Some Economic Advice

[Jorgen_CAB]

ORIGINAL: StarLab

ORIGINAL: Jorgen_CAB

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

I didn't see what happened in Larry's preview, but I do know that the preview build has some exploitable issues where you can gain ridiculous amounts of money through diplomacy (we'll fix these for release). Do you know if that was involved in the billion credits you are referencing?

I can say that it's not typical in my experience to have a billion credits sitting around in DW2.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, the bonus funding mechanics are only a beginning. You can expect more mechanisms for using funds throughout your empire in the future.



Regards,

- Erik

I just re-watched quickly the last few episodes of the Ackdarian play-through where he had close to a billion at one point. Several crash research would cost him around 200k at that time and was not used.

I just did a skim through my VODs. Do you have a timestamp of when you saw the Billions? I see 1M+ but nothing in the billions in my spot-check. I half remember misspeaking the number as a BILLION by mistake, but I think I corrected myself shortly after (but didn't come across that moment in my skim-check of the VODs). I think this is where the confusion is. I'm pretty sure I've never seen credits in the billions...

No... it was at most around about 1 million at most, not more. Perhaps a bit further from when that screenshot was taken. The comment of a billion is mostly an error, I actually meant 1000k so a million. [;)]

DISTANT WORLDS 2 Ackdarian Technocracy 09 - about 2 hours in is probably about the highest cash in that game.

[zgrssd]

I am 90% sure the "1 Billion" figure was hyperbole.
But the Argument holds. If I have 500k and only -5k per month, I could sustain that for 100 Months. 8 Years would be 96 Months. Without anything being added to it.

While I can understand it is a game balance, once you are in the income hole, there is no way to get you out of the income hole:
- If you do not earn enough money, you have too little tax
- To fix too little tax, you would have to do investment into colonies
- To do investment into colonies, you need positive cashflow
- there is no way to abandon colonies. Or get a colony with a capped growth (to keep the upkeep manageable)
That is a "catch 22" if I ever saw one.

What is worse is that you have no way of spending those cash reserves to get you out of the hole:
- any additional ship would make the issue worse
- any additional colony would make the issue worse
- only doing crash research on Upkeep, Growth or Happiness techs has a remote chance to even get close to helping with the issue.

And then the Suggestions will propably advise you to build more state ships, digging yourself deeper into that hole.
I can think of 2 ways to fix that via modding. And I hope at least one can work.

[Jorgen_CAB]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

I am 90% sure the "1 Billion" figure was hyperbole.
But the Argument holds. If I have 500k and only -5k per month, I could sustain that for 100 Months. 8 Years would be 96 Months. Without anything being added to it.

While I can understand it is a game balance, once you are in the income hole, there is no way to get you out of the income hole:
- If you do not earn enough money, you have too little tax
- To fix too little tax, you would have to do investment into colonies
- To do investment into colonies, you need positive cashflow
- there is no way to abandon colonies. Or get a colony with a capped growth (to keep the upkeep manageable)
That is a "catch 22" if I ever saw one.

What is worse is that you have no way of spending those cash reserves to get you out of the hole:
- any additional ship would make the issue worse
- any additional colony would make the issue worse
- only doing crash research on Upkeep, Growth or Happiness techs has a remote chance to even get close to helping with the issue.

And then the Suggestions will propably advise you to build more state ships, digging yourself deeper into that hole.
I can think of 2 ways to fix that via modding. And I hope at least one can work.

The only real issue is slower colony growth and slower technology speed, so it is not catastrophic. Just a mismanagement of the economy at play.

You likely can cut down on running cost by scraping ships, troops and facilities and increase taxes and remove the reserved value.

[StormingKiwi]

re: the billion million controversy I started

That was either a typo on my part or a brain fart. I'm surprised I didn't cause greater confusion by typing 'nillion' or 'villion'.

I meant 1,000K. So million. (5k x 200)

Sorry for the confusion.

This doesn't change the underlying points being made, that negative cash flow is perfectly sustainable given a large enough initial balance, and that the private sector windfalls are large and frequent enough to be considered predictable.

