Matrix Games Forums

I have a problem to understand food ...

1) food is not a ressource listed in the bottom bar (why??)
2) the development screen tells me that my pile of food is 136 and my country needs +190 foods a month (turn). My develpopment screen tells me that I have + 119 food/turn. The problem is that my pile should reduce of about -70/turn. But the pile is stable and my people are not starving. I have ckecked my trade but didn't find +70 from trade (I had no food import visible in the review trade screen).

And anyway, even if the difference came from trade, it should be more explicit ...

Yep. I dunno either. Be happy - things are going well!

We have a large number of problems like this.
+ Some screens show production last month, and some forecast this month
+ Some show gross production, and others show net (net of some things), and others show "impact on the bottom line" (really net)
At the moment, large pieces of the economy just dont make any sense to the player.

The devs have taken this on board, and are preparing (a) a whitepaper on the inner workings of the economy and/or (b) explanatory screens/reports that lay things out clearly and are labelled. They are busy on the first patch (getting rid of CTDs and adding save to detailed combat) right now, but I think this is high on the list for after that.

that would be sweet because i spent about two hours yesterday trying to reconcile supply and upkeep costs as represented in the various reports and displays and for the life of me i could not square away the variances

Ralegh, I'm just curious - when this situation happened in beta ... what happened? It was deemed to not be an issue?

There were a lot of things that weren't clear back then. Fundementally, any beta throws up hundreds of issues, which have to be prioritized to decide what gets done. WCS and Matrix fixed every major bug that was identified, and made quite a large number of recommended changes - I for one felt listened to. Some of the enhancements and documentatiion we requested didn't make the cut, however - doco on modding the game was always intended for after the first service pack, and doco about the economy seemed to fall back there too. It is only relatively recently that they have understood that what is actually needed are some revamped screens as well, since the ingame information is just not good enough. They might put the data from the current Ralegh Briefing papers in game as well.

It is easy to be sad that this game isn't the complete realisation of everything it could have been. I take the opposite view, and am encouraged by the opportunity to help it become what it can be - and am glad they released when they did (reminder: Eric has been working on this for 6 years).