Minor Overhaul to Wealth Generation

[Azuraal (OP)]

This idea comes mostly from the desire for realism though I believe it will also add depth while slightly reducing complexity.

Currently wealth comes from two sources: taxes and financial centres.  But what value do financial workers add that isn't covered by services? It kinda seems like their job it just creative accounting
And what do construction factories do while you aren't building any infrastructures?

My proposal is therefore following, completely remove financial centres and make idle construction factories produce additional trade goods (at no mineral cost) which would be automatically sold to civilians.

Why it would add complexity? It would incentivise setting up construction factories on other planets besides few mega industrial centres.  Additional trade goods would increase the volume of civilian shipping,
and by keeping import/export balanced you increase the efficiency of civilian freighters, since if a planet only imports goods the civilians only make money, and therefore pay you taxes, on half of their trip.

[skoormit]

This idea comes mostly from the desire for realism though I believe it will also add depth while slightly reducing complexity.

Currently wealth comes from two sources: taxes and financial centres.  But what value do financial workers add that isn't covered by services? It kinda seems like their job it just creative accounting
And what do construction factories do while you aren't building any infrastructures?

My proposal is therefore following, completely remove financial centres and make idle construction factories produce additional trade goods (at no mineral cost) which would be automatically sold to civilians.

Why it would add complexity? It would incentivise setting up construction factories on other planets besides few mega industrial centres.  Additional trade goods would increase the volume of civilian shipping,
and by keeping import/export balanced you increase the efficiency of civilian freighters, since if a planet only imports goods the civilians only make money, and therefore pay you taxes, on half of their trip.

Very interesting. I like the idea of having a way to balance import/export of trade goods on each planet.
Some initial thoughts:

It seems like this would eliminate some bits of depth:
1) Managing your allocation of workers between wealth jobs (financial centers) and productive jobs (everything else).
2) Creating specialized planets for wealth creation. You could still do this, but the benefit would be far diminished without financial centers providing the big multiplier on worker taxes, unless the wealth creation bonus of civ admins will apply to this trade good income.

How do we make the income from the production of trade goods with idle factories make up for the extra income lost from financial centers?
Right now, one financial center produces taxes for the 50k workers plus extra income equal to five times that amount.
An idle construction factory would produce the same base amount of worker taxes, therefore the trade goods produced would need to be worth five times that amount in order to provide the same income as one financial center.
But now we have just made things much easier for us:
To balance our income vs expenses, we just have to leave some confacs idle. Right now, idling confacs does not reduce expenses. Keeping a balanced budget requires planning ahead and building financial centers to provide enough extra income to keep up with growing expenses.
We can easily spend saved wealth when needed by activating some or all of the idle confacs. Right now, we can't do that. For example, my current empire has one financial center for every two confacs. The financial center income produces about 25% of my total income, and I run a slight budget surplus. With this change, instead of having financial centers, I would have 50% more confacs, and keep 1/3 of them idle. In an emergency, I could activate the idle confacs, giving me an instant 50% boost in confac output at the cost of 25% of my income. If I tend to keep a savings balance of about 1 years worth of income, I could keep up this deficit spending for 4 years. We don't have an option like this in the current game. We need to consider if this is a good thing to have.

[Azuraal (OP)]

Some initial thoughts:

It seems like this would eliminate some bits of depth:
1) Managing your allocation of workers between wealth jobs (financial centers) and productive jobs (everything else).   
2) Creating specialized planets for wealth creation.    You could still do this, but the benefit would be far diminished without financial centers providing the big multiplier on worker taxes, unless the wealth creation bonus of civ admins will apply to this trade good income.   

Managing worker allocation between production and wealth creation would be replaced with managing how much of your industrial capacity you utilise for for national needs vs civilian, which by being more fluid than infrastructure composition allows for more tactical choices.   
For example if a war breaks out you can effectively militarise your planets' industry by dedicating some of their capacity to component production.   

Keeping on top of wealth creation by making sure you dedicate enough of your workers to financial centres is just boring management in my opinion, there are no interesting choices to be made.    Its by my standards the textbook example of complexity without depth.   

