Fairly often I find myself going through all of my systems on the Empire management screen switching from one industry conversion to the other or adding a new system improvement when an IND CONV is already in the queue. It gets tedious to have to remove the existing IND CONV or drag it to the end of the build queue. I think I may have a better idea.



How about just having a toggle for each system (maybe empire-wide also) - "If the system is idle, convert industry to..." and let me toggle between science or dust. That way you wouldn't even have to manually put IND CONV in the system's build queue at all - it would just automatically happen if the build queue was empty. Nobody is ever going to want an empty build queue without some kind of IND CONV anyways. You could even have a "Pause Production" toggle for if you wanted to pause production on system improvements for a few turns to get some extra science/dust without having to clear the queue.

Have you tried using the AI settings for this? Do you know if it will select those options too?

I'm not sure how the AI handles IND CONV specifically, but I can say that I almost never agree with what the AI wants to build, so I always manage my build queues manually.

The AI governors make local decisions only. They will eventually build every single improvement in a system if you let them. The different governors only select a different order for building the improvements. So they will never decide to help out the empire by contributing dust or sci.



I have suggested a few times that there should be one global slider which allocates overflow/unused capacity between dust and sci. So if you have three systems and one of them is producing something, then the output of the other two systems goes into the slider. If you have set it to 50%, then half the output goes to dust production and half to science.

Actually, that idea with the slider would work too davea. The only potential problem I could see is if you ever wanted to "specialize" certain systems for science or dust.



Also, not to drag my own thread off topic, but the AI building all available system upgrades is a horrible thing - there are some upgrades that are counterproductive in certain systems. For example, building "Careful Sweeping" in a system with less than two moons actually loses you dust/turn.

NecoMachina wrote:
The only potential problem I could see is if you ever wanted to "specialize" certain systems for science or dust.

I don't understand. If you have two systems, each with 50 industry unused, why do you care which system's industry is converted to science and which to dust? All of the improvements you have, which might be specialized, are unaffected.

Also, not to drag my own thread off topic, but the AI building all available system upgrades is a horrible thing - there are some upgrades that are counterproductive in certain systems. For example, building "Careful Sweeping" in a system with less than two moons actually loses you dust/turn.

In general I agree with you, but for Careful Sweeping, this is a common misunderstanding. It is actually +2 *per pop* per moon, which is pretty strong.

davea wrote:
I don't understand. If you have two systems, each with 50 industry unused, why do you care which system's industry is converted to science and which to dust? All of the improvements you have, which might be specialized, are unaffected.

Ya, you're right. Now that I think about it more, the slider system is much better than what I had in mind.

davea wrote:
In general I agree with you, but for Careful Sweeping, this is a common misunderstanding. It is actually +2 *per pop* per moon, which is pretty strong.

Wow! I had no idea - I've only been building it in systems with at least 2 moons. So when you say "per pop" do you mean the population of just that one planet, or the population of the whole system? They really should make the descriptive text more clear & accurate...

That makes a hell of a lot more sense, the amount of time i have not built that improvement because i thought i needed 2 moons to make a profit!

This has in principle already been suggested here: /#/endless-space/forum/28-game-design/thread/12389-ind-sci-ind-dust

This thread has been linked to the former and is moved to the archives.