I have been thinking this a long time: how can you miracously put up buildings simply with cash, especially if it is beyond limits of the labour? In some games you can't rush certain key buildings, which makes completely sense.



I know we gamers are supposed to be god-like creatures who pull the strings and try to make our beloved faction flourish. Still, there is nothing to be done, if you don't have got working hands to build up infrastructure. Additionally, dust (or let's just say "currency") pops up only if people work on it, or have correct lands in their neighbourhood.



In the real world you put people doing certain things because of incentivises, mainly wages. You can put millions of dollars in a project that gets completed, but it still takes time. (And not to mention that not all projects funded by public money is successful, just Google "Ciudad Real airport"). Paying for rushing has similiar mechanisms, but instead of getting stuff done immediately I think it would be better if you only get some bonuses for construction if you set "local wages" higher for production instead of science or agriculture. You still can bring on food via stockpiles. This kind of subsidy-element is dominant on most states in the world.



And one more thing: if you get oriented - let's say on construction - you don't use these construction workers in your high-end laboratories next year for reasearching. You don't do it because of specialisation. I understand that game is a game and is not to be supposed to be too throughoutly designed. I only have noticed how many people have started to think how "easy" running a state could be, which is total illusion, of course.



The next time I am wondering about internal moving-in from one city to another.

... well there is a reason they call it science-fiction, you know.

I see what you mean but i think it`s a nice mechanic. Gotta use the sweet Dust on something, right?

Lol, well of course you're right It's a convention going back to the days of the original Civilization, and it's been duplicated by so many of the games that have followed, not because it's realistic, but because it works for the game.



Of course, not all of these games take place in a world that's realistic from our perspective! One gets the feeling that there's not a lot of specialization of labor in the world of Endless Legend. And the technologies that aid buyouts suggest that you do so by taking advantage of some kind of abstracted slave market. Endless Legend's economic system is almost certainly a far cry from our modern capitalism. The idea of getting things done by providing monetary incentives (paying people to work for the public good, to staff public hospitals and manage dams and whatnot) is relatively modern-- heck, in the long view, even currency itself is relatively modern.



But I do think that it would be interesting to play a 4x game where that's how things worked!

Drauglir wrote:
I have been thinking this a long time: how can you miracously put up buildings simply with cash, especially if it is beyond limits of the labour? In some games you can't rush certain key buildings, which makes completely sense.

Dust is not "cash". Dust is super advanced nanomachines with network intelligence and computational capability designed by the most advanced alien civilization to ever exist, the endless. An ascended race who abandoned their biological origins to become several factions, the virtual endless lived entirely inside simulations, the concrete endless in robo bodies, etc.

Dust is mistakenly believed to be "magic" by the natives of auriga (the homeworld of the endless). The lore is all over the place. But primarily see the lore of endless space as well as the endless legend faction videos and quests. At the very least the opening video for the roving clans

Dust can be used to infuse individuals, making them immortal and giving them amazing powers of both body and mind. It can be used to instantly build anything you want. It can be used to transform equipment and retrofit what would otherwise be hard to change (aka, rebuilding a spaceship to have different techs inside)

Really, in the "endless" setting, Dust is used as cash because it is valuable, after all it is an adaptable power source, a luxury that can keep you young and make you happy, a multi-use building material, and an omnitool all rolled into one. When heroes get paid it's both their salary and their food rations, when you quick-build it's the material, the extractors, the builders and the pay for specialists, and on and on for each function. Dust is a miracle material left behind by the Endless, and even just by its relic status it would be valuable anyway, but it is the most useful thing known to the various species, and thus he who controls the Dust controls the universe, with apologies to Frank Herbert.

I think the general assumption is that you preserve your usual workforce and outsource said project to a third party. You might argue that would still take time in itself, but that would be a fairly complicated gameplay mechanic. Especially if its already partially completed and you just want it to be finished a few turns earlier.

taltamir wrote:
Dust is not "cash". Dust is super advanced nanomachines with network intelligence and computational capability designed by the most advanced alien civilization to ever exist, the endless. An ascended race who abandoned their biological origins to become several factions, the virtual endless lived entirely inside simulations, the concrete endless in robo bodies, etc.

Dust is mistakenly believed to be "magic" by the natives of auriga (the homeworld of the endless). The lore is all over the place. But primarily see the lore of endless space as well as the endless legend faction videos and quests. At the very least the opening video for the roving clans

Dust can be used to infuse individuals, making them immortal and giving them amazing powers of both body and mind. It can be used to instantly build anything you want. It can be used to transform equipment and retrofit what would otherwise be hard to change (aka, rebuilding a spaceship to have different techs inside)

Ok, fair enough. I am trying to find a new approach for using "currency". For example, I really like the way Vaulters breed.

Regarding the plausibility of buying out items, I'm reminded of a quote from Alan Emrich, lead designer of Master of Orion 3: 'It's a science fiction strategy game, with priority in reverse order'. In other words, it's a game first and foremost, then strategy, then fiction, and finally whatever science will fit into the rest.

Drauglir wrote:
I really like the way Vaulters breed.

Wait, what? Is this from some kind of adult-only expansion pack? How did I miss that?

I think he meant Broken Lords. they "breed" by turning dust into more of them, right?



One "turn" is not one day. It might be a year, or even more. there's many buildings and infrastructure that are built in less time, when the builders are serious and have enough money.

one population point is not just one person either.

when you move food workers to science, you don't tell farmers to go to the lab, you tell them to produce whatever wanted by the already-existing scientists, so the scientists could experiment or something.

I do it all the time. Dust is basically nanites..

Dust... is... more than nanites. Dust is a collection of subatomic, pseudo-barionic, networking machines. That's right, Dust is smaller than ATOMS, the fundamental unit of barionic matter, and it has networking potential and COMPUTER POWER at that level of smallness. When properly energized, collected, and applied it can transform one element into another, gather the released energy, and do it again until the heat death of the universe and it has no more elemental atoms to convert. Chiseling rock, cutting wood, and then making all the refined building materials move to where they need to be is trivial for Dust, and it wonders why you're wasting its time doing it while it slips between the dimensional branes of the multiverse as proposed by String Theory.



The complexity, and sheer small-nes of Dust is why, even in Endless Space, there's no, like, technology called "Artificial Dust." Dust practically transcends matter and energy, and would likely take a fundamental leap, and consequent shift in any race's understanding of matter and energy to even begin planning out, let alone building, a conceptual prototype.