I still don't even know what money is for other than getting civilians to haul my stuff.
So wealth has been in the game forever, but as far as I can tell, it's never really that limiting of a factor. But, it represents one of two resources which are unlimited, the other being workforce. As such, there's a lot of interesting things one could do with it. Sadly, you never really seem to run low on wealth. Fair warning, this is a long post, discussing theory, etc. But I figure, we all play Aurora...a lot of words aren't going to scare anyone off.
So, let's look at the real world...wealth is often a vastly more limiting factor then actual mineral resources. The US, for example, has access to vast mineral resources, but often doesn't have the wealth to divert those resources into purely national pursuits. Now, a lot of this is done via roleplay, and that's fine, but that leaves us with a resource that is currently fairly unimportant. Steve has done some great things with trying to make wealth necessary, and I like those things, but I think they could be improved on in various ways.
I'll be referencing the attached image of one of my games for some examples. It's a quite a modest empire, which highlights just how plentiful wealth is. I only have two primary planets, and the second one is still growing quite rapidly. Note also, this is my bugged game where no civilian transports are spawning(yes, they are enabled), so all this income is purely from a few mining colonies and large populations. This again reduces my income so honestly I think I'm on the low end of incomes, overall.
- Research! This is a great use of wealth, and a major one. Having wealth be a limiting factor on research is a great thing. The only thing I would suggest, is that perhaps it isn't limiting enough. I could be operating a LOT more research labs at this point, the only reason I am not is because I don't want to make the game boring and progress to the top of the tech tree too quickly. Taking the brakes off, I think I could probably triple my research comfortably. Of course, it's still very expensive,a and perhaps we can find more uses for wealth, research will be just fine as it is. But making research a bit less about 'how many labs can I build' would be very good, because it extends the time at certain tech levels, expanding the game and encouraging tradeoffs and choices.
- Maintenance Supplies! As you can see, that is where most of my wealth is going, and I don't really have that large of a military force in the first place. I'm actually a little curious, am I paying anything for my large civilian fleet? In any case, I think that is a keystone here. Civilians don't cost maintenance supplies, which is a perfect design decision. Assuming that they don't cost wealth instead, perhaps they ought to? It would be a nice balancing effect on building vast numbers of civilian ships. This assumes that we are not already paying for civilian shipping, which if we are...that's great. If we aren't, maybe we should be, with some balance adjustments.
- Ground units...I think the maintenance price needs to increase, along with other changes which make it much easier to restore and maintain ground units. Wealth is the only real 'limiting factor' to stockpiling vast numbers of ground troops, and it frankly isn't that much of a limit currently. Otherwise, great plan, wealth is a wonderful cost choice.
- So...let's move on to new ways to spend our money: this one be a little controversial. Right now, I can maintain a literally unlimited number of automated and normal mines. In fact, manned mines actually create wealth in large amounts, a nice balance perk to using them over automated mines. But that means that we are basically getting minerals for 'free', and the only limit on how many minerals we can mine is how many mines we can make. Mines produce minerals, which are needed to make more mines, so it's basically exponential with only itself as a limitation. It would be very interesting to change that. A simple 'you have to pay your workers/maintain your machines' cost, using wealth. This would mean that manned mines would be much cheaper, obviously, since they produce wealth, further encouraging their use when possible.
- Finally, there are few other small things that could have a wealth cost as a balancing factor. Deep space tracking stations, for example, meaning that where to put them requires a little more thought. Terraforming stations also come to mind, paying a bit for terraforming would be a nice balancing factor, limiting the ability of a nation to just build vast numbers of transformers. Finally, military academies, because they generate an incredibly important resource, but are a one-time cost.
As a final aside, let me mention what shouldn't have any wealth cost, and why. Most production already uses wealth for manufacturing when in use. Shipyards, ordnance, fighters: all of them have wealth costs, you are already 'paying someone to make them'. Perfectly logical. Fuel refineries...just not worth it. Spaceports and all the rest, again, limited benefit, and you already have to get the resources there to use them. Finally, infrastructure...and I thought about that hard. While it having a wealth upkeep would be interesting, I think would be very punishing since having spare infrastructure is quite common, and it generates itself via civilian trade.
