Consumer Goods seem like an arbitrary extra step and useless in its own merit

[Wurdle]

I would like for Consumer Goods to be more than just an intermediate step for research/alloys (the real resources of the game) or a growth limiter in the form of upkeep.

Without having its own independent uses, Consumer Goods are not fun to manage and tedious. I never look at a surplus Consumer Goods as a good thing, in fact if it's not as close to 0 as possible I begin wondering why my economy isn't being run at its maximum potential. Why is that? They simply aren't useful on their own; they are entirely a means to make one of the two important resources in the game 1) research or 2) alloys.

At the very least, minerals and energy have their own independent uses outside of generating the big two. You need minerals to build buildings, build mining stations, energy to clear tile blockers, to trade on the market, to buy extra services from the various non-empire factions in the game. I love the design of minerals and energy in regards to the new economy, they are necessary in their own utilities but also necessary to convert into another resource which is the final goal of the civilization as a whole (the big goals of all civilizations being to either grow, research, or fight/defend).

Consumer Goods seems to be something tacked on and adds an unnecessary level of complexity that creates a tedious experience. Now not only do I micromanage my conversion of minerals -> alloys, but I have to micromanage both minerals -> consumer goods and then furthermore consumer goods -> alloys. I am never satisfied having a surplus of Consumer Goods, but neither am I happy with a deficit.

Some of the other exotic resources suffer, I believe, in the same way from a lack of usage. Oh boy nanites! Oh what? I can only enable one single edict with them? Look at the new implementation of Gases, Motes, and Crystals: not only are they necessary for building higher tier buildings, high level ships, but they also have unique edicts. They are multifaceted while both Consumer Goods and certain other exotic resources seem lackluster or, even worse, unnecessarily complex.

I've got several solutions:

1) Get rid of it. It's tacked on and serves no other function. Minerals converting to alloys is a great level of depth and complexity because each have their own use outside of the conversion. Consumer Goods has the additional headache of being an upkeep, which in the new version of the game is a headache as Paradox seems to have gone wild with arbitrary empire growth limiters (housing!, amenities!, cohesion!, admin cap!, crime!, upkeep for tier 2 in exotics!, upkeep for pop with CG!). Yes, the game is technically more 'complex,' but it's tediously complex. A big civilization has a lot of upkeep? Okay fine. Does anyone really enjoy checking out sixteen different resources every month to make sure I'm not going out of my limits? Personally I can't stand it.

2) Find more uses for Consumer Goods. Why are energy credits traded on the market? Why not consumer goods? Currencies may or may not differ between civilizations and empires, but surely two civilizations trading in consumer goods for primary resources is a basic economic principle. If consumer goods were the standard currency of the market place to be used to invest in other resources, it wouldn't seem too weird and would make an excellent reason to stock up on consumer goods and give them a wide variety in usage. A few more edicts for consumer goods couldn't hurt, either, maybe something akin to Tax Returns - Governors, Rulers, Admirals and Generals cost -50% recruitment and -50% upkeep.

3) Link Consumer Goods to potential growth. This is an entirely new idea I've had to solve the issue of "Why stockpile food and consumer goods to begin with?" Paradox took a step in the right direction with the new planetary edict that increases growth by spending food, but I feel like the larger your stockpile of food and consumer goods, the greater your population growth should be. I'm not well versed in math, but maybe something along the lines of: if your food (or CG) stockpile is proportionally larger than your population, you should get a growth increase. So let's say you have 5000 food stockpiled and your population is at 25 pops. You would get an growth of +50% (this number is totally arbitrary and would have to be tweaked). But if your population grew to 50 pops because of that growth spurt, the growth would slow down to +25%. Eventually your population could even be so huge as to be a burden and you'll have to build additional farms or suffer negative growth penalties. This could be made more complex by adding in available consumer goods as an additional factor or even having surplus housing an amenities as additional factors. Once again, a big pet peeve I have is that amenities, housing, consumer goods are all things I only worry about when they are either negative or positive. If they are 0 or hovering right about 0, I'm pretty happy because I'm stretching my empires' potential to its highest current capacity. This is tedious, but also seems wrong in the sense of the lore.

All right. That's my rant. If anyone agrees or disagrees, feel free to comment. Try to not to get off topic too much talking about the poor AI or game lag. Those are big issues that should be fixed first!

 

[M@ni@c]

I agree consumer goods aren't all that exciting right now. But for the record, one somewhat meaningful decision they allow you to do, is decide whether you want to pay the upkeep of your pops through minerals (through artisan factories) or trade (through the civilian economy trade policy).

 

[eagletrekkie]

I mean I agree with you that they've gone upkeep crazy, but to me, the unnecessary upkeep is amenities, not consumer goods. If anything, Amenities and Consumer goods should be rolled together and then can have the stacking bonus. I don't see the need for more than one local resource to keep up with, and housing makes more sense than amenities.

