If the fact that there is no build time associated with them presents a problem.

~SDC~

I humbly and respectfully cast my vote for either in this order:

0. Definitely CHANGE the current system of waste - so far the game looks awesome, but this is kinda silly

1. Cash back or

2. Give it to the unused spending on that world (i.e. no military goes to social) or

3. Spreading it around

My 2 cents :

For each planet, unused military resources are used for this planet's social project, and vice-versa.

If a planet has neither military or social projects, then convert that into cash.

Beginner, thanks for letting me add my input.
1)Regardless of what suggestion, institute following a) Changing current production incurs penalty of x% of total progress.
In turn that you produce something, the overallocated points are not lost. If nothing new is scheduled, they deteriorate moderately.

2) Regarding M/S/T sliders, change interface to must= 100%. (with lock slider for each to make it easier)

3) Depending on your faction type, your gov't type /controlling party, have minimum levels where sliders can be set per type. i.e warmongers must put 20% into military. (Maximums not needed, minimum forces maximum due to 100% add rule above)

4) In the planet screen, ability to focus the projects(if both happened to be focused, they would both be considered regular),
a) This is how points would be distributed if the two current M/S projects were as follows...
regular // regular. As per economy settings.
nothing // nothing. All into tech.
nothing // focused. All points into focused side. Including research.
nothing // regular. The nothing side % is allocated to tech.
regular// focused. The regular sides % is allocated to focused.
Regarding above. Cross penalty could be applied, expecially regarding bonuses. Also points couldnt be reduced in area lower thean minimums stated above. ie Warmongers, if no military project ongoing would lose those.

5) Allow governers work queus to focus the item or not.

Thrag:

How is your method not increasing micromanagement if you have to go through every single planet with an empty build queue to setup the proper production transfer? Given that players just leave a planet idle under the current system, your suggestion would significantly increase the amount of required micromanagement, especially if the computer opponents can capitalize on their advantage in micromanagement at higher difficulty levels and larger map sizes.

This brings us to the AI and programming issue again. The amount of work required for any change may or may not be trivial depending on how the game was designed. It is most certainly not prudent for either of us to dismiss this factor off hand given our limited knowledge in this area. I would suspect however, that a single empire wide excess production priority list would be far easier to integrate into the existing code than any planetary level micromanagement. Hopefully the developers will be able to examine this in more detail.

Corrections
regular// focused. tech is allocated to focused.

I like the sound of Za H's suggested solution, but I do have to question how much extra CPU power it would need to work all that out every turn, particularly in the later parts of a game when it already starts to slow down a bit.

~SDC~