[Erik Rutins]

If you don't spend your money, you can accumulate it. Yes, in the real world you could create a way to then use a large amount of money to finance longer-term plans. That won't be the case in the initial release, so you'll have to manage your cashflow more carefully rather than relying on bonus income. As noted above, fully funding these areas from cashflow gives you more colony growth and research. However, even unfunded your colonies will still grow and you will still research.

Regards,

- Erik

[Spidey]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

I am 90% sure the "1 Billion" figure was hyperbole.
But the Argument holds. If I have 500k and only -5k per month, I could sustain that for 100 Months. 8 Years would be 96 Months. Without anything being added to it.

While I can understand it is a game balance, once you are in the income hole, there is no way to get you out of the income hole:
- If you do not earn enough money, you have too little tax
- To fix too little tax, you would have to do investment into colonies
- To do investment into colonies, you need positive cashflow
- there is no way to abandon colonies. Or get a colony with a capped growth (to keep the upkeep manageable)
That is a "catch 22" if I ever saw one.

What is worse is that you have no way of spending those cash reserves to get you out of the hole:
- any additional ship would make the issue worse
- any additional colony would make the issue worse
- only doing crash research on Upkeep, Growth or Happiness techs has a remote chance to even get close to helping with the issue.

And then the Suggestions will propably advise you to build more state ships, digging yourself deeper into that hole.
I can think of 2 ways to fix that via modding. And I hope at least one can work.

When you are off by a factor of 1000, the argument generally does not hold. And if a veteran player like Larry only managed to get to a million credits after ~35 hours of play then that's not really indicative of a broken cash reserve that just cannot be spent.

Also note that the -5k deficit is not descriptive of your expenses but rather of the difference between expenses and revenue. If all you have is a measly million and fleet retrofits and fleet constructions can easily drain a 100k here and another 100k there then that's not really a super strong argument why your petty cash reserve should be part of the general infrastructure and growth funding. At least not that I can see.

Consider what the gamey 0% tax route that funds everything by pushing civilians to retrofit would actually constitute in the context of the game. It would be comparable to Biden pushing through a 0% income tax, establish a federal drug and alcohol monopoly, and then funding the entire federal machine through a sales tax on drugs and alcohol. And whenever he'd want something done, he'd just release a new and improved kind of tobacco or booze, and everybody would immediately dump all their savings into getting wasted. It could, very theoretically, be something other than a total and unmitigated disaster, but I promise you that it would not be the optimal case. Nor should it be in DW2, in my opinion.

But I do think that midgame or thereabouts, it might be relevant to open up an option for the player to dump excess money back into the civ economy, in part to speed grow new colonies but also to alleviate it a bit if civilians are destroying themselves by flying into hazards repeatedly with reckless abandon. Then their ships die, they'll buy a new ship, and then crash that into the same hazard. And eventually that situation will drain the civ cash reserve. Same thing with attrition from pirates and other factions. Particularly if we cannot designate areas off limit to civilians.

All that said, I really don't think that zero tax route should be the optimal starting path. It just feels so silly and artificial. There might have been better or more elegant ways to implement it than what was chosen but from what I'm seeing on streams, it doesn't look like something I feel comfortable offer a criticism of without having played with it.

[Panpiper]

Zero tax is NOT optimal. Those doing the preview streams have determined this without a doubt. You get more by taxing and using some of that tax to fund colony growth (and research) than you will by having zero tax and therefore doing no such funding.

[StormingKiwi]

ORIGINAL: Spidey

When you are off by a factor of 1000, the argument generally does not hold. And if a veteran player like Larry only managed to get to a million credits after ~35 hours of play then that's not really indicative of a broken cash reserve that just cannot be spent.

Also note that the -5k deficit is not descriptive of your expenses but rather of the difference between expenses and revenue. If all you have is a measly million and fleet retrofits and fleet constructions can easily drain a 100k here and another 100k there then that's not really a super strong argument why your petty cash reserve should be part of the general infrastructure and growth funding. At least not that I can see.

Generally maybe, but in this specific instance, my argument does hold.

