How do I see what I'm spending money on?

[DeltaV112]

I am honestly confused there is such a entry as "Private Fuel".
AFAIK, all resources belong to the private industry.
And when you buy ships or pay maintenance, you are buying those resources of the private economy*

If the PE was paying itself, that operation would be 0 Sum game. One part of the PE pays for what another part of the PE has. Total sum stays the same.

*However, currently the money does not seem to actually reach the Private economy - it just vanishes from the game. I reported this as a potential bug.

No, because if you and the PE were to pay their maint costs to the PE there would be a massive inflation problem. Planets basically magically make money, and without some sink for all that money to vanish into the amount of money in the game could only increase. Hence usually when you spend money it just vanishes into the ether from whence it came.

A true economy where transactions were always two-sided(i.e. someone gives/receives) would mean figuring out how to control the money supply(either having some money-supply managing system, or handing the player the monetary levers), as well as setting up more sophisticated spending decisions for the private side of the economy and probably breaking it out into multiple accounts.

[Commander4X]

I just solved my money sink problem.

I got a single ship inside a nebula that could not escape this trap.

This ship constantly got the order to retrofit. Then stopped again. Money paid of course. This pushed Annual Expenses -> Ship Building to its limits.

Solution 1: assign this ship to another empire via Game Editor.
Solution 2: set this ship to Manually Control

[maggiecow]

Do you only want to know how much is spend on "decorations for we love our leader day"?
Or do you want to be able to control it?

Or do you want to be able to reserve money, so the exact purpose stops matering and you have the money for the stuff you need?

I want the later, because it actually helps with the underlying problem, rather then give me information with no value for me.

You don't. You've argued yourself into a corner and are afraid to admit it. Nobody sane wouldn't want BOTH the information to be available to them and the tools to make use of that information. Acting like you can only have one or the other is nonsensical.

[zgrssd]

Do you only want to know how much is spend on "decorations for we love our leader day"?
Or do you want to be able to control it?

Or do you want to be able to reserve money, so the exact purpose stops matering and you have the money for the stuff you need?

I want the later, because it actually helps with the underlying problem, rather then give me information with no value for me.

You don't. You've argued yourself into a corner and are afraid to admit it. Nobody sane wouldn't want BOTH the information to be available to them and the tools to make use of that information. Acting like you can only have one or the other is nonsensical.

Development time is not unlimited. So there has to be a choice between "having this information" or "being able to do something about it that maters" first.
I choose to get the later first.

[OloroMemez]

Perhaps the simplest solution to implement to solve the issue of money strangely disappearing is only tracking things you're paying for, and not all incoming. Just adding a small section to do with recent transactions of one off purchases. Like 10k spent on Fleet Replacement, 5k spent on Building X. Gives you a chance to see where it's disappearing to, but only tracks what's occurred in the month before it deletes the record of it.

Keeping a running tally of every single transaction, especially in the case of resource trading when you can reach thousands of private ships trading multiple resources, could be a bit performance expensive.

[maggiecow]

Do you only want to know how much is spend on "decorations for we love our leader day"?
Or do you want to be able to control it?

Or do you want to be able to reserve money, so the exact purpose stops matering and you have the money for the stuff you need?

I want the later, because it actually helps with the underlying problem, rather then give me information with no value for me.

You don't. You've argued yourself into a corner and are afraid to admit it. Nobody sane wouldn't want BOTH the information to be available to them and the tools to make use of that information. Acting like you can only have one or the other is nonsensical.

Development time is not unlimited. So there has to be a choice between "having this information" or "being able to do something about it that maters" first.
I choose to get the later first.

I'm curious how much development time you think is needed to spool off a list of transactions that the game is already tracking. Doesn't even need to be part of the UI. Make it a log/txt file and I'm good. But again, you're just making excuses now because you've argued yourself up a tree and can't climb down.

[maggiecow]

Perhaps the simplest solution to implement to solve the issue of money strangely disappearing is only tracking things you're paying for, and not all incoming. Just adding a small section to do with recent transactions of one off purchases. Like 10k spent on Fleet Replacement, 5k spent on Building X. Gives you a chance to see where it's disappearing to, but only tracks what's occurred in the month before it deletes the record of it.

Keeping a running tally of every single transaction, especially in the case of resource trading when you can reach thousands of private ships trading multiple resources, could be a bit performance expensive.