:::
Anyway, that's my summery of where I stand on wealth right now. Having to build and maintain large civilian populations is ultimately a good thing for gameplay. It creates targets for conflict, increases the value of large inhabitable planets, and makes it far more worthwhile to conquer populations rather then kill them. It's also a great realism element, since strong economies tend to produce strong nations. It would also make finding nice planets far more exciting, something which would logically be valuable, according to most good science fiction. This means you would need large populations to fund your mining colonies, your research, your ships. Maintaining large populations in multiple locations becoming quite useful, especially if they can devote their time to producing wealth. Which means you need ships to protect them, planets to house them, and risk them being attacked.
I don't think I'm reinventing the wheel here. Steve is has already done a lot in this direction, and I'm not trying to imply that my ideas will be something that has never occurred to him. But I'd love to hear if other people have other experiences. Do you find wealth as plentiful as I do? Would it be interesting to need to maintain large civilian populations to fund mining efforts? What would these new uses for wealth change about research, or maintaining large numbers of ships? How would this improve civilians, since trade can generate a LOT of wealth?
Thanks for sticking with me through all of this, I look forward to hearing what people think about my little bit of gametheory.
A major wealth sink for me is the research cost, more often than not it is more than half of my expenditure. Maybe playing with reduced research rate lowers this by a lot and wealth seems to be easy to come by?
Eh. I'm playing at 25% research speed right now and still having trouble with wealth. Research is certainly expensive, but it's not hard to spend everything you earn; just build more construction factories!
Yes... I think that lower research speed actually make wealth cost a more precious thing as you really have time to build more than you often can afford. Especially research, shipyards and troops can become quite expensive at times.
A major wealth sink for me is the research cost, more often than not it is more than half of my expenditure. Maybe playing with reduced research rate lowers this by a lot and wealth seems to be easy to come by?
Eh. I'm playing at 25% research speed right now and still having trouble with wealth. Research is certainly expensive, but it's not hard to spend everything you earn; just build more construction factories!
Another simple way of using wealth would be to fund the culture and development of your worlds so it would simply increase production, trade and research but the amount of increase should be exponentially more expensive for more production capacity. The cost should be based on the population of said colony not the amount of buildings.
We already have this, practically speaking. Production costs wealth, research costs wealth, and adding more capacity of either costs wealth to build the buildings. It wouldn't change the game; just a balance change.
I have always wanted player created commercial ships to cost maintenance in the form of wealth...
I don't like this option, in my game i disable the Civilian Shipping lines and only use commercial ship build by me.
If you increase the cost of commercial ship or give it a maintenance, it will only bring to mainly use the civilian line or to spam the financial center.
it won't bring anything interesting to the game, just one more step or ruin one playstyle.
A major wealth sink for me is the research cost, more often than not it is more than half of my expenditure. Maybe playing with reduced research rate lowers this by a lot and wealth seems to be easy to come by?
Another simple way of using wealth would be to fund the culture and development of your worlds so it would simply increase production, trade and research but the amount of increase should be exponentially more expensive for more production capacity. The cost should be based on the population of said colony not the amount of buildings.
I have always wanted player created commercial ships to cost maintenance in the form of wealth...
Weapons already received a new penalty in the form of maintenance failures. Which means you need to build more MSP which means you need more maintenance facilities and these cost wealth and minerals. Let's not start changing game parameters based on very little first-hand experience. Even twenty games from one player might not be illustrative of a problem if the playstyle is always the same. Father Tim has harped about this many times - Aurora supports several different types or flavours of play currently. We should always be very careful that we don't ruin one while trying to improve another. So while for your playstyle wealth isn't an issue at all, it definitely is an issue for a different playstyle - I know this both from posters on the forum as well as my own games. Thus, if Steve changes the wealth generation and/or requirements so that your playstyle gets more challenging, it might ruin my playstyle.
What I find is that my finances only get strained when ive got 10k or so ordnance factories busting out missiles all the time.
same here, soon as my nation switches to a war footing, my finances are thin.