-5000 credits per year can be maintained for 200 years, and in the income equation of income = taxed + bonus, bonus income dominates.

Larry did not get to a million credits through his taxed revenue but through bonus income.
After ~35 hours of play, Larry hadn't played 200 years of gameplay.

All that said, I really don't think that zero tax route should be the optimal starting path. It just feels so silly and artificial. There might have been better or more elegant ways to implement it than what was chosen but from what I'm seeing on streams, it doesn't look like something I feel comfortable offer a criticism of without having played with it.

It's not a zero tax route, it's a zero reserved revenue route.

[Jorgen_CAB]

ORIGINAL: StormingKiwi

ORIGINAL: Spidey

When you are off by a factor of 1000, the argument generally does not hold. And if a veteran player like Larry only managed to get to a million credits after ~35 hours of play then that's not really indicative of a broken cash reserve that just cannot be spent.

Also note that the -5k deficit is not descriptive of your expenses but rather of the difference between expenses and revenue. If all you have is a measly million and fleet retrofits and fleet constructions can easily drain a 100k here and another 100k there then that's not really a super strong argument why your petty cash reserve should be part of the general infrastructure and growth funding. At least not that I can see.

Generally maybe, but in this specific instance, my argument does hold.

-5000 credits per year can be maintained for 200 years, and in the income equation of income = taxed + bonus, bonus income dominates.

Larry did not get to a million credits through his taxed revenue but through bonus income.
After ~35 hours of play, Larry hadn't played 200 years of gameplay.

All that said, I really don't think that zero tax route should be the optimal starting path. It just feels so silly and artificial. There might have been better or more elegant ways to implement it than what was chosen but from what I'm seeing on streams, it doesn't look like something I feel comfortable offer a criticism of without having played with it.

It's not a zero tax route, it's a zero reserved revenue route.

If you min/max you probably want to keep cash flow at around zero or just above it, just enough so you cover your running costs.

That means you will never want to reserve any money from taxes, so that should stay at 0% always.

I'm sure you will be able to grow your economy and get enough spare cash through bonus income through the better part of the game.

This is basically the same as running zero taxes on your colonies in Universe to gain maximum growth... it just means you need to balance it with maintaining ships, troops and facilities. So it is a much better system than in Universe.

In Universe you could use bonus income to fund colony growth which lead to gamey behaviour like setting taxes to zero on all planets until they grown max population.

Here things are different, first of all you start to have a diminishing return of taxes when a planet reach half its population capacity, you need taxes to fund most state running costs including colony upkeep etc.. DW2 have a much more involved economy system than Universe.

Being unable to use bonus income for running costs makes the new economy way more interesting as a mechanic.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Perhaps better to make some good practical example...

I'm currently researching better Water planets, I have three colonies with water planets that would all benefit from this technology. It will be finished on 5 years. I suddenly get some bonus for advanced torpedoes which if I add to the queue I could finish in two years (before it would take 8 years with multiple research). But I also delay the Water technology from 5-7 years.

I will now have to make the decision what is the most beneficial to me... better torpedoes in two years or gain the Water tech in five rather than seven years.

In this particular case it probably is better to wait, but it does not have to be, that is a judgement call.

[zgrssd]

If you don't spend your money, you can accumulate it. Yes, in the real world you could create a way to then use a large amount of money to finance longer-term plans. That won't be the case in the initial release, so you'll have to manage your cashflow more carefully rather than relying on bonus income.

When you are off by a factor of 1000, the argument generally does not hold. And if a veteran player like Larry only managed to get to a million credits after ~35 hours of play then that's not really indicative of a broken cash reserve that just cannot be spent.

I regularly get 1 Million on the bank in DW1.
And I see plenty of cases for people gathering 500-700k on the Bank. You know, half a million or more.

If you don't spend your money, you can accumulate it. Yes, in the real world you could create a way to then use a large amount of money to finance longer-term plans. That won't be the case in the initial release, so you'll have to manage your cashflow more carefully rather than relying on bonus income. As noted above, fully funding these areas from cashflow gives you more colony growth and research. However, even unfunded your colonies will still grow and you will still research.

