Civilian fleet and economy balance...

[Jorgen_CAB]

I find it extremely rare that the civilians lack funds to build anything, I often rather see it in reverse that I WANT the civilians to build things so I can get their money into the state coffers.

This means there is zero incentive to protect civilian ships, if they are destroyed you just have more money as they need to build more ships. You could even make it easier and don't allow them to evade and get killed intentionally, more money for you... resources generally is not that big of an issue when it comes to civilian ships as they don't really use the more exotic resources anyway.

There really need to be some game play incentive to actually patrol and guard civilian trade other than maybe some strategic fuel stations here and there and the occasional luxury resource.

Using Escorts for patrolling space is more of role-play thing than useful as the game is balanced, currently.

I also think that the civilian economy should not really just save their money but use it for something. Storing up vast amount of money does not really make anyone any good and that is usually not how a civilian economy work either. Resources are spent to make life better for the inhabitants. If there are abundance of economic resources then most of it should go back into the planets economies and develop them and/or make the population happier. If this was made in a way such that it is of diminishing return and if the stream of revenue is disrupted it has severe short term consequences. Then just some disruption in their economies can snowball quickly into lowered tax income and unhappier populations due to economic decline.

How it usually work in real life is that an increase in comfort will have a good positive effect short term then that level of comfort will become expected and the happiness level drops somewhat to a normalized level. If that comfort later is removed the same thing happen, the happiness level drops allot for a short time and the normalize to a more stable level over time as people adapt.

If the game worked more like that you would need a continuous increase in economic growth to sustain high happiness and any disruption will have a very large impact on happiness too. The more resources you extract the more resources the population should consume to gain any benefit from them, with some limitations of course. But if they are cheap they should consume more of them and gain some benefit from that consumption. As long as you can increase the rate of mined resources your populations happiness will remain high, if your resource extraction stagnate the happiness of the population will eventually drop down.

[100thMonkey]

I find it extremely rare that the civilians lack funds to build anything, I often rather see it in reverse that I WANT the civilians to build things so I can get their money into the state coffers.

Same for me. Ironically, there's a certain parallel with real life. More destruction through wars means more economic activity and, for some, more profits (think military-industrial complex and certain big corporations, like Halliburton just before, during and after the Irak war). So, in that respect, DW2's economic simulation is kind of realistic.

This means there is zero incentive to protect civilian ships, if they are destroyed you just have more money as they need to build more ships. You could even make it easier and don't allow them to evade and get killed intentionally, more money for you... resources generally is not that big of an issue when it comes to civilian ships as they don't really use the more exotic resources anyway.

There really need to be some game play incentive to actually patrol and guard civilian trade other than maybe some strategic fuel stations here and there and the occasional luxury resource.

It would be more interesting with some incentive. But I don't know if I'd want any supply disruption of any luxury resource that the citizens previously had a taste of, to have a big impact on happiness. Because, depending on your game settings and how the game evolve, it might be very difficult, or even impossible, to effectively protect all trade routes. So if the impact on happiness is too high, it might create very difficult situations. I know you like challenges , but not everybody likes them at the same level. So maybe there should be a setting in the game options for how much a disruption of the supply chain of luxuries (previously available) would impact happiness (or, possibly, other aspects of the empire).

Instead of having all luxury resources shortages seriously impacting happiness, maybe there could be more luxury resources with a high impact than now. Maybe another tier of luxury resources, between the ordinary ones and the super luxuries? It would have less benefits than the super luxuries, but a bigger impact on happiness than the other luxuries. You could even add some randomness to it, so at some point there's a fad and your citizens very much want a certain resource, and you need to maximize your sources of it to keep your citizens happy. And later, the fad would die and it becomes less important / impactful. It would even add to the "aliveness" of the DW2's universe...

[Jorgen_CAB]

I do think that protecting trade would be a very interesting challenge. If there needs to be an option for some people who can't deal with it then so be it. But right now if feels kind of gamey that I have no real incentive to patrol my mining systems.

If such a mechanic is implemented in a way that we have good information of why people are unhappy, from losing access to certain resources we should be able to deal with it.

But generally we would know that protecting mining operation is important, especially those resources you don't have a large abundance of.

War can only be really profitable in general if it is not fought on your soil. I don't know of any war from history that has ever really been beneficial to the country at which the war was actually fought. The US for example have not really fought any war even close to its own land unless you count the civil war and that one was not very profitable in general for either side.

Anyway... war in this game can be costly but in my opinion not costly enough if your civilian side is raided and disrupted.

[100thMonkey]

Agreed 100%.

[OrnluWolfjarl]

I can't help it but think that the civilian economy gets to sit on so much cash, because it's a workaround to an unknown problem we have yet to witness.

[Jorgen_CAB]

What would that be... it is the same issue and system as in the first version?

I just think there are some room for development in this area looking forward.

[OrnluWolfjarl]

What would that be... it is the same issue and system as in the first version?

I just think there are some room for development in this area looking forward.

I'm saying I don't know if there is an issue. I'm simply speculating. I'm stating that this is the impression I get from how incredibly high the private sector money can get.

It's possible that the private sector AI was hoarding money instead of spending it on ships because it thought it didn't have enough cash. And it's possible that giving the private sector a ton more income was the easy way to fix this until a better solution could be implemented. It wouldn't be the first time this kind of quick fix was used in a strategy game. Especially if this issue was discovered before release and there was not enough time to fix it properly.

For example, Europa Universalis IV had a notorious bug where the AI would take out a massive amount of loans for no apparent reason, when it already had plenty of money in the bank. And the devs couldn't fix it, so they gave the AI a huge income modifier to make it behave as it should. A similar thing was happening to the new races in the early days of Total War: Warhammer 2 in a certain game mode.

The reason I'm speculating is because the amount of cash that the private sector amasses over a short period of time is insane. There's no other number so high anywhere in the game. I've seen the private sector reach 3-4 million in the first few years of play, when I barely get a tenth of that amount in total income. So I'm guessing there's some sort of multiplier at play here, which is either an error in a formula or a fix to a behavior.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I can fairly confidently say this is not the case... the civilian AI don't really reflect on how much money it has... it actually just try to fulfill a qouta of ships based in some metric.

For example it will build a certain amount of passenger ships based on the number of colonies and resorts you have. Building more resorts usually help you develop colonies for example.

The more mines you build the more freighters are built too... so if you build lots of mines close to your stations you get a more efficient civilian freighter fleet... etc...

I wish that the civilian fleet looked more at demand and economy... if the economy is strong they will still add some more ships even if demand is low for future growth potential.

I usually concentrate on luxury resources and only construction as needed. But I always still find myself building lots of mines close to my colonies I don't need as this increase the number of freighters to support my luxury recovery in far flung mining operations. This should not be necessary...