And to dedicated wealth planets, I say good riddance.  Entire planet dedicated to financial work is just silly in my opinion, and trivialises what could be a lot more interesting part of the game.   

As to exact numbers and balance, I don't know, this is just the initial idea. 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Some initial thoughts:

It seems like this would eliminate some bits of depth:
1) Managing your allocation of workers between wealth jobs (financial centers) and productive jobs (everything else).   
2) Creating specialized planets for wealth creation.    You could still do this, but the benefit would be far diminished without financial centers providing the big multiplier on worker taxes, unless the wealth creation bonus of civ admins will apply to this trade good income.   

Managing worker allocation between production and wealth creation would be replaced with managing how much of your industrial capacity you utilise for for national needs vs civilian, which by being more fluid than infrastructure composition allows for more tactical choices.   
For example if a war breaks out you can effectively militarise your planets' industry by dedicating some of their capacity to component production.   

Keeping on top of wealth creation by making sure you dedicate enough of your workers to financial centres is just boring management in my opinion, there are no interesting choices to be made.    Its by my standards the textbook example of complexity without depth.   

And to dedicated wealth planets, I say good riddance.  Entire planet dedicated to financial work is just silly in my opinion, and trivialises what could be a lot more interesting part of the game.   

As to exact numbers and balance, I don't know, this is just the initial idea.

I agree... complexity without depth is to be avoided and introducing more dynamic choices is adding complexity WITH depth.

I think this would also go better in hand if civilian trade companies also could loos business and be forced to scrap ships in the process and then have to buy them back at full price if business starting to boom again.

This way you could potentially use the industry for governmental needs but there is a risk of not only lower your taxable income but also to deteriorate the civilian logistical infrastructure as well over time if you use the factories too much.

Disrupting trade might also have impact on planetary moral too. If you don't satisfy trade enough that might have an economic impact on planets civilian population in terms of comfort.

[Droll]

I like the idea of actually making the trade economy matter more as well.

The primary issue is with regards to performance. The main advantage of having civilian shipping not be an important income factor is that you can turn off civilian construction in the mid to late game without having to worry. If we make civilian shipping the major income source then the option to disable civilian construction kind of disintegrates in the late game.

I am actually all for the complete abstraction away of individual civilian trade ships into trade routes between planets. Basically exporters create a trade route between importers and shipping companies can allocate "invisible" ships to them or maybe not ships but an abstract quantity that represents the amount of shipping power the company has at that trade route. Instead of spending their wealth on new ships they spend it on more shipping power which they can allocate as they see fit. This does away with all the ship based calculations and instead you have transportation happen every production increment based on the trade routes total cargo throughput.

Player made civilian contracts would simply create a trade route from suppliers to demanders based on the quantity and type of installation the player wants shipped.

The problem with my approach is that it needs an overhaul to how these ships get destroyed and or otherwise pirated by NPRs and alike. It might necessitate a new "commercial raiding" stance that places military ships along the trade route and effectively "leaks" wealth generation - destroying the shipping power that the companies have spent so much time creating. Trade routes also need to be aware of and ignore alien controlled systems and order danger systems. Trade routes created by players for installations also have the problem of installations that get destroyed alongside the abstract civilian freighters.

[serger]

I don't like current implementaion of Finacial Centers too, just because they really must not be so freely scaleable - finances have to deal with manufacture and service, not creating goods themselves, and in current version you can fill you economy with finances, doing nothing else, and make wealth out of nowhere.

An option of instant swithing between expansion-making and wealth-making manufacturing is not what I'd prefer, it's not an event I can believe in story, that Aurora produces. But we have this instant swithing between completely different kinds of pruduction anyway - there is no preparatory time period of production cycle except of shipyard works in current version. So, I think I have to humble.

