Oh, I understand now. I am surprised to learn that unused industry sits there and accumulates. So, if I instruct a system with 200 gears/turn to build nothing, then four turns later I come back, I can insta-build an 800 gear dreadnaught? Actually I don't like that. In most 4X games, you lose that unused overflow. Others may disagree, but I view storage of unused industry as a bug to be fixed. Then my slider will work great.

TheManInRoomFive wrote:
"how do you suggest solving the problem of losing leftover industry is dealt with, then, when we -don't- want it converted?"

Enable the building of storage facilities. With a cap on how much they can save, acting as a buffer, and then let left over production after that be wasted.

Interesting idea...



This also brings to mind the idea of FIDS banks: instead of converting or producing, you could send it into storage, and it would accrue low interest. The more you put in/the longer you let it grow, the more worthwhile it would become.



The logical reasoning behind such a feature would be iffy, though... I could see it work with dust, but in terms of Food, Industry and Science, the values are more representations of man-hours of work than something that could accrue interest like cash.



Not sure how it would work, exactly... but I think I'd like -some- way to "invest" various types of production, which would add a "do you want a little bit now, or more later?" aspect to strategy.

Kingherod wrote:
Me either. I think they just need to notify you when you are not producing something to help the process a bit, but the one turn reserve is not a bad feature.

I could definitely go for an alert like that. Maybe something like the one for tech, which simply doesn't let you end your turn until you choose -something-. Shouldn't be hard to implement, seeing that the tech one already exists.

supersoaker9 wrote:
Really? I thought it only carried forward 1 turn.

It does only carry over for 1 turn, I tested it.



It's true that a full turn* of absolutely no production will still carry over (i.e. it doesn't only carry over when you finish a project that cost less Industry than your output for that turn, as I originally suspected), but you can't keep stacking this turn after turn.



*I didn't run exact tests, but I tried "saving up" for 5-6 turns, and I still wasn't able to get more than about two turns' worth of production when I finally queued up a whole bunch of cheap projects after. It might be a bit more or a bit less than a full turn, but I don't think so; that seems like it would be too complicated for nothing.

davea wrote:
Oh, I understand now. I am surprised to learn that unused industry sits there and accumulates. So, if I instruct a system with 200 gears/turn to build nothing, then four turns later I come back, I can insta-build an 800 gear dreadnaught? Actually I don't like that...

Really? I thought it only carried forward 1 turn.

GC13 wrote:
That is very unexpected! I'd use that gleefully, since it makes my life so easy, but like you I worry it might be an exploit.

If you actually tested and confirmed this, then I definitely want Davea's sci/dust slider for some realism.



Seriously, WOW! Close down a GM plant for 10 years and reopen it, then suddenly 1,000,000+ cars appear out of thin air?! Wow, if only.

ElegantCaveman wrote:
@mabalogna:Honestly, I wouldn't even call this a bug. It doesn't leave much room for abuse (at most, it gives you an extra turn when you're unsure on what to build). But it can be a nice safety net if you forget to build something some turn. That's happened to me before, and I'm sure it'll happen again. I'm glad that I didn't lose my industry now.

Me either. I think they just need to notify you when you are not producing something to help the process a bit, but the one turn reserve is not a bad feature.

"how do you suggest solving the problem of losing leftover industry is dealt with, then, when we -don't- want it converted?"

Enable the building of storage facilities. With a cap on how much they can save, acting as a buffer, and then let left over production after that be wasted.

@mabalogna:



1) Honestly, I don't understand what you're saying, so I can't comment. Sorry.



2) This is what I just said. Leftover industry when you finish something can be used for whatever you build next. I wouldn't want that leftover industry to automatically get converted into dust or science.



As for your correction, you got me curious so I tested it as well. You're right, an empty queue does stack, but only for one turn. You can't do nothing for 5-10 turns then just build something really big in one shot.



It's still a bit more than I thought, though, but not by much.



Honestly, I wouldn't even call this a bug. It doesn't leave much room for abuse (at most, it gives you an extra turn when you're unsure on what to build). But it can be a nice safety net if you forget to build something some turn. That's happened to me before, and I'm sure it'll happen again. I'm glad that I didn't lose my industry now.

moving a queue can be useful for sudden changes. Such as a war.



It would also be nice if you can queue all colonies to build the same thing.

1) You can drag and drop items in the queue to move around their order, instead of removing and then adding the conversion again. The real solution here would be if you can CTRL+CLICK a bunch of systems and queue up the new building you want, and then queue in the conversion you want to come after so that all those affect systems will do the same thing; this worked really well in Civ4 whenever I wanted to make all my cities build the same unit or building.