All the info is already being tracked. It just needs dumped to a fixed length log file. This would also allow people to track down bugs. To flog a dead horse here, the game tracks an absolutely massive amount of data, while rendering a pseudo-3d galaxy. A log file is nothing. I'd be surprised if the development build doesn't have this sort of functionality built in already.

[zgrssd]

You don't. You've argued yourself into a corner and are afraid to admit it. Nobody sane wouldn't want BOTH the information to be available to them and the tools to make use of that information. Acting like you can only have one or the other is nonsensical.

Development time is not unlimited. So there has to be a choice between "having this information" or "being able to do something about it that maters" first.
I choose to get the later first.

I'm curious how much development time you think is needed to spool off a list of transactions that the game is already tracking. Doesn't even need to be part of the UI. Make it a log/txt file and I'm good. But again, you're just making excuses now because you've argued yourself up a tree and can't climb down.

You think the game is logging every of the thousands of transactions that happen every single ingame year?
It is hard to talk if you make such ridiculous claims.

[OloroMemez]

Can we just lock the thread now? It's devolved into pointless personal attacks.
If you want to actually know how doable this is, ask one of the modders on the discord.

[maggiecow]

Development time is not unlimited. So there has to be a choice between "having this information" or "being able to do something about it that maters" first.
I choose to get the later first.

I'm curious how much development time you think is needed to spool off a list of transactions that the game is already tracking. Doesn't even need to be part of the UI. Make it a log/txt file and I'm good. But again, you're just making excuses now because you've argued yourself up a tree and can't climb down.

You think the game is logging every of the thousands of transactions that happen every single ingame year?
It is hard to talk if you make such ridiculous claims.

My problem is it isn't logging the financial transactions. It's TRACKING the transactions, it isn't logging them. If it wasn't tracking transaction how would your economy run? Logging the financial transactions shouldn't be a major overhead, given that it's already TRACKING them. The game tracks millions of things in a typical game year.

[maggiecow]

Can we just lock the thread now? It's devolved into pointless personal attacks.
If you want to actually know how doable this is, ask one of the modders on the discord.

I don't feel attacked. It's just bants, mucker.

I don't see how a modder would know. This isn't something in the XML, it would require a change to the program.

[OloroMemez]

Among those modders are software developers. So then we can stop questioning each other's programming credentials.

[maggiecow]

Among those modders are software developers. So then we can stop questioning each other's programming credentials.

I'm sorry that amidst all else that is happening in the world, a post I started and which has largely been commented on by my friend zgrssd is causing you so much distress. How are we to learn without discourse, without sharing ideas and opinions? Would you really deny the opportunity for a thought to bloom, like a fragile flower, in zgrssd's mind?

Ultimately it's simple. I think the inability to see exactly what your empire's is spending its money on is a major drawback.

Broadly speaking there are bugs in several areas:
- Problems with the graphical engine and .NET mishandling (which is probably/possibly engine-specific). These are the showy crashes that are most frustrating to players and this is where I imagine the majority of the developer attention is going. I'd be curious how much bug-squashing is actually workarounds for problems with Stride and how it's handling .NET exceptions.
- Problems with game logic, balance and automation. You can have these problems, and not even realise there's a problem.

It's not a question of asking a developer what's possible, because anything is possible if the attention is focused at it. I feel it's almost an insult to their abilities to ask whether it's possible to take the information that HAS TO BE TRACKED to get a budget and present it as a log file, POSSIBLY accessible through the game menu.

Currently you can't look at your economy Tab and see what you're spending on, eg retrofits. (I assume it's under ship and base maintenance, but who knows? Maybe I should search the Galactopedia... DOH). Why is this important? Because retrofits are tanking plenty of players economy and most of them don't realise it, they're just struggling to hold onto their money and figure it's something they're doing wrong. These are actual problems, it's just hardly anybody notices because MOST experienced players already have automation off for most things so they're not running into this sort of bug anymore.

It's the same problem that we have with message filtering. It's not that the information isn't available, it just isn't granular enough in the way it's presented. If you can come up with a total figure for "Ship and base maintenance" you should be able to break it down into what's actual maintenance and what's retrofitting... that's assuming retorfits even show up on the economic tab. Do they? Can you say for sure?

Furthermore, I have zero confidence that there aren't other problems that would come to light if players could get their hands dirty in the financial deets. Every hero has an auditor inside them, just dying to come out.

Instead of attacking zgrssd for his unsophisticated deliberation, maybe you could get on the side of the angels, see the value of having access to more information, embrace the message and get it out there.

Or you disagree.

