Is there too much money in this game?

[Registered55]

yes, but it will choke the AI!

ultimately empires of such scale has almost limitless resources at it's disposal anyway, only thing that could drain it would be a very long engaging war (when i say long i mean decades, perhaps even a century of nothing but WAR)

other than that, one would expect an empire with multiple planets to be very rich.

inflation doesn't quite work with such an advance race,

one could argue what your suggesting is unrealistic, an advance empire that is being penalised for being too rich?

there are many ways of making the game more difficult, but your suggesting making the mid to late game the same as if you just started, and your empire doesn't have many resources available, sounds like you want some kind of arbitrary penalization for being rich???

I don't quite understand that?

[Philo]

Why is everybody acting like this is a common thing that happens in any 4x game? It's not. Galactic Civilizations II for example, you will be actually running a deficit on money in the early to mid game. This is if you early expand (which I think is the most common tactic in the game). The AI will at times punish you for it by having just colonized a few worlds and building up a military which then eradicates you.
There's where the tactic and choices comes in. Do I expand early but risk having litte to no military and mediocre science? And etc.

Also, same thing with Civilization IV (Realism Invictus mod) . You can't really afford to expand too fast cause you'll crash your economy VERY badly. And also, if you put too much emphasis on just building offensive military the other civs might just be building some cheap but very cost efficient defensive units and wonders.

It's not like all 4x games you play you're sitting on hundreds of thousands of cash. Distant Worlds is the first of that kind for me at least.

[adecoy95]

money is pretty abundant, legends made it a bigger issue with all the new techs and characters adding to the problem

[jpwrunyan]

I agree with Philo above.
I would add that the best economic game I have played is Caesar 3 where your economy is a constant balancing act all throughout its growth. Do I want DW to be Caesar 3? No. But I want it to be challenging the same way as Caesar 3.

Now about the AI... These are not AI issues, I believe. But for the sake of argument, lets say they are: sanity check exceptions may be made behind the scene to make sure the AI is still competative. Did the AI run out of steel and now gone broke? Give it a break and dump a free steel stockpile in its capital so that it can still build bases. Again, these sorts of things are not intrusive to the player. The end result may be the same, but I resent opening the game editor to boost the AI, but I have no prob if the game does this behind the scenes.

Finally, the point of games is to play optimally. Playing sub-optimally for the sake of "challenge" is lame. I can play a "competetive" game of basketball with a 6-year-old if I want by getting on my knees, letting him score before I do, and lowering the basket for him. But it still isnt fun, and I dont get any better at playing basketball.

[Registered55]

so you want the AI to be allowed to CHEAT?

generally most players of any game don't like it when the AI is allowed to cheat!!!

have you tried modding the races files like i suggested, it worked for me!!

Ceaser 3 is not a good example, like i said we are playing with RACES that are extremely ADVANCE.

why not just try lowering the maintenance bonus, in fact why not make ships really expensive to maintain... see how that works for you, again the game is modable to everyone..... i don't understand why your not adjusting the game yourself, and instead asking the developer to make global adjustments that suit your type of gameplay???

the game is modable.... so mod it!

[ASHBERY76]

ORIGINAL: Philo

The point is not even that the game is too easy. But just that there is too much money. Having 300 000 all the time even while spending it on buying ships and crash researching is just stupid. The point of money in 4x games is supposed to be you making choices:

Do I put more emphasis on research but leave my army a bit undeveloped for the meanwhile? Do I try to expand and grab territory but be very poor for some time?

Right now you can just do everything, expand, build your fleet, crash research almost everything. And still have some spare cash to bribe allies and pirates.

Indeed even when playing late game EU3 with a huge empire I still have to make choices about money.DW is way of out sink with scaling.Some guy just posted a screenshot in DW of having 21 million space cash and had 800 ships..

This is nuts.

[Registered55]

so your comparing an extremely advance intergalactic race that has multiple planets and tens of Billions of subjects in it's realm, to a 17th century empire made of of a few million subjects? Oh my god.... you just don't get it do you....


maybe you could ask the developer to allow the ship maintenance in the races file to be pout in negative mode

what i mean is,

Code: Select all

'Ship Maintenance Savings: percentage rate of savings on maintenance costs for ships and bases
 ShipMaintenanceSavings		;-40

probably doesn't work, maybe ask for that in the feature request post, that way you can make ships very expensive to maintain.

i have not checked if negative numbers work or not, perhaps someone can quickly confirm if negative bonus actually does give negative effect.