2) The only production that carries over is what wasn't used on the turn a building/ship finishes, i.e. you have 10 production left to finish a building, and your 100 prod system finishes it - those 90 prod points get added onto your next in queue; this works the same for research. It's because of this carry over that your highest production systems are able to turn out 2, sometimes 3 destroyers per turn. this is the same game mechanic used in the Civ franchise, and atleast in Civ4, there were a few strategies that revolved around exploiting the over flow as much as possible.



CORRECTION:

This must be a bug because production does stack if the queue is empty. Just tested it out ingame and had a building that was going to take 2 turns - ended turn with the empty queue and it was down to 1 turn.

davea wrote:
Oh, I understand now. I am surprised to learn that unused industry sits there and accumulates. So, if I instruct a system with 200 gears/turn to build nothing, then four turns later I come back, I can insta-build an 800 gear dreadnaught? Actually I don't like that. In most 4X games, you lose that unused overflow. Others may disagree, but I view storage of unused industry as a bug to be fixed. Then my slider will work great.

I don't think that's how it works. I haven't really tested, but from what I can gather, you get a little bit of overflow when you finish a project, nothing more. If you don't use it up right away, you lose it. You can't stack it up turn after turn. I'll give an example with some arbitrary values:



Say your system has and Industry of 500.



Say you build something that has a build "cost" of 700. Also say you don't queue up anything after it.



It'll take 2 turns, and there'll be 300 industry points just "floating" there.



So you go back to that system to give it a new build order. Say this time you build something that has an 800 industry "cost". Normally, it should take 2 turns to finish (since your output is only of 500/turn), but because of that 300 you have just "floating" there, it'll use that up and actually finish the new project in 1 turn only.



On the other hand, if you don't give that system any build orders and you end your turn, that leftover 300 will just disappear. The next turn, you'll be back to your usual 500.



What made me realize this is building relatively low-cost things after finishing a bigger project. You can sometimes end up building a bunch of "cheap" things all at the same time.



Actually, a good example of this is colonizing a new planet from within a system that's already quite advanced. I'll give you a "real-world" example with the actual values:



Take a system that has an industry output of 800, you're late-mid-game. Let's say it's a big system with 6 planets in it. It's one of the first systems you've colonized, 5 of the planets are populated and doing well, but the 6th is a tiny Barren with a negative anomaly on it, so you never really bothered to colonize it, as there was always something more pressing to do.



But you've reached a point where you're doing well, you're not at war, you've built all the improvements you wanted on that system, so you decide that it's time to colonize that tiny Barren and "fix it up" a bit.



So you go ahead and give the colonize order, but you don't queue up anything else because you want to build the exploitation the next turn, and if you queue up a bunch of stuff straight away, you're afraid you'll forget to do that.



You end your turn, the planet gets colonized. So you go back to it, decide to up your science a bit and build a global tech park exploitation on it. Your new planet also has a moon and a minor anomaly, so you decide to scan the moon and "fix" the anomaly while you're at it. With that done, you queue up a couple of Destroyers (which happen to have a 550 construction cost).



To your surprise, you notice that -all- of these things will be done the next turn.



Why? You're building quite a lot of things... how can they all be done so fast?



You're operating with two turns' worth of industry so, in this case, 1600.



- Colonization, from last turn (70)



- Global Tech Park (44)

- Moon Survey (110)

- Minor Anomaly (200)

- Destroyer (550)

- Destroyer (550)



Total: 1524/1600



You actually still have 76 left, which would be added to whatever you queued up next, and which would still be added if you just end your turn right there and give a new build order next turn.



Now, what would happen if your slider idea was actually in the game, without there being an override?



So you colonize your planet that first turn (70 construction), and all the leftover construction (a whole 730!) gets converted into whatever mix of dust and science your slider is set to.



The next turn, you queue up those things listed above. How long will they take?



- Global Tech Park: 1 turn

- Moon Survey: 1 turn

- Minor Anomaly: 1 turn

- Destroyer: 2 turns

- Destroyer: 2 turns



An extra turn for the ships. Not the end of the world, especially since I said that you weren't at war and things were calm at this juncture in your game. But still, that's an extra turn to wait for them.



What if you were playing multi-player, and you see an adversary's scout pop into view near that system? You don't have any other ships nearby, so you can't kill it, but you don't want him to just go and get a good look at your territory. That scout can move fast, so if you don't catch him now (he just ran out of turns on one of your systems), you might not get a chance for a while. But if you had those ships now instead of next turn...



Sometimes, 1 turn is all that's needed to make the difference. Of course, that industry isn't completely wasted, it's still been converted into dust or science or both. But converting those industry points might not have been the best thing to do.