[Emperor0Akim]

I think you both do actually agree on the basics.

as made evident here
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 3#p4981823

and with the Storm-Auto Retrofit-Bug

Both problems would have been found earlier, if the moneyflow in the game was more traceable.

It may be possible for modders to come up with a solution, but this is a problem they should not have to solve.
And the tools are not available at the moment, I think Bethesda set a very bad example that way.

Community Involvement is important for games to stay, but the game has to be engaging for that first, and then give
the community the tools to do so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XehNK7UpZsc

But for this to work, the game has also give the players what they want.
I know Slytherine toiled hard over the last few years, and DW2 is their Baby, but maybe the Game they made was not what the Players expected from a DW Sequel.

Personally I don't like the new UI at all.
It's like Windows Vista, or Windows 8, nice to look at, but does not show me what I want, or what I need.

The DWU UI is maybe not more elegant, but more informative, faster to use, and automatically pauses the game, when I open a menu to ponder what to do next.
Sure I still have a list as long as my arm for things I would like to see in DWU, but my hope was that DW2 would give me some of that.
Instead DW2 took away many things I liked in DW:U, without adding some things on my wishlist.

[maggiecow]

I think you both do actually agree on the basics.

You get it.

Of course we all agree. Who doesn't want more information? Look at the raft of problems, include the latest bonus income bug that was patched just today (fixed bug where economy line items were often not being updated), that would have been much more apparent if the information was there to check. The guy who brought that to the devs attention had to WORK for it to figure out what was wrong.

zgrssd is just too far down a hole to admit he's wrong. I love him anyway, the scamp. He, and anyone else that thinks logging is going to be an egregious overhead, is possibly more concerned with seeing other things fixed first while being unaware that their economy could be riddled with errors with no easy way to tell.

[MichaelJ007]

The financial statement is certainly deficient. There are definitely missing line items.

I have no problem with black hole spending, like ship maintenance, so there is a cash sink. However other things are not clear at all. Perhaps the figures are in there but not broken down for visibility.

BLACK HOLE SPENDING PLAYER
Players spends maintenance for troops, ships, bases. No problem this is a black hole. Maybe it should be color coded differently.
Private sector also pays shio maintenance, happy that its a black hole.

DOUBLE ENTRY SPENDING
- Private sector spends cash on tourism and ship building, which is reflected as income for the player. The tourism figures look a bit low for the number of passenger ships and resorts, but I have no evidence that its wrong.
- Private sector pays taxes and this is reflected as an expense for them and income for the player.
- Private sector spends cash on fuel, but this is not recorded as income for the player. Is this meant to be income given it's my tankers and bases filling up private sector ships?
- Private sector spends cash on retrofits, but I cant identify where this is recorded on their expense statement or my income statement.
- As a player, I spend money on ship building and retrofitting, but this is not explicitly broken down on the player expense statement.

I haven't really paid attention to diplomatic spending (protection, tribute, gifts). Just assumed it's all recorded. Will have another look.

[Emperor0Akim]

- Private sector spends cash on retrofits, but I cant identify where this is recorded on their expense statement or my income statement.

I haven't really paid attention to diplomatic spending (protection, tribute, gifts). Just assumed it's all recorded. Will have another look.

Private Sector Retrofits are covered under private ship-building and state bonus income.

Tribute received and tribute paid are both covered in the annual income.
Gifts on the other are not covered by a category. ( I actually forgot about them as an expense )

[Theutus]

My running total is bouncing around all over the place. Where do I access the per item list of income and outgoings so I can audit it?

I feel like I'm expected to run a military but I don't even have Quickbooks installed. The summary amounts shown in the financials tabs are woefully inadequate.

In 2003 a game called RailRoad Tycoon 3 came out, it had the best economic simulation I've ever experienced in a game. You controlled a corporation which could own a fleet of trains, rails, industries, hotels etc.. it also had a robust ledger you could access and sort, which broke down your entire corporation's economy. It also had a functioning stock/bond market.

I would love it if Distant Worlds 2 had something similar. The single sheet is lacking.

[Litjan]

Here is the summary of the previous dozens of posts @Erik Rutins:

We need a better (more easy to read and understand yet more detailed) representation of the economy!

[MichaelJ007]

- Private sector spends cash on retrofits, but I cant identify where this is recorded on their expense statement or my income statement.

Private Sector Retrofits are covered under private ship-building and state bonus income.

I would have preferred separate line items for Ship Building, and Retrofitting. The tooltip only says 'new builds' but does not specifically say that it includes retrofitting.