That still does not change that the only way out of it, is currently to scrap ships. Which you might need to not loose your homeplanet to invasion.

I wonder of this was possible to mod in:
"Stimulus Package"
Substract Flat sum now. Pay it out into clashflow over 1-5 years.
Maybe loose some based on Corruption reduction.
It would be realy nice if I could get the advisors to recognized that this money is not consistent income (so do not plan to spend it on maintenance). Or if that money could directly be funneled into Resaerch and Colony growth, without being accounted as income.
But when in doubt I just leave it for humans only and hope they are smart enough to get around those issues.

[Jorgen_CAB]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

If you don't spend your money, you can accumulate it. Yes, in the real world you could create a way to then use a large amount of money to finance longer-term plans. That won't be the case in the initial release, so you'll have to manage your cashflow more carefully rather than relying on bonus income.

When you are off by a factor of 1000, the argument generally does not hold. And if a veteran player like Larry only managed to get to a million credits after ~35 hours of play then that's not really indicative of a broken cash reserve that just cannot be spent.

I regularly get 1 Million on the bank in DW1.
And I see plenty of cases for people gathering 500-700k on the Bank. You know, half a million or more.

If you don't spend your money, you can accumulate it. Yes, in the real world you could create a way to then use a large amount of money to finance longer-term plans. That won't be the case in the initial release, so you'll have to manage your cashflow more carefully rather than relying on bonus income. As noted above, fully funding these areas from cashflow gives you more colony growth and research. However, even unfunded your colonies will still grow and you will still research.

That still does not change that the only way out of it, is currently to scrap ships. Which you might need to not loose your homeplanet to invasion.

I wonder of this was possible to mod in:
"Stimulus Package"
Substract Flat sum now. Pay it out into clashflow over 1-5 years.
Maybe loose some based on Corruption reduction.
It would be realy nice if I could get the advisors to recognized that this money is not consistent income (so do not plan to spend it on maintenance). Or if that money could directly be funneled into Resaerch and Colony growth, without being accounted as income.
But when in doubt I just leave it for humans only and hope they are smart enough to get around those issues.

It is an option, which path you take is yours to make. One lead to better colony growth and more research the other lead to a bigger fleet.

The choice is yours...

Why change it to one option... bigger fleet AND better growth and research... how boring is that. [;)]

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: Jorgen_CAB

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

If you don't spend your money, you can accumulate it. Yes, in the real world you could create a way to then use a large amount of money to finance longer-term plans. That won't be the case in the initial release, so you'll have to manage your cashflow more carefully rather than relying on bonus income.

When you are off by a factor of 1000, the argument generally does not hold. And if a veteran player like Larry only managed to get to a million credits after ~35 hours of play then that's not really indicative of a broken cash reserve that just cannot be spent.

I regularly get 1 Million on the bank in DW1.
And I see plenty of cases for people gathering 500-700k on the Bank. You know, half a million or more.

If you don't spend your money, you can accumulate it. Yes, in the real world you could create a way to then use a large amount of money to finance longer-term plans. That won't be the case in the initial release, so you'll have to manage your cashflow more carefully rather than relying on bonus income. As noted above, fully funding these areas from cashflow gives you more colony growth and research. However, even unfunded your colonies will still grow and you will still research.

That still does not change that the only way out of it, is currently to scrap ships. Which you might need to not loose your homeplanet to invasion.

I wonder of this was possible to mod in:
"Stimulus Package"
Substract Flat sum now. Pay it out into clashflow over 1-5 years.
Maybe loose some based on Corruption reduction.
It would be realy nice if I could get the advisors to recognized that this money is not consistent income (so do not plan to spend it on maintenance). Or if that money could directly be funneled into Resaerch and Colony growth, without being accounted as income.
But when in doubt I just leave it for humans only and hope they are smart enough to get around those issues.

It is an option, which path you take is yours to make. One lead to better colony growth and more research the other lead to a bigger fleet.

The choice is yours...

