Author Topic: Useless Money?  (Read 2755 times)

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Offline Borealis4x (OP)

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Useless Money?
« on: October 31, 2016, 04:10:30 PM »
I don't really understand what money is for besides paying civilians to give you minerals. Does it actually matter if you balance your budget?
 

Offline smoelf

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Re: Useless Money?
« Reply #1 on: October 31, 2016, 05:01:53 PM »
Every time you build ships, industry, expands shipyards, researches (and probably other stuff that I can't remember right now) it costs money. If you check the wealth tab in colony overview you can see your expenses for all that stuff. Once you run a deficit, you start to reduce the economic modifier, meaning you'll do everything with lower efficiency. So money is actually quite useful :)
 

Offline bitbucket

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Re: Useless Money?
« Reply #2 on: October 31, 2016, 05:07:25 PM »
The total amount of wealth you have isn't all that relevant, though, as long as you don't run out. If you don't balance the books, you'll start incurring major penalties in production and research.
 

Offline 83athom

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Re: Useless Money?
« Reply #3 on: October 31, 2016, 07:16:46 PM »
Those major penalties include massive negative modifiers to production, mining, fuel refining, ship maintaining, etc. Once you start getting a major deficit, it is very difficult to recover from then on. Once rebellions are coded in at some point in the future, it may also spark them on colonies.
Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.
 

Offline TMaekler

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Re: Useless Money?
« Reply #4 on: November 01, 2016, 04:12:21 AM »
Although what I am missing is "unhappyness" due to "parked riches". It can be very easy to accumulate money so that you don't run out for quite some time if it becomes necessary. But in reality if governments would park riches the people would ask themselves why they don't spend them on benefitting the population - so they would grow unhappy if riches aren't spend. That mechanic could add some realism to actually really managing your income.
 

Offline TCD

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Re: Useless Money?
« Reply #5 on: November 01, 2016, 10:03:51 AM »
Although what I am missing is "unhappyness" due to "parked riches". It can be very easy to accumulate money so that you don't run out for quite some time if it becomes necessary. But in reality if governments would park riches the people would ask themselves why they don't spend them on benefiting the population - so they would grow unhappy if riches aren't spend. That mechanic could add some realism to actually really managing your income.
Ahem <sovereign wealth funds>? But in general surely the problem is the bigger one that tax rates are not controllable, and don't cause unhappiness? I get that Steve is less interested in the economic simulation side of the game, so this may just be the way it is. But once high taxes cause unhappiness you'd have an automatic control on wealth accumulation.

I suppose the other side would be giving us something to actively spend money on. Perhaps letting us pay overtime rates to rush production, maybe a 50% higher industry cost for 25% higher industry rate? It would be an interesting change that would make financial centers more valuable, they'd in effect be a flexible but expensive alternative to expanding other industry. 
 

Offline baconholic

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Re: Useless Money?
« Reply #6 on: November 01, 2016, 10:58:44 AM »
Wealth is mainly used to pay for research, construction, shipbuilding, and ship maintenance. If these 4 aren't your top money suckers, you don't have enough industrial base compare to your population.

Financial centers are pretty much a must build if you want to fuel research labs in the 3 or 4 digits.
 

Offline TCD

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Re: Useless Money?
« Reply #7 on: November 01, 2016, 01:23:18 PM »
Wealth is mainly used to pay for research, construction, shipbuilding, and ship maintenance. If these 4 aren't your top money suckers, you don't have enough industrial base compare to your population.
I think the problem can arise if doing a conventional start. All those years without a substantial industrial base to spend things on can lead to a vast wealth hoard. I've never had too much wealth from a standard start.

Financial centers are pretty much a must build if you want to fuel research labs in the 3 or 4 digits.
Is this true? I'm not convinced that making financial centers are necessarily better than using those resources to set up extra colonies to boost trade. You seem to need to make so many FCs to get even 1 research lab of wealth.
 

Offline TMaekler

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Re: Useless Money?
« Reply #8 on: November 01, 2016, 01:27:07 PM »
I think the problem can arise if doing a conventional start. All those years without a substantial industrial base to spend things on can lead to a vast wealth hoard. I've never had too much wealth from a standard start.
This can be. I almost only start with a conventional start and do set the wealth accumulation between 25-50% so it fits the growth. If not enough money comes in I begin building FCs so I don't fall into the negative.
 

Offline baconholic

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Re: Useless Money?
« Reply #9 on: November 01, 2016, 06:15:27 PM »
I think the problem can arise if doing a conventional start. All those years without a substantial industrial base to spend things on can lead to a vast wealth hoard. I've never had too much wealth from a standard start.
Is this true? I'm not convinced that making financial centers are necessarily better than using those resources to set up extra colonies to boost trade. You seem to need to make so many FCs to get even 1 research lab of wealth.

Even for conventional starts, once you start building up your construction factories and research labs, you'll eventually need to start building financial centers. If you have to much wealth, you are simple not building fast enough.

Compare to financial centers, trade is like a drop in the bucket. Financial center income can become more than taxes, which is always much bigger than what trade can generate.
 

Offline Borealis4x (OP)

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Re: Useless Money?
« Reply #10 on: November 02, 2016, 05:00:34 PM »
I really think that your wealth and your spending should be presented front and center and not buried beneath menus.
 

Offline TMaekler

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Re: Useless Money?
« Reply #11 on: November 03, 2016, 05:26:59 PM »
Seeing finances in the summary page would be a nice addition to the window header summary.
 

Offline Erik L

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Re: Useless Money?
« Reply #12 on: November 04, 2016, 09:18:18 AM »
Seeing finances in the summary page would be a nice addition to the window header summary.

Look at the title bar of the economics screen. It shows your +/- wealth for the last increment.

Offline TMaekler

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Re: Useless Money?
« Reply #13 on: November 07, 2016, 12:55:15 PM »
Look at the title bar of the economics screen. It shows your +/- wealth for the last increment.

"Window Header Summary" = "Title Bar" - just fancier  ;D