[ASHBERY76]

Hey OCD guy you cleary can`t see the forest for the trees.


Diplomacy spamming bribes cost 8000
Pirate bribes 1000
Planet special building 100,000

Hmm tough gameplay choices.

My budget

[Lihnit23]

Following off of Registered55's "modifing the game to make it tougher" ideas, I did some experimenting with creating a custom empire leader that has huge negatives on skills (the skills can be from -100 to +100).

Setting the leader's military ship, civilian ship, and military base maintenance costs skills to -100 turned a 10k maintenance cost to 18k maintenance cost.

Setting the leader's colony income skill to -90 turned my home planet's 171k income to 14k income.

I figure if you create 10 custom leaders or so (for when they get replaced), you can thoroughly gimp your cash for the whole game.

A fun skill to modify I think would be the mining rate. Set it to -100 and you have to build twice as many miners to get the same production. This of course would increase maintenance costs.

There are more skills than these 4 to modify income, but you can only set 4 per leader (you can also use colony governers for similar effects).

[onomastikon]

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76


Diplomacy spamming bribes cost 8000
Pirate bribes 1000
Planet special building 100,000

Hmm tough gameplay choices.

My budget

Precisely.
Especially if I have enough of everything else (resources) as well.

[Baleur]

If you've got too much money, build more ships [:D]

*i always play as zerg'ish military despots, and always keep my income no higher than +10k by spamming out military ships, so that might bias my view on this*

[Lihnit23]

ORIGINAL: Lihnit23

Following off of Registered55's "modifing the game to make it tougher" ideas, I did some experimenting with creating a custom empire leader that has huge negatives on skills (the skills can be from -100 to +100).

Setting the leader's military ship, civilian ship, and military base maintenance costs skills to -100 turned a 10k maintenance cost to 18k maintenance cost.

Setting the leader's colony income skill to -90 turned my home planet's 171k income to 14k income.

I figure if you create 10 custom leaders or so (for when they get replaced), you can thoroughly gimp your cash for the whole game.

A fun skill to modify I think would be the mining rate. Set it to -100 and you have to build twice as many miners to get the same production. This of course would increase maintenance costs.

There are more skills than these 4 to modify income, but you can only set 4 per leader (you can also use colony governers for similar effects).

Following up on my last post, I did some more experimenting on maintenance costs and colony income.

On the default theme, ship and base maintenance costs are ~25% of the purchase price of the ship or base. After creating a leader with -100 skill on all the maintenance cost slots, the maintenance costs rose to ~60% of the purchase price.

If you create a leader or governer with a minus on colony income, your empire's income from planet sources will definitely take a big hit (depends on the minus). This has the largest influence on total income. This adjustment also works as advertised.

For you guys who are complaining about excessive mining, adjust the mining rate on the leader (into the negative of course). This works for slowing down the mining rate nicely. This one is tough to balance out though. As an example using a desert moon with 99% silicon: with -100 skill, you might make ~70 minerals after a year; while on -50 skill, you make ~1800; and on default skill, you make ~2500. Go figure.

[Registered55]

hat off for modding, I’m really pleased to see that someone here don't mind trying out things to adjust their own game.... a developer spends a lot of time allowing there own creating to be modded, it's quite frustrating then when you see a handful of users that don't want to use those abilities, yet want the game to be adjusted to suite their own goal.... in this case make money a much more rare commodity, it's nice to see you however get in there and see what can be done..... i spent a long time doing it myself, but got there in the end.... balance does take time.

although I have put in a feature request (not sure if the others in this thread has done that, didn't check, although again I would like to think they have as that is the right thing to do) where there can be an option in the races.txt files that allows the ship maintenance to go in the negative.... in other words, don't make them cheaper but actually more expensive.

Also make it so the more advance or bigger the ship than the more in scale of cost it will add to the maintenance, although still concerned that this could inevitably cause problems for AI if not handled correctly.

[Lihnit23]

One minus I see from creating characters with negative skills is that if the AI picks the same race as you, its game is basically screwed since it would use the same character file that you're using. It'll make too little money.

[Philo]

Look, the modding sounds fine. If you have a mod that balances the income like it should I'll definitely install it and try this game again. But I have no interest in modifying some game files on my free time and trying to for hours end find the right balance, I thought that was supposed to be the job the developers get paid for.

I mean, why even bother balancing any game out before release. Just make it moddable > you can't complain just because there might be a way to balance the thing out with a lot of time and effort.

You should be complaining when some unfinished shit is released.