Why change it to one option... bigger fleet AND better growth and research... how boring is that. [;)]

You made a mistake in that one sentence. Let me fix it for you:
"It is an option, which path you take is yours to make. One leads to being conquered and loosing the game, the other to being able to continue the game."

You argue from a completely mad asumption "you build bigger fleet to ruing your colonygrowth". Rather then "you build a fleet a certain size to not loose".

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd
You made a mistake in that one sentence. Let me fix it for you:
"It is an option, which path you take is yours to make. One leads to being conquered and loosing the game, the other to being able to continue the game."

You argue from a completely mad asumption "you build bigger fleet to ruing your colonygrowth". Rather then "you build a fleet a certain size to not loose".

This an example of what I'm talking about with the negativity. Look, you just called his assumption "completely mad". This forum has rules which we all agree to when registering for an account here. Those rules require civility and no personal attacks. Consider this an official warning to keep things civil in the future. If you ignore the warning, the next step is a one week ban for reflection on the forum rules.

Speaking to the content of your post, you've setup a very binary situation where you claim that a gameplay choice is a non-choice. That you can either play it one way or lose the game. In my experience with the actual game, that's not true. I'd suggest that you reserve some benefit of the doubt until you are able to actually play DW2.

We are very open to feedback, but hypothetical pre-release feedback that doesn't square with the experience of actually playing the game is in a bit of a strange place. If after release players find issues with the choices or gameplay, we'll work to address those issues but I think it's premature to conclude that you already know exactly how to play the game and how any choices may turn out.

Regards,

- Erik

[Spidey]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

ORIGINAL: Jorgen_CAB

ORIGINAL: zgrssd




I regularly get 1 Million on the bank in DW1.
And I see plenty of cases for people gathering 500-700k on the Bank. You know, half a million or more.


That still does not change that the only way out of it, is currently to scrap ships. Which you might need to not loose your homeplanet to invasion.

I wonder of this was possible to mod in:
"Stimulus Package"
Substract Flat sum now. Pay it out into clashflow over 1-5 years.
Maybe loose some based on Corruption reduction.
It would be realy nice if I could get the advisors to recognized that this money is not consistent income (so do not plan to spend it on maintenance). Or if that money could directly be funneled into Resaerch and Colony growth, without being accounted as income.
But when in doubt I just leave it for humans only and hope they are smart enough to get around those issues.

It is an option, which path you take is yours to make. One lead to better colony growth and more research the other lead to a bigger fleet.

The choice is yours...

Why change it to one option... bigger fleet AND better growth and research... how boring is that. [;)]

You made a mistake in that one sentence. Let me fix it for you:
"It is an option, which path you take is yours to make. One leads to being conquered and loosing the game, the other to being able to continue the game."

You argue from a completely mad asumption "you build bigger fleet to ruing your colonygrowth". Rather then "you build a fleet a certain size to not loose".

If you need that many ships to just survive, without actually being able to end threats, then isn't that a bigger problem than whether you're getting good growth and research?

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

Speaking to the content of your post, you've setup a very binary situation where you claim that a gameplay choice is a non-choice. That you can either play it one way or lose the game. In my experience with the actual game, that's not true. I'd suggest that you reserve some benefit of the doubt until you are able to actually play DW2.

We are very open to feedback, but hypothetical pre-release feedback that doesn't square with the experience of actually playing the game is in a bit of a strange place.

And in your experience:
How often did you had to restart because you were in a unrecoverable "negative income" situation?
If you were in negative income, what ways did you take to correct the issue?
Did those solutions resulted in you loosing or ending the game in another way?
Anything in the "can not yet talk about it" category adressign any of those?

Because as far as I see, the answers is:
Always, nothing, always, no.
And that worries me.

I am not arguing that everything is working fine if you never drop into net negative income. I am not arguing that once you learned "never go into the negative" is the only way to play the game, it would not be playable.

I am asking about the other 75% of situations where not everything is fine.
The ones that streamers regularly and effortlessly get themself into.
The ones without any obvious way to get out of.

ORIGINAL: Spidey

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

ORIGINAL: Jorgen_CAB



It is an option, which path you take is yours to make. One lead to better colony growth and more research the other lead to a bigger fleet.

