Lack of strategy for edicts

[Piotrzeci]

I'll start by talking about no-brainer campaigns. Fear campaign, drone campaign, research grants, declare saint and obviously healthcare campaign (and probably some more) bring basically no strategic value, they are on as long as you have energy/influence for them, because they just are worth the price and at no situation you don't want the things they give. I don't think it is a well designed feature, if seeing that one of them ended means you go and reset it without any thinking involved. I see no point in Healthcare Campaign - when are you supposed not to use it? Well maybe when you don't have the energy... but then you sell something. Meaning always on.
They could be made into policies like Research grants giving bonus output to scientists, but also increased maintenance.

Then about the new strategic resource edicts, which are even worse. Spend energy to gain sublight speed, weapon damage, etc. Just turn them on always when you go to war, because why not get some bonus strength. I said spend energy, because obviously you don't need strategic resources, just buy them whenever needed.
So it's not just a no-brainer, but also one that requires going through the Market to buy right amount of everything and then turn on right edicts... same lack of strategy, but with more work.

 

[beckermt]

bring basically no strategic value, they are on as long as you have energy/influence for them,

Emphasis mine, because it highlights the strategic decision perfectly. Everything that takes EC competes with everything else. If you're building a surplus to be able to afford those Campaigns each time they expire, then they are by definition affecting your strategic decision-making.

At some point, you made the choice to make enough EC to afford them. Why you made that choice is not clear, but Campaigns are a benefit of that choice.

 

[Losttruppen]

Yeah it's the same choice between spending alloys on ships or expansion, or consumer goods on research or unity production. Ideally you buy everything but you don't have the resources to do that unless you are snowballing hard enough anyways. The choice is between those and what you aren't spending influence or energy on, which would be a lot of things with the market now.

 

[Matoro_TBS]

So your strategic choice is to always make sure you can pay for them? Fine. I don't. When I'm super-wide warmonger expanding to left and right, influence is much better spent on actually expanding than getting some resource buff. I can always build more mines, but I cannot claim space for myself with minerals. Sometimes I play smaller and with no need to expand continuously I run all the edicts to get an edge against my warmongering neighbors.

 

[Piotrzeci]

Emphasis mine, because it highlights the strategic decision perfectly. Everything that takes EC competes with everything else. If you're building a surplus to be able to afford those Campaigns each time they expire, then they are by definition affecting your strategic decision-making.

At some point, you made the choice to make enough EC to afford them. Why you made that choice is not clear, but Campaigns are a benefit of that choice.

But it's a landslide of a competition. No empire will ever be in a situation, when spending few hundred EC on a global pop growth, won't be an obvious "yes". Escpecially, because it's not only that EC can be converted into everything, but everything can instantly be converted into EC, you will always have something to sell and reactivate the bonus.

 

[AlphaAsh]

...

I agree. I think that the current implementation of 'strategic resources' is just as rubbish as the previous implementation. The only one that ever made any kind of sense to me was the first version, and this continuing fail of feature design just strikes me as legacy from the unwillingness to fix tracking bonuses on ships (probably cos performance. k.).

Passive empire bonuses was at least slightly better than this scroll the edict window nonsense.

 

[Losttruppen]

spending few hundred EC on a global pop growth

These scale with empire sprawl. The more you spend on expansion the less you spend on edicts. It's tall vs wide. Sure you might have one running, but to have them all as you suggest is going to cost you other opportunities.

 

[Piotrzeci]

These scale with empire sprawl. The more you spend on expansion the less you spend on edicts. It's tall vs wide. Sure you might have one running, but to have them all as you suggest is going to cost you other opportunities.

What other opportunities? You literally reduce your pop growth and the number of workers, which you can just make into technicians and pay with them for the campaign. A wide empire will make more energy and more of everything, it's not that the price is only affordable for small empires.

 

[AlphaAsh]

Previous version of AlphaMod, when SRs did not stockpile, I had code that kept count of total SRs and applied an increasing passive empire bonus. The performance hit was negligible - the bonus didn't need to be added or removed instantly, and was just checked for yearly.

Worked a treat.

 

[Losttruppen]

What other opportunities? You literally reduce your pop growth and the number of workers, which you can just make into technicians and pay with them for the campaign. A wide empire will make more energy and more of everything, it's not that the price is only affordable for small empires.

I would say that is more a problem with how strong pop growth is and how easy it is to gain resources (trade is really strong, some strategic resources are in higher abundance than you can ever spend while still being in demand on the market somehow, unlimited market) than how edicts are currently implemented. I don't think we should focus on the symptoms of the imbalanced economy rather than the disease itself.