[tjhkkr]

If they do change the money scheme, I hope there is a slider, I am not as interested in the economy as I am in the military,... but I do understand that the two are tied...

[jpwrunyan]

Economics is economics.
Comparing Caesar 3 economy engine to DW is perfectly valid. You may disagree with me but you're wrong.

And yes, i would allow the ai to "cheat". It is preferable to me having to make deliberately sub-optimal decisions, which was my whole point. Notably, no one has disputed it. Thank you everyone for agreeing with me.

About modding the game to uh... Fix it. That is such a wrong headed answer to these issues i dont know where to begin. Perhaps with inventing a time machine and then using it to travel to the past to sterilize your grandpa so you would never be born. In those days gov sterilization was legal.

Wtf? Modding is not about fixing problems in a game. If your game requires user modification to fix issues, that *is* the problem. Stop telling people they can fix the game by modding it. Do you know how crappy that makes the game sound to an outside observer? Please. Stop. I want to spend time playing the game, not fixing it--just like the 99.9% of the game-playing community. Not modding aka fixing it!

At least say something that makes sense like: "the economy balance is not an issue imo, but you can mod it yourself if you have the time or ask someone if you dont". Some people on this thread are seem to be saying such. I applaud them. They are sensible.
I dont have a prob with the people who are saying this. I have a problem with people saying modding *is* the solution. Those people are wrong.
And to people who think the econ is fine the way it is: well, thats your opinion but you are wrong. The econ sucks.


Tl;dr: as usual, I am right

[Lihnit23]

ORIGINAL: jpwrunyan

Economics is economics.
Comparing Caesar 3 economy engine to DW is perfectly valid. You may disagree with me but you're wrong.

And yes, i would allow the ai to "cheat". It is preferable to me having to make deliberately sub-optimal decisions, which was my whole point. Notably, no one has disputed it. Thank you everyone for agreeing with me.

About modding the game to uh... Fix it. That is such a wrong headed answer to these issues i dont know where to begin. Perhaps with inventing a time machine and then using it to travel to the past to sterilize your grandpa so you would never be born. In those days gov sterilization was legal.

Wtf? Modding is not about fixing problems in a game. If your game requires user modification to fix issues, that *is* the problem. Stop telling people they can fix the game by modding it. Do you know how crappy that makes the game sound to an outside observer? Please. Stop. I want to spend time playing the game, not fixing it--just like the 99.9% of the game-playing community. Not modding aka fixing it!

At least say something that makes sense like: "the economy balance is not an issue imo, but you can mod it yourself if you have the time or ask someone if you dont". Some people on this thread are seem to be saying such. I applaud them. They are sensible.
I dont have a prob with the people who are saying this. I have a problem with people saying modding *is* the solution. Those people are wrong.
And to people who think the econ is fine the way it is: well, thats your opinion but you are wrong. The econ sucks.


Tl;dr: as usual, I am right

All I was doing was showing that there are ways to reduce income throughout the game. Just use the modding guide. Heck knows I won't be doing any income reduction stuff in my games. I've yet to win.

I think the econ is fine as is for my level of play. I'm just a casual player of this game. When I become an expert, then I'll complain on how much the econ sucks. Until then, I'll keep trying to win my first game.

And as for you saying that I'm wrong... go climb a tree.

[Registered55]

fix it.... i never said it needed fixing.... in fact until you posted, the WORD fix/fixing has not been mentioned ONCE, this game belongs to the creator, and he has created this game to his vision, his dream....
however the creator knows that not everyone will agree with his vision, hence the development of modding.

modding allows the user to change the games mechanics if you will to match there OWN vision, if you want to change the aspects of certain elements to your own sense of wrong and rights, that's what the modding is for..... but as for fixing.... why would the creator make changes to something he already thinks is OK!

farbeit for me to speak on his behalf, however most creators will ultimately follow there own vision.

the option to adjust this game is there, a creator will not fix something that they believe don't need fixing, you may disagree with that, your entitled to your opinion as we all are, but it is just an opinion.
my opinion is that an advance race that has BILLIONS of subjects, several colonies in it's realm should be VERY RICH!
again, there is no right or wrong, depending on who you ask there would be arguments on both sides that have merit.

Thank you everyone for agreeing with me

so unless someone argues with you, then they must be agreeing with you....
do the words "Abstain" or "refrain" mean anything to you.
how about "presumptuous"

[Kadrush]

The problem is that the AI is stupid, it always get out of steel, gold and/or caslon and poorly uses it fleets...

Without resources the AI creates huge build quees with hundres of ships and cant spend all the money...shame for late game.