The choice is yours...

Why change it to one option... bigger fleet AND better growth and research... how boring is that. [;)]

You made a mistake in that one sentence. Let me fix it for you:
"It is an option, which path you take is yours to make. One leads to being conquered and loosing the game, the other to being able to continue the game."

You argue from a completely mad asumption "you build bigger fleet to ruing your colonygrowth". Rather then "you build a fleet a certain size to not loose".

If you need that many ships to just survive, without actually being able to end threats, then isn't that a bigger problem than whether you're getting good growth and research?

Colony Growth and Reserach are the solution for all those "bigger problems" too.
So still the same convergent instrumental issue - can't get out of that hole.

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: zgrssd
And in your experience:
How often did you had to restart because you were in a unrecoverable "negative income" situation?
If you were in negative income, what ways did you take to correct the issue?
Did those solutions resulted in you loosing or ending the game in another way?
Anything in the "can not yet talk about it" category adressign any of those?

Because as far as I see, the answers is:
Always, nothing, always, no.
And that worries me.

Never, there are many things you can do (see my original post in this thread for some tips), No never, there's a lot that hasn't been discussed at all or understood so far.

The previewers have a beta preview build with no manual and some unfortunately haven't read the tutorials or galactopedia in detail either, so there are certainly plenty of misconceptions or misunderstandings I've seen in the streams or things I would do quite differently. That's ok, it's part of the learning process and being asked to play a complex game without a manual is a pretty challenging learning curve.

However, you have to take what you see with a grain of salt because of that.

Ideally, the decision on whether to run with positive or negative cashflow and how much and how often will be your choice. You can choose to manage your expansion and expenses carefully and grow your economy in a measured way to always maintain maximum bonus funding, but you may also find that quite often you have needs that you decide to prioritize higher than maintaining that bonus funding. And it's important to note that conceptually, it is "bonus". Ideally, you'd have the fleet size, army size and all the facilities you want and have all the bonus funding funded all the time. In reality, that's not always possible especially when you are trying to expand and sustain multiple new colony worlds, or fighting a war and keeping order on conquered unassimilated worlds, etc. Expansion and war are probably the two costliest parts of the game and there are decisions on trade-offs to be made by the player in these circumstances.

As far as getting yourself out of the negatives, readily available solutions, some of which I touched on in my original post which was intended to help streamers that I saw making some mistakes. If you see yourself getting into a negative situation:

- Increase your access to luxury resources
- Get more trade treaties
- Focus your research and espionage on economic/trade/corruption reducing facilities.
- Use trade and diplomacy to get additional cash or techs to build said facilities to improve your economic base.
- Try disbanding some ships, bases or troops to reduce your maintenance
- Assimilate your unassimilated populations
etc.

In any 4x game, you can get into economic trouble and as in others, there are ways out of it if you don't avoid getting into it in the first place.

All of this is dependent on player choices and playstyle. Some faction/government combinations will have an easier time than others, but none are economically crippled.

Regards,

- Erik

[Jorgen_CAB]

From watching the streams there are some that seem to grasp that cash flow is important. Some might simply build to much too fast or colonise too many planets at the same time which is very expensive, some simply don't seem to check their economy very often either. That is something that usually is important to me in games in general and I presume in this game even more so.

When you do certain things it might be difficult to get out of it, such as colonising too many colonies... then you just have to wait until the population grown to a point you get positive tax from them. You also can reduce other expenses such as troops or fleets if you can, it can be wise to reduce military spending to get out of a hole and spend some time using bonus income on gifts to appease any possible hostiles.

If you just built too many ships, troops or facilities you can quite easily fix that problem. If you are at war you probably should just accept that you will not be able to fund colony growth and research, that should be just fine. But also remember that you can scrap ships and troops after a war, you don't need to keep them around. The way the game is set up it might actually be better to scrap and later rebuild so you get a good cash flow, in my opinion that seem like an interesting choice to be faced with and quite different from most other games. How many countries in our world keep their excess military forces after a huge war, like say WW2?!?