And while we are speaking of officers getting older; when will we get the chance to research age increasing technology?
Right after Steve changes the officer starting age to a number beginning with '3'.
In other words, heat death of the universe.
https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13463.msg173845#msg173845
Damn you Steve, the universe is dead now :'(
And while we are speaking of officers getting older; when will we get the chance to research age increasing technology?
Right after Steve changes the officer starting age to a number beginning with '3'.
In other words, heat death of the universe.
https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13463.msg173845#msg173845
And while we are speaking of officers getting older; when will we get the chance to research age increasing technology?
Right after Steve changes the officer starting age to a number beginning with '3'.
In other words, heat death of the universe.
...
In further as it stands one can build a 'mothball hangar' that would normally have an insane maintenance cost but can considerably cut down on the maintenance cost of other ships sitting in port, using one designed for the ship above we have:
...
In your example, you build a hangar that costs ~4k bp in order to save ~1.5k MSP per year, while requiring an additional 4,123 tons of maintenance capacity.
Assuming you need to build two maintenance facilities (60BP each) to provide the extra capacity, and with MSP costing 0.25 BP each, your annual savings represents a rate of return on your investment of ~9.1% while occupying 100k workers.
You also have an up-front cost of the shipyard needed to build that carrier (~11k bp, depending on your tech level), and the ongoing workforce that yard requires (almost 10m workers).
You are going to have to make (and use) a lot of these carriers and/or wait a very long time to recoup the cost of that yard.
There are simpler ways to get far better returns in the game.
For example, suppose instead of building that shipyard you build financial centers of equivalent cost.
Let's say 90 fincens. Costs 10.8k bp, and 10.8k corbomite.
Uses only 4.5m workers. Less than half what the yard needs.
Returns annual income equal to 27 times your "wealth per million workers" tech level.
Even if you are still at the starting tech level (100 per million workers per year), and have no wealth creation bonus from your governor or sector, that's 2.7kbp per year.
So a bare minimum rate of return of 25%, using half as many workers.
With a couple tech levels and a modest governor bonus, it's not hard to be making your investment back in two years or less.
And while we are speaking of officers getting older; when will we get the chance to research age increasing technology?
A small decline in a bonus/es could also represent corruption setting in rather than failing health, something that could be remedied by assigning someone else to that post though that would probably just add micro the game?I apologise if this has been brought up before, but would it be feasible to implement a system where commanders also have a chance of losing efficiency bonuses once they reach a certain time in service?
I tend to treat my civilian administrators as abstractions of an entire government apparatus, and hence I assume the efficiency bonuses are tied not to a particular leader but rather to the entire colonial administration of thousands of civil servants. I find this better from a RP perspective because this leads to certain colonies being better than others at certain functions (which I RP as resulting from local expertise, incentives, and infrastructure), hence my colonies feel more real and unique. And it sometimes forces me to make sub-optimal decisions - like building up a new naval base not at the local warp point nexus, but one system over at a colony which is actually good at shipbuilding.
The problem, of course, is that immortal (story character) leaders tend to universally end up with sky-high bonuses of everything. I've been solving this by periodically randomising leader bonuses, but this gets tedious as the game progresses and I would really like an alternative. Essentially, past a certain time in service (say 20 years), I'd like to have commanders start rolling for a small reduction in their bonuses in addition to the usual rolls for an increase. Does this seem reasonable?
There is an East-West split in that assumption, Eastern cultures (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, etc.) place a high value on the elder members of society, deferring to their wisdom, moral authority, etc. In the West, older people are seen as less capable, out of touch, etc.
Partly that is because as you get older, your perspective changes (based on a lot more experience of life) and you value different things (time vs money for example). Younger people generally don't have the same frame of reference (less life experience) so they can't understand that different perspective. In the East, that is understood and the elders are consulted for their hard-earned wisdom. In the West, they just assume older people are 'out of touch'.
So, apart from actual age-related diseases that impair mental faculties, which is covered by the medical conditions in Aurora, I don't subscribe to the Western 'older people are less capable' paradigm. I am certainly far more capable and wise than I was at half my current age, because I have twice the life experience and I have learned from twice as many mistakes
I realise that in your above suggestion, you reference 'story characters' that can't get ill, but being extremely capable is the whole point of story characters.
