Economy demystified

[Gertjan]

taltamir, now you should start another thread on "how to design your ships better than the AI does"
 

[Shark7]

Ship cost is very heavily influenced by material availability. When I ran low on gold and steel in my last game, my ~2500 cost escorts went up to nearly 8000 per unit.

[taltamir]

ORIGINAL: Shark7

Ship cost is very heavily influenced by material availability. When I ran low on gold and steel in my last game, my ~2500 cost escorts went up to nearly 8000 per unit.

cost is 8 x material costs. Minimum material cost is 1 credit per unit for any material. In a recent game shortages sent one of my materials to 40 credit per unit. there is no apparent upper bound so shortages can be very very expensive. Costs are recalculated whenever you purchase a ship so you always buy at current prices.

[Florestan]

Taltamir, thanks for the explanation !

ORIGINAL: Dadekster

Ok, right up front I will admit that I am no computer expert but I can't believe that in the year 2010 with quad core cpu's, (and yes I sort of understand the limitations of quads and how a game has to be programmed to take advantage of it etc) memory in the gigs and all that how we can't have a game that can run or keep track of an economy with thousands of civilian ships and all the related information to model a run of the mill economy along with all of the resources and trade going on as well. I mean really...is it that much information that a modern PC can't handle it? I thought modern PC's could handle millions of calculations per second and in parallel and all that fancy techno mumbo jumbo they like to throw out. I know one thing, with this game running my PC isn't exactly overheating due to displaying to many polygons and shading ffs.

For what I know, this game is nearly a one man show, except for the graphics and sound. One programmer, that was not even a video game programmer at the start, that wanted to play a game he could not find on the market... I guess he has no time to play it any more, now !
So he probably made some design mistakes, the biggest being probably the choice of the .NET framework. This kind of programming tools are known to have poor performances. Well, I'm not so sure it was really a mistake because it probably eased the development process a lot. I did not use it a lot, but I found it quite comfortable to use.
Would he have chosen standard C++, depending on his experience, perhaps the game would not be available before another year. .NET, in the way it is done has a lot in common with Flash on the execution part (most internet mini-games you find on sites like www.kongregate.com are made with Flash), so I guess it must be quite resources hungry, even if the limitations are not the same. Silverlight, Microsoft's Flash competitor inspired from (based on ?) .NET is even slower than Flash itself...
So, don't be too quick to flame this game's performances, things are not as simple they may seem.

[Sithuk]

Have any of taltamir's observations on the economy changed significantly in the last 12 months with the expansion and patches?

[Data]

The fundamentals have remained but many changes were introduced. As to how significant they are this is for each of us to decide, for example I still consider the freighters to be underused.

[malisle]

@taltamir

You said:
"Fuel costs can go up a LOT due to shortages (hydrogen is the basic fuel, followed by calson... hydrogen will go up from 1 credit to 40 credits in price due to great shortages, which often occur in late game for a variety of reasons I will get into later)."

So, why do these shortages occur and how can I use that against AI? [:)]

[Data]

They occur because your demand increses over time while your fuel sources don't keep up. As long as you make sure you have plenty of sources for fuel you'reok; conversly, this is how you use it against the AI...destroy it's fuel sources.

[Locarnus]

Ok, so private freighters will be upgraded.

Whats about mining stations?
Relating to the other thread where I asked about the usefullness of adding more extractor components to a mining station,
do the private mining stations upgrade like freighters?

I think not...

By the way, how to upgrade research stations?
The only way I know of, is to retire the old one, than put a new one there. Can I build the new one and then retire the old one at a black hole to get the bonus?

[cookie monster]

AFAIK nothing built outside of a colony is currently allowed to be upgraded in anyway.

Regarding Research Stations, what I did was...

Build some stations to get the empire wide research bonus, have a few as backup, due to losses in wartime.

Then retrofit the heavily guarded Home System Space Port to have lots of research facilities.

In a nutshell my home space port had over 50 of each research facility by end game.

Of course the AI doesnt do this, so you have an advantage.

But there's no use playing with one hand tied behind your back afterall.

You could retire a station and build a new one but that's expensive and I think my above strategy is better.

[Data]

AFAIK nothing built outside of a colony is currently allowed to be upgraded in anyway.

very well put and entirely correct

[Locarnus]

Yeah, checked it.

Nothing upgrades.
From about 250 small freighters, 200 are totally inefficient (fuel) and slow ones using old caslon reactors.

I have no idea how to get rid of them.

But the worst part is, that the mining stations do not upgrade, escpecially the gas mining ones.
So I have lots of gas mining stations using only 2 extractors, while the more recent ones use 6 extractors and the next version will prob upgrade to 8 gas extractors.