All I'm saying is that I wouldn't want it to happen automatically without the ability to toggle it off in some cases.

davea wrote:
Oh, I understand now. I am surprised to learn that unused industry sits there and accumulates. So, if I instruct a system with 200 gears/turn to build nothing, then four turns later I come back, I can insta-build an 800 gear dreadnaught? Actually I don't like that. In most 4X games, you lose that unused overflow. Others may disagree, but I view storage of unused industry as a bug to be fixed. Then my slider will work great.

That is very unexpected! I'd use that gleefully, since it makes my life so easy, but like you I worry it might be an exploit.

Yeah, isent that what the infinite science/dust constructions are for?

I find it's quite tedious to deal with a number of systems that are producing dust or science when a new improvement becomes available. right now you specifically select which conversion you want and it appears in the queue, blocking everything that comes after it indefinitely. how about instead you can select a standard conversion that the system defaults to whenever the queue is *empty*. then, whenever you want to build something else, like a ship or a new improvement, you can just click it - adding it to the queue (overwriting the conversion). after the ship is built it will automatically resume conversion without you having to select it again.



AI governors habitually do stupid shit (like keep bouncing from 1 terraforming option to another, or never adjusting the planet exploitation to what you need) so this would really make things a lot more user friendly.

davea wrote:
Sorry, why would you *want* to lose it? Are you trying to avoid, say an economic victory to play forever? Can you address this by turning off the economic victory?

Sorry, I forgot a word in my post. I've edited and fixed it now. I meant:

how do you suggest solving the problem of losing leftover industry is dealt with, then, when we -don't- want it converted?

The problem I speak of is the one I mentioned earlier in this thread:

ElegantCaveman wrote:
As much as I like the idea in general (especially the slider, which gives a nice "global control"), I see one pretty major problem with it:



If any overflow automatically goes into dust or science or whatever your setting is set to, then you lose out on leftover industry which you might want to otherwise use in some cases.



Say you have an industry rating of 100 in a system, and you're building something that costs 250 industry, on the third turn, when it gets done, you've got an extra 50 industry just "floating around" which will go towards whatever you build next.



Sometimes I'll queue up a bunch of things and let things run, only looking back at that system when the queue's over. It's pretty much guaranteed that there's -some- run-off at this point, so just because I wasn't continually queueing stuff up, it doesn't mean I wanted to stop building there.



I guess the simplest way around this would be to have a system-specific toggle where you could tell a system to hold on to its "leftovers" once it's done with a queue instead of sending it to the pool.

If you have a dust/science slider and nothing else, all of that extra industry from finished projects automatically goes there, which means you can't you use for actual industry.



As much as I'd like a dust/slider instead of just one or the other when I -do- want to use my industry for those things, sometimes I want to use my industry for industry only, and I wouldn't want to lose those little leftover bits automatically when something is finished and I have nothing else queued up.



As I mentioned in my original post, the only thing I can think of to get around this is if there was a planetary toggle for the conversion, so that you could say "On this planet, I don't want my leftovers converted; industry stays industry".

ElegantCaveman wrote:
how do you suggest the problem of losing leftover industry is dealt with, then, when we -don't- want it converted?

Sorry, why would you *want* to lose it? Are you trying to avoid, say an economic victory to play forever? Can you address this by turning off the economic victory?

+1 to solving this in SOME way.

True.



But as much as I like your idea of a dust/science slider, how do you suggest solving the problem of losing leftover industry is dealt with, then, when we -don't- want it converted?

The idea of automatically moving ind->dust and ind->sci to the bottom does not really help me. My problem is that some turns I need to boost dust in order to reach some goal (retrofitting or hiring a hero) and other turns I want all the overflow to go to science. It is tedious to change ind->dust into ind->sci on all those colonies.

Agree, that should be easy enough to implement... like GC13 said, all it means is that everything with a "∞" should just always remain at the bottom of the queue. I thought it really annoying when I once lined up some system improvements etc in the system's queue and then ignored the system for X amount of turns only to discover that nothing had happened there in the meantime because I'd forgotten to remove the convert-to-dust improvement!

GC13 wrote:
How about if you build something on a system converting Industry into Dust or Science it automatically places that on top of the queue but leaves the conversion in the queue? That way you don't need to click to eliminate and then re-add the conversion, or you don't need to drag to re-order the queue.

That could be a simple and elegant way of doing it actually. Also probably would only be a relatively minor (and easy to make) change from how things are now.



I like it!

How about if you build something on a system converting Industry into Dust or Science it automatically places that on top of the queue but leaves the conversion in the queue? That way you don't need to click to eliminate and then re-add the conversion, or you don't need to drag to re-order the queue.