So, apart from actual age-related diseases that impair mental faculties, which is covered by the medical conditions in Aurora, I don't subscribe to the Western 'older people are less capable' paradigm.
I apologise if this has been brought up before, but would it be feasible to implement a system where commanders also have a chance of losing efficiency bonuses once they reach a certain time in service?
I tend to treat my civilian administrators as abstractions of an entire government apparatus, and hence I assume the efficiency bonuses are tied not to a particular leader but rather to the entire colonial administration of thousands of civil servants. I find this better from a RP perspective because this leads to certain colonies being better than others at certain functions (which I RP as resulting from local expertise, incentives, and infrastructure), hence my colonies feel more real and unique. And it sometimes forces me to make sub-optimal decisions - like building up a new naval base not at the local warp point nexus, but one system over at a colony which is actually good at shipbuilding.
The problem, of course, is that immortal (story character) leaders tend to universally end up with sky-high bonuses of everything. I've been solving this by periodically randomising leader bonuses, but this gets tedious as the game progresses and I would really like an alternative. Essentially, past a certain time in service (say 20 years), I'd like to have commanders start rolling for a small reduction in their bonuses in addition to the usual rolls for an increase. Does this seem reasonable?
If you think financial centers aren't any good, we clearly follow very different approaches to economic growth.
For any given play style that minimizes the use of financial centers, my observation above is moot.
For my play style, which pursues very aggressive economic growth, financial centers are the best investment available in the game (with the arguable exception of terraforming).
I don't think I've ever heard anyone express the opinion that "you're much better off just relying on taxing civilian shipping."
That seems to imply that players make a choice between increasing civ tax income or building financial centers.
But pursuing either one does not reduce the opportunity to pursue the other.
EDIT:
And in fact I have ~1500 financial centers in my current game, with a total population of ~2.5b.
Why? Because I need the income. I always want to build more stuff, and building financial centers increases my income faster than anything else, which then allows me to build more stuff.
There's already a very strong incentive to move production facilities to smaller colonies, because smaller colonies give you the greatest manufacturing bang for your population buck. I don't see how this would make things worse given the other incentives for spreading out industry (mineral resources, proximity to mining sites, local fleet logistics) still exist, and it's not like financial centres are very good anyway (the consensus advice has always been that you're much better off just relying on taxing civilian shipping). Plus given typical homeworld population sizes, I don't think this should be a problem unless you have thousands of financial centres, in which case, why?
If you think financial centers aren't any good, we clearly follow very different approaches to economic growth.
For any given play style that minimizes the use of financial centers, my observation above is moot.
For my play style, which pursues very aggressive economic growth, financial centers are the best investment available in the game (with the arguable exception of terraforming).
I don't think I've ever heard anyone express the opinion that "you're much better off just relying on taxing civilian shipping."
That seems to imply that players make a choice between increasing civ tax income or building financial centers.
But pursuing either one does not reduce the opportunity to pursue the other.
EDIT:
And in fact I have ~1500 financial centers in my current game, with a total population of ~2.5b.
Why? Because I need the income. I always want to build more stuff, and building financial centers increases my income faster than anything else, which then allows me to build more stuff.
There's already a very strong incentive to move production facilities to smaller colonies, because smaller colonies give you the greatest manufacturing bang for your population buck. I don't see how this would make things worse given the other incentives for spreading out industry (mineral resources, proximity to mining sites, local fleet logistics) still exist, and it's not like financial centres are very good anyway (the consensus advice has always been that you're much better off just relying on taxing civilian shipping). Plus given typical homeworld population sizes, I don't think this should be a problem unless you have thousands of financial centres, in which case, why?
It's an interesting idea, but there is one side-effect I don't think we will like.
Higher population colonies will have a greater wealth multiplier than smaller colonies.
Therefore when we spread out population (which we still will do as much as possible, because population growth remains the long-term economic bottleneck), we will be incentivized to leave financial centers on the homeworld (and/or our largest other colonies), and move actual production facilities to smaller colonies.
This requires us to manage production and logistics across many smaller colonies.
Our current system doesn't penalize us for focusing smaller colonies on financial production, which means we don't have to choose between optimizing income and reducing logistical complexity.
