I would like to suggest the addition of an on/off button for system improvements.



While some ppl might suggest to just scrap unwanted system improvements, there are cases where this feels like bad game design.



To give two of the worst cases:



1st. The system improvement that converts 100% food into production, as someone else complained about it, once it's built your population growth rate is reduced to zero, ofc you can wait till your system is maxed out but there are still cases of random events where you lose population and have to scrap / wait for population to reach max / rebuild something that is not really cheap in the first place.



2nd. Trade route improvements get even worse as there are more then one per system and their need can change from turn to turn as your diplomatic relationships change.

This just forces you to ignore trade all together unless you have the trait to trade with everyone regardless of diplomacy or you play with someone you trust to keep a long friendly relationship.



All mentioned issues are also aggravated by the fact any AI you pick for your systems, sooner or later all available improvements get built, resulting in paying upkeep for unwanted improvements.



Edit:

In order to avoid exploiting this mechanic there can be some penalties, for exemple:

1. a delay of x turns when toggling an improvement on before the benefits gets applied while you pay the upkeep from start

2. you still pay the upkeep of an improvement for x turns after it got turned off

3. you still pay some kind of low upkeep while the improvement is off



I'm sure other ppl or the dev can think of other ideas to balance this out, but one thing i don't agree with is paying the full upkeep for the entire time an improvement is offline, doing so gives you no reason to turn an improvement offline with the exception of the 100% food to production improvement.

I am strongly against this. You could then get the Dust Income improvements everywhere applicable, turn them off and keep your taxes low to boost production etc. If you need some greater amounts of Dust you would simply ramp up the taxes for one round and enable all the improvements. After that revert to the initial state. This would make the Dust income mechanics moot.

The toggling of improvements has so far only been suggested for adaptive industries (ind->food conversion), not anything else.



For some buildings it would of course make more sense to toggle them (e.g. food producers) than scrap them, but if a building is never needed again, scrapping is of course more effective.



I'm not sure this would lead to more or less micromanagement, overall.

I don't necessarily have a problem with toggling improvements given that, even while off, they still require maintenance. This would eliminate the issue vyolin raised...

vyolin wrote:
I am strongly against this. You could then get the Dust Income improvements everywhere applicable, turn them off and keep your taxes low to boost production etc. If you need some greater amounts of Dust you would simply ramp up the taxes for one round and enable all the improvements. After that revert to the initial state. This would make the Dust income mechanics moot.

Then we just need to think of proper ways to implement it while also preventing exploits. For exemple there could be any of the following or all of them:

1. a delay of x turns when toggling an improvement on before the benefits gets applied while you pay the upkeep from start

2. you still pay the upkeep of an improvement for x turns after it got turned off

3. you still pay some kind of low upkeep while the improvement is off



If you found out a way to exploit the mechanic suggested then please use your posting time to come up with an idea to improve the mechanic and avoid such a case.



In the end this will just give players more options, scrap will still be used depending on situation, but there will also be a much needed alternative beside scrap in some cases (food producers that were mentioned are another good exemple).

Sorry that my post was not as constructive as you wished for.

My first idea would have been similiar to your bulletin 1 but all of them seem very reasonable.

Nonetheless I am inclined to stick with Nosferatiel's opinion on micro-managment. This would surely open new possibilities but also it would increase the need for micro-management to make good use of it.



I think it might be most interesting for the +Dust improvements like Xenotourism Agencies.

For Adaptive Industries I think this would be in contrast to its design. In my opinion it is meant as bonus for completely populated system to make use of the food surplus. More like the icing on the cake than a mere side dish.