But I think it will be nice to have those additional options:

1) To switch mining sector of any colony between national and commercial, smth like we have it now with CMCs. (There is no need to redesign mining - minerals are minerals, commerce needs then as they are.) The same with fuel refining and, in addition, with fuel harvesters (to have an option of letting them sell fuel to commercials, unloading to nearest colony with spaceport).
2) To have an additional type of constructions - smth like Consumer Industry, that will make goods and wealth, be constructed by population in the same way as infrastructure (life-support one), and be boosted by Financial Centers' multipliers instead of them producing wealth directly.

As for abstract shipping - I'd prefer to have a net of mass driver transport routes with transit points at stabilized JPs, with an option to destroy packets by ship-based weapons, in the same way we deal with missiles (surely you have to bring active sensors to detect packets of non-alied empire - they have to have no thermal signature).

[Jorgen_CAB]

An option of instant swithing between expansion-making and wealth-making manufacturing is not what I'd prefer, it's not an event I can believe in story, that Aurora produces. But we have this instant swithing between completely different kinds of pruduction anyway - there is no preparatory time period of production cycle except of shipyard works in current version. So, I think I have to humble.

I also think that we should have some sort of gearing mechanism for industrial production... it could be really simple. When you add factory production to a project it will take some time for that project to run at full effect, it should generally take a few years to reach peak performance... this would then make it a question of how often you want to change industry from one project to the next.

In my multi-faction games I usually abstract this as whenever industry is changed then only half can be applied and this can only be done at the start of every year. The other half will enter the gearing pool. Half of all the gearing pool can then be distributed to new projects every year but you can always distribute at least 5% or up to 10% if you are at war. This simulates the gearing problem of a changing industrial environment.

[Droll]

I don't like current implementaion of Finacial Centers too, just because they really must not be so freely scaleable - finances have to deal with manufacture and service, not creating goods themselves, and in current version you can fill you economy with finances, doing nothing else, and make wealth out of nowhere.

An option of instant swithing between expansion-making and wealth-making manufacturing is not what I'd prefer, it's not an event I can believe in story, that Aurora produces. But we have this instant swithing between completely different kinds of pruduction anyway - there is no preparatory time period of production cycle except of shipyard works in current version. So, I think I have to humble.

But I think it will be nice to have those additional options:

1) To switch mining sector of any colony between national and commercial, smth like we have it now with CMCs. (There is no need to redesign mining - minerals are minerals, commerce needs then as they are.) The same with fuel refining and, in addition, with fuel harvesters (to have an option of letting them sell fuel to commercials, unloading to nearest colony with spaceport).
2) To have an additional type of constructions - smth like Consumer Industry, that will make goods and wealth, be constructed by population in the same way as infrastructure (life-support one), and be boosted by Financial Centers' multipliers instead of them producing wealth directly.

As for abstract shipping - I'd prefer to have a net of mass driver transport routes with transit points at stabilized JPs, with an option to destroy packets by ship-based weapons, in the same way we deal with missiles (surely you have to bring active sensors to detect packets of non-alied empire - they have to have no thermal signature).

I like the idea of mineral packets being able to transit between star systems even if its not extended to trade goods. One of the most annoying things I find is automating mineral transportation.
It would also be nice if I can get the existing civilian shipping to ship my minerals for me between worlds with the help of the mineral reserve system. This creates an emergent mineral economy where planets the are running surplusses in production automatically become exporters whereas planets with shortages become importers.

[liveware]

+1 for interstellar mineral packets. Maybe just through stable JPs?

I also like the industry gearing mechanic mentioned. Perhaps another possibility for this would be for industry to ramp up to the specified percentage of construction capacity. Something like what currently exists in the industry screen, except it takes a year or two (or whatever) for industry to actually ramp up and meet the target construction capacity percentage.

[Droll]

+1 for interstellar mineral packets. Maybe just through stable JPs?

I also like the industry gearing mechanic mentioned. Perhaps another possibility for this would be for industry to ramp up to the specified percentage of construction capacity. Something like what currently exists in the industry screen, except it takes a year or two (or whatever) for industry to actually ramp up and meet the target construction capacity percentage.

I think an excellent way to think of industry gearing is how Hearts of Iron 4 does it. Your industry starts at a % of efficiency and overtime reaches a maximum.