Hopefully they fix the economy in a meaningful way instead of changing things in a vacuum like the overabundance of +6 minerals they just dropped that made early game mineral districts useless. They said they are focusing on bug fixes and balance right now, probably in that order, so I'm willing to wait and see.

 

[AlphaAsh]

...trade is really strong, some strategic resources are in higher abundance than you can ever spend while still being in demand on the market somehow, unlimited market...

Potential levels of surplus are crazy right now, aye. It's never really been hard to get a strong surplus in previous versions either, since casuals tend to be put off a game by shortages (disempowerment doesn't sell, empowerment does), but considering how lethal shortages are to an economy this version (they just kill AIs), I'm not surprised at the over compensation on the other end of the scale.

Unfortunately, once you get a hang of the economy, the silly surpluses just take any risk or challenge out of it and it becomes a chore.

I also agree the market needs some major nerfing as well. It's just too damn powerful. Two words - stock limits.

 

[Tisifoni12]

Edicts, other than the survey one, are basically temporary fixes for if you have a deficit of energy, food, minerals, to keep you going while you address the deficit.

 

[permeakra]

I mostly agree with OP.

While campaigns and resource edicts do have a cost, their associated costs are fairly weak and edicts mostly provide a moderate flat bonus.

I think they could use rework to get more strategic value. Ideally I would like a much higher bonus but an expense of some debuff in different area. Kinda like economy policies work.

Also goddamn it, make edicts run continuously with monthly automatic payments. Keeping ongoing edict active if you want it is a pain in the ass.

At some point, you made the choice to make enough EC to afford them. Why you made that choice is not clear, but Campaigns are a benefit of that choice.

Not really. There are many ways to spend energy, so keeping a healthy income is simply a no-brainer. You need them anyway for terraforming, blocker removal and a lot of upkeep. Comparing to those, campaigns have negligible cost.

 

[beckermt]

At some point, you made the choice to make enough EC to afford them. Why you made that choice is not clear, but Campaigns are a benefit of that choice.

Not really. There are many ways to spend energy, so keeping a healthy income is simply a no-brainer. You need them anyway for terraforming, blocker removal and a lot of upkeep. Comparing to those, campaigns have negligible cost.

It sounds like you're saying that there are a lot of different things to spend EC on and you're making decisions about what to spend it on. That sounds like strategy.

 

[permeakra]

It sounds like you're saying that there are a lot of different things to spend EC on and you're making decisions about what to spend it on. That sounds like strategy.

*annoyed noises*

A simple effort to have some buffer income for maintanance(so you could buff your fleets if you are suddenly at war or you didn't enter a spiral of doom if you got happiness debuff) will give you a sturdy and reliable income you simply have no way sto spend. The excess energy needs to go somewhere. It's nice to have campaigns for that, but there costs are not nearly high enough to make their use a strategic decision.

 

[beckermt]

*annoyed noises*

A simple effort to have some buffer income for maintanance(so you could buff your fleets if you are suddenly at war or you didn't enter a spiral of doom if you got happiness debuff) will give you a sturdy and reliable income you simply have no way sto spend. The excess energy needs to go somewhere. It's nice to have campaigns for that, but there costs are not nearly high enough to make their use a strategic decision.

*annoyed noises*

Those costs scale with sprawl. They can be more expensive for wide empires.

 

[Piotrzeci]

*annoyed noises*

Those costs scale with sprawl. They can be more expensive for wide empires.

What about relative cost to production? Large empires also make more energy, so the (relative) cost is always similar.

 

[Matoro_TBS]

Relative cost is "always similar" only when the economy is similar. In practice I find myself with relatively less energy than smaller empire. With smaller empire trade needs less hassle and pirates eat less of it, as distances are smaller. Huge empires, especially ones that cannot colonize hot, energy-rich worlds, swim in food and minerals while paying a lot more from leaders, curators, campaigns and so on.

Huge energy production is a strategic choice by itself. I usually neglect energy in favor of other resources and manufactories, aiming to keep energy barely positive. I can always get energy by selling stuff, so I feel like it's better use for my planets to mine and make alloys and CGs. This combined to wide empire means campaigns become a significant investment, while I produce so much alloys and science other stuff becomes a lot easier. I end up keeping my energy income stable by selling hundreds of food and minerals.
I guess this is also because I usually start in cold/continental worlds which have little energy deposits compared to hot worlds.
I guess this was just an example of playstyle where campaigns aren't a no-brainer. Sure, I guess I could always buy enough energy to keep them running, but them again I don't care about micro enough to keep reapplying the food->growth decision either.