I have a valuable system right in the middle of 7 empires, which are constantly at war. Guess where their fleets get their fuel from... I should put a commerce center on my gas mining stations (does this effect the profit?).
Needless to say, my freighters around this system are not quite oversupplied with fuel...

[cookie monster]

I once made a new design for freighters and they were incredibly slow to retrofit to it.

My guess is it's broke, but I would prefer that someone confirms.

If you like micromanagement you can via the editor delete the obsolete freighter/gas station and place your latest design there. You lose the resources in the cargo bay though.

Commerce centers effect profit, check the galactopedia.

If your freighters are lacking fuel in a sector cos of reserved fuel for trading put a resupply ship there.

[Theluin]

If you have a good space port network you can get rid of old freighter by opening the Ships and Bases screen, navigating to freighter, selecting them all using shift+arrow keys and then clicking scrap. The downside is that if you had had more than about 200 freighters before you scrapped'em, your space ports will be producing them for about a year and during the first months you may have a resource distribution problem.
PS You can use this method to scrap anything else, like old mining ships, mining stations or passenger liners. [;)]
PPS This is also a quick method for disbanding fleets. Just navigate to military ships instead of freighters, sort the list by fleets, select all the ships in the fleet you want to disband and set their fleet to none.

[Data]

This is about the only ingame option we have though retiring the ships at least recovers the resources.

[Sithuk]

The private sector now retrofits with the Legends expansion. Are there any significant other economy changes?

I'm having a difficult time reconciling the cashflow summary in the top right of the "main" screen with the detailed economy breakdown under the empire summary screen (F6). Has anyone worked out why the cashflow summary can be so far out? I'm showing large negative cashflow which never seems to drawdown my cash pile. If my cash pile does reduce it doesn't reduce by anywhere near what it should according to the large negative cashflow estimate given on my summary in the top right. The difference isn't accounted for by private sector shipbuilding activities or resort income which are shown in the Empire Summary (F6) screen.

Could the cashflow discrepancy be caused by private sector retrofitting activities? Does private sector retrofitting generate income and if so where is the income shown?

[Pipewrench]

The easiest way to explain this is :

The top Money number is your current cash on hand. Purchasing anything the state will use comes out of here.

The middle Cash flow number is dedicated to tax revenue - the total maintenance cost of all your state owned ships and bases.

The bottom Bonus Income is dedicated to freighter or passenger revenue every time an order is placed. This is a tax levy from your commerce centers. This is a point of sale purchase and will fluctuate.


Cash flow number:

If you raise taxes, you push the number towards the positive.
After you build a new ship or base or resort, the maintenance cost will be added towards the negative.


Bonus number:

Every station or port has a commerce center.
When the private sector books a delivery run it pays the commerce tax on how much profit the freighter will make. The profit is based on how much the resource currently is valued at x quantity - fuel. (I am speculating on fuel as it could be a separate order)

If the destination is owned by you:

With strategic deliveries the tax collected is minimal and with low fuel costs the private makes a very small profit.
With luxury deliveries a higher tax is collected because the private sector makes more profit.
With tourists a premium is paid at the resort.

Private sector builds:

Any private sector build or retrofit order must use your shipyards. This generates bonus income.

[BlueTemplar]

- From what I see, retiring a ship doesn't give you any money back, only resources (all of them). Out of a half dozen ships retired, I only once seemed to get something back : 25 credits (about 5,7% of the ship's cost) - bonus income displayed +13.

- Scrapping a ship doesn't give you anything, even if it was over one of your planets.

- I couldn't find a way to retire a Construction ship at a planet, even though it was built there.

- Money is generated by population about every 37 days (about 1/10 of a year).
- State seemed to get only about 1/4 (+2.5%) of the displayed Leader colony income bonus (+10%) (while Private seemed to get the whole 10%).

- Ship maintenance costs are paid about every 73 days (about 1/5 of a year).

- Ship maintenance cost displayed in the design screen is the yearly maintenance cost. It seems to be about 30%-40% of ship cost. Exploration ships and Construction ships seem to actually cost 20% less in maintenance than displayed in the design screens. (Small Space Ports cost the amount displayed.)

- Pirate "protection" costs are paid about every 73 days (about 1/5 of a year).

[FingNewGuy]

- Pirate "protection" costs are paid about every 73 days (about 1/5 of a year).

As accurate, very helpful to know. Can watch that timing closely and cancel the protection agreement before the succeeding tranche gets paid out. [8D]

[BlueTemplar]

Though you also have to pay the monthly (not 72 days') amount straight away.