 

[FriendlyEntropy]

I would like for Consumer Goods to be more than just an intermediate step for research/alloys (the real resources of the game) or a growth limiter in the form of upkeep.

Without having its own independent uses, Consumer Goods are not fun to manage and tedious. I never look at a surplus Consumer Goods as a good thing, in fact if it's not as close to 0 as possible I begin wondering why my economy isn't being run at its maximum potential. Why is that? They simply aren't useful on their own; they are entirely a means to make one of the two important resources in the game 1) research or 2) alloys.

I agree, but when you say "entirely" I believe you're forgetting that you can use Consumer Goods in the Decisions tab in the Planet Summary menu.

 

[Wurdle]

I agree consumer goods aren't all that exciting right now. But for the record, one somewhat meaningful decision they allow you to do, is decide whether you want to pay the upkeep of your pops through minerals (through artisan factories) or trade (through the civilian economy trade policy).

Oh yeah I love that feature, but it seems I always opt for Artisan Factories as they seem more efficient.

 

[Wurdle]

I agree, but when you say "entirely" I believe you're forgetting that you can use Consumer Goods in the Decisions tab in the Planet Summary menu.

youtube.com/watch?v=_YUAu0aP4DA&feature=youtu.be&t=1342

 

[Secret Master]

I never look at a surplus Consumer Goods as a good thing,

Distribute luxuries decision for extra amenities and immigration?

Also, since gestalt minds don't use consumer goods, it's (technically) and advantage they have.

 

[LeonOfOddecca]

I mean I agree with you that they've gone upkeep crazy, but to me, the unnecessary upkeep is amenities, not consumer goods. If anything, Amenities and Consumer goods should be rolled together and then can have the stacking bonus. I don't see the need for more than one local resource to keep up with, and housing makes more sense than amenities.

I made a similar suggestion on another thread, but I actually like the idea of a local upkeep in addition to housing, so I'd prefer if upkeep is paid using amenities rather than consumer goods. Housing is not a produced resource, which makes them different enough from amenities to present different challenges. On the other hand, there is no need for more than one global resource to keep up with, because global upkeep is a very simple type of challenge (just build enough of the relevant production building), and we already have food for that. So my preference is to make amenity consumption be strata dependent, like consumer goods are now, and get rid of consumer goods pop upkeep entirely. In addition, all amenity producing jobs should have a consumer goods upkeep. So in effect, pops still would consume consumer goods, but only via amenities.

 

[LeonOfOddecca]

I would like for Consumer Goods to be more than just an intermediate step for research/alloys (the real resources of the game) or a growth limiter in the form of upkeep.

Without having its own independent uses, Consumer Goods are not fun to manage and tedious. I never look at a surplus Consumer Goods as a good thing, in fact if it's not as close to 0 as possible I begin wondering why my economy isn't being run at its maximum potential. Why is that? They simply aren't useful on their own; they are entirely a means to make one of the two important resources in the game 1) research or 2) alloys.

I think you have your facts wrong. Consumer goods aren't used for alloys. Alloys are produced entirely from minerals. Consumer goods are used for research, unity, amenities, and direct pop upkeep.

 

[Wurdle]

I think you have your facts wrong. Consumer goods aren't used for alloys. Alloys are produced entirely from minerals. Consumer goods are used for research, unity, amenities, and direct pop upkeep.

You're totally right. Guess Consumer Goods are even more boring than I misremembered them to be.

 

[LeonOfOddecca]

You're totally right. Guess Consumer Goods are even more boring than I misremembered them to be.

I kind of disagree with you. I think the problem is not with consumer goods per say, but with how upkeep is handled. I quite like that consumer goods are this intermediate resource that you can direct where you need. Furthermore, your point about aiming for a surplus of 0 isn't an argument against consumer goods. Compare it to the real world where a business tries not to have too much liquidity because money that's just lying in the bank isn't doing anything. It should be invested in something more productive. (Of course, you generally do want some liquidity, either for a rainy day, or because you need to save up for an investment).

 

[Foefaller]

I think there needs to be more decisions and the like to spend CG on. Things like Economic Policy suggest that there is suppose to be some sort of a choice on whether to focus using your minerals on alloys to make navies or Consumer Goods to improve amenities/research/unity/living standards, only all those things you use CG for are upkeeps, so I think most players usually see the cost as "required," and not that you are making a conscious choice to focus your economy on one thing over the other. Makes the whole thing seem more like an unnecessary extra step than it has to be.

Distribute luxuries decision for extra amenities and immigration?

Also, since gestalt minds don't use consumer goods, it's (technically) and advantage they have.

