1.04 public beta 2 -- the Economy

[Chet Guiles]

I have tried a couple of games with the 1.04b2, and the economy AI seems to be somewhat of a berserker. (That said I have not had any of the odd GxBO crashes with the 1,04b@ that I did with the original 1.04b.)

What I mean is this, the amount of available cash and the cash flow jump erratically from positive to negative in very short times. Which affects what I am allowed to buy and do. One turn I am 20K ahead, and at the next clock tick, 4K in the hole. I am not sure what buttons to push to tame this or what might cause it to happen. I am not allowing the AI to run rampant with ship and spaceport development and these kinds of things happen while I am just watching progress on the map.

Anyone have a similar experience?

This is a great game, and I know we are in a beta phase of this patch. So that's something I hope y'all will look at before finalizing. I like the idea of letting the AI do certain things, but this financial system looks like Wall Street and my 201.3K performance.

Thanks. [:)]

[Sigh]

What exactly causes the economy to fluctuate so much anyways? Is there a base income (loss) amount thats maybe affected by taxes? And then "random" (of course they actually arnt) spurts of income from the trading going on?

When a ship docks and "sells" resources does that generate automatic cash?

[taltamir]

i saw the same... the economy just jumps all over the place... i think it might also be related to war though... war causes unhappiness, which reduces taxes, which results in losing money. It seems that the displayed values for income are only updated once a "year" in game terms.

[Sliverine]

disable all AI automation including agent recruitment, tax setting etc...manually do all those stuff and see if your income still fluctuates

[Sigh]

I disable everything but taxes. And those dont change much as far as i can tell (in the early game)

[Sliverine]

yea the sudden spurts cld be due to trading. the constant income from colonies shouldnt change much tho so im guessing the fluctuation might either be due to trades or to the automation recruiting agents or building stuff that you dont know of.

[taltamir]

i think if it was updated on a quarterly or even monthly basis then it would be more obvious what is going on.

[Sliverine]

yea there was this suggesting on the wishlist compilation about having a visual economics graph for all that cost/profit calculations that enabled you to actually track what happened the past couple of years to identify trends/problems. I guess its a good time to implement it now

[DarkWraith]

In my latest game, the jumping around of my income seemed to be caused by resort bases. Sometimes they'd show 100k incomes, other times it'd only be 8k. It's probably just an issue with how the game extrapolates the current resort income into the yearly budget. Not sure if it's something that can even be solved.

[Fishman]

Spaceport and Resort income are basically "windfall" income sources: You can't rely on them and they do not generate a consistent and reliable flow like tax income does, and when these are included as part of the income chart, things get kinda crazy.