They also require more pops dedicated to Maintenance drones than traditional empires need for entertainers. Part of it is not having clerks... but if you consider those jobs to be (mainly) regulated to technician jobs to make up for the lack of EC from trade, I wonder if the the number of # of additional pops you need for amenities as a GC is made to be close to how many Artisans that reg. Empires need to create the Consumer Goods they require...

 

[Secret Master]

They also require more pops dedicated to Maintenance drones than traditional empires need for entertainers.

Well, I did say "technically" in my post with that comparison.

There's a long thread about how machine empires are horribly underpowered in the current patch.

EDIT: What I mean to say is that with a rebalance to machine empires, their lack of need for consumer goods might be a real advantage.

 

[meiam89.]

If you don't use alternate living condition it might seems like consumer good are uninteresting, but they matter a lot when you start playing with all the different one like stratified economy, shared burden, slavery and so on.

Yeah it could be more interesting, but it's pretty much bottom of the barrel in terms of stuff I wish paradox would spend more time on. Even if you limit yourself to just economy, I think amenities and habitability need an overhaul instead, trade also could be expanded to be made more interesting. Consumer good

 

[Jman5]

I think either Consumer Goods needs to be pulled or Amenities need to be pulled. There are just way too many resource types and it doesn't add fun or depth. It just makes it needlessly more convoluted.

 

[evilcat]

There are some decissions:
Do i use stratfied economy or slavery, or maybe academic privilege?
Do i go with civil economy (technology) or Militarized (fleet) ?

It is not much, but this is some choice.
Maybe we need more local goods decision like "Research project" (boosting science output) National Hollyday (Boosting Unity) or Obedience Lottery (boost local ethos attration) or Welfare State (cuts crime and unemployment)

Unfortunetly stuff like Academic Privilege seems to not be very good since might as well build more labs, but maybe one day it will work better.

 

[Masoz]

A few things:

- Alloys compete with consumer goods for minerals. That's actually their main purpose: To make sure you dump minerals back into the civilian economy instead up using 100% on alloys to immediately doomstack and kill everyone. That's their primary purpose, and it's the equivalent to the mineral upkeep for pops pre-2.2.

- If you have an excess, consider switching to social welfare or utopian abundance (egalitarian only) living conditions to boost pop happiness globally. An empire-wide happiness boost can let you get away with building less amenities and housing.

 

[Wurdle]

I have never had a single game where happiness, amenities, housing, crime, have ever been an issue or impacted my empire negatively. Even if I ignore it they are all so inconsequential since their bonuses are hard-capped and their malus penalties never seem to show up unless you a purposefully tanking your economy.

I do have an issue where I spend 85% of my game-play time cycling through populations and re-arranging them to get mild increases in all my yields, rather than being able to max out a planet's population in 2.1.4, re-arrange it once, and then have a fully optimized planet for the rest of the game.

But that's a rant for another topic: I think the stratified worker population system is unfun, tedious garbage and if they would just let me manually assign jobs I'd be so much happier than toggling up and down on the little tabs for five minutes like I'm some fucking Welsh Corgi herding five thousand sheep through a wooden gate that fits two at a time.

 

[AlanC9]

So you micromanage pops, but don't micromanage housing and happiness?

 

[BoomWolf]

I'm pretty sure taking away the "done planet is done" scenario is a design choice. and I for one am in favor of it.

Basically, you have to keep managing your empire, you can't just let it sit on a static conditions, unless you got the empire type that allows to just stop growth.

Pre 2.2 I've too often find myself just playing on my phone while waiting for things to happen as there was literally no decisions to be made in the entire empire, everything was running, everything was working. once in a while I'd go to a planet and spam build commands/upgrade commands for ten seconds, and then go back to PvZ until the next planet's turn to get spammed came (or the time for war came, and then I actually had stuff to do)

Now, the economy requires constant surveillance, maintenance and decision making. even with my usual tall builds I always have something I can do.

And this game is obviously designed to be played at fixed speed, no pauses (multiplayer rules)
The challenge does not come from being able to min-max everything and micromanage stuff while paused-that's easy.
It comes from trying to do as much as possible as quickly as possible while things just keep happening, and if you fail to keep up it spins out of control.
And when you play that way, even the incompetent sector management governors become an asset, because as bad as they are they take some load off you and lets you focus elsewhere.



As for the main topic of this thread, while I agree a few more outlets of CG would be nice, I find it to be useful, as stated by others, as a means to insure you can't just dump all your production into military at a moment's notice.
And on the other hand, having surplus around actually IS useful exactly because of that. it allows you to switch gears into war economy and tank a negative GC production for a while in case you need it. not always optimal-but useful. (heck, I saved tons of energy in the past for the same reasons, because once my over-the-top fleets left the docks, the upkeep would trigger massive energy penalties. I just HAD to keep a "war chest" to fund me while I'm fighting)