Sick of the Sliders...

[unmerged(20208)]

Ok, I'm actually a game designer myself, with over 20 years of experience going back the board game industry. I don't normally discuss anything related to game design, because I've got to be the most plagurized person in the history of the industry and I long ago tired of the soulless, talentless hacks always waiting for me to speak so they can run off make another decent game instead of using their own worthless ideas. But I can't stop playing this game, because of what it could be it interests me greatly. But I've about had it with the sliders so I am going to break my usual silence and offer some rare advice.

You are only a few steps away from solving your micromagement problem with the sliders. This is a "band aid and string" solution, but the whole game is held together with band aids and string, so it fits right in

Step 1: Combine the "Supply" slider with the "Consumer Goods" slider.

Step 2: Add checkboxes next to all sliders except the consumer goods slider (do not add a checkbox to the Consumer Goods slider, if you think you should you aren't getting it). These checkboxes "auto-balance" the checked slider, and all excess IC is always directed to Consumer Goods where, at the very least, your unused IC is producing supplys, money, and reducing dissent. You can still uncheck the production slider to waste IC (and save resources) if you want. Nothing is lost, there is one less slider, and the sliders now mostly take care of themselves. It's not perfect, but it eliminates 90% of the endless fiddling with sliders. In fact, if the producton slider were checked, you wouldn't even need to adjust it yourself when you added new builds, it would happen all by itself!

Step 3: Problem solved, never tinker with sliders again unless you need to change them for a reason.

 

[Malch]

I agree about the checkboxes, but not with combining Consumer good and supplies. They produce 2 different resources, they are each affected by different aspects of the game (ministers, Diplo sliders, offensives) and they have been seperate since HOI1.

 

[unmerged(37708)]

I also disagree with the combined sliders, its an value which seems imperative to me to adjust individually.

 

[unmerged(20208)]

Any techs that apply to any aspects of either slider (supply, money, dissent, etc) would be unchanged by combining the sliders. The only thing you lose is the ability to seperately adjust supply from the elements of the Consumer Goods slider. The checkboxes don't do any good without combining the sliders, and they should be combined, from a purely game design standpoint, forgetting the nightmare of the sliders, supply belongs lumped in with the consumer goods slider anyway.

But here is the big deal. There would only be four sliders. With the checkboxes, and existing ability to lock sliders etc, you would almost never have to adjust the sliders manually. Most changes you wanted to make would be made through a combination of checking and unchecking boxes and locking and unlocking sliders. You'd almost never actually move a slider manually. Consumer Goods would never go negative, even would be considered bottomed out. Production has priority over Reinforcement and Upgrade, any excess IC above production would always automativally be either in consumer goods or divided equally among Reinforcements and Upgrades. It would all work automatically and you'd almost never need to touch the sliders. This doesn't work with the supply slider being seperate from consumer goods, and the supply slider should be combined with consumer goods anyway.

If you really think this all the way through, you'll see that this is a very simple change that can be done in a patch that pretty much eliminates the annoying sliders without actually changing the game at all.

What is it that you'd think you were losing? If you want more supplys just bump up consumer goods, you'll also get money and dissent reduction in addition to supplys. On the other side, you almost never even need to look at the sliders again. Wouldn't you love it if you never had to move a slider again? This will do that...

 

[Bullfrog]

You are forgetting that the sliders don't neccessarily indicate need but want. Trade, for example, raises or lowers the IC required of a certain category. If you trade excess energy for supplies, the supply alternate will say "we are producing...troops need...supplies traded for-xxx" and the required supply IC will automatically go down. You then need to manually adjust the slider if you want to use the excess IC you have just created. Same for consumer goods. If you have a bottom rung IC# to keep the $ flow positive, it usually ends up as 5-10 IC higher than the minimum level indicated(which is for dissent). This would confuse the auto adjust of your slider. Do you want to keep those 5-10 IC's and let your money go down? or do you want to keep the money flow positive? The trade part of the game makes things too unpredictable to add in a generic slider adjust. HOI would have benefited but the sequel is too in depth economically. Good idea though maybe i'll steal it.

 

[unmerged(20208)]

I had thought of that, it's a "band aid and string" fix, like I said. It's doable in a patch but not simple. The wild fluctuation of the supply value would need to be averaged out so that those "spikes" that you are talking about no longer occur. The Consumer Goods slider can't handle those spikes, as you say. But the only reason those spikes are there is because they didn't have a critical need to eliminate them. It isn't acually all that difficult to average out supply usage and stabilize that value so that those spikes no longer occur.

I haven't actually played this game a lot, it's very interesting because most games made for the last decade suck beyond words. This game does not suck beyond words, it's a big huge mess, but at least there was actual talent behind this game. It's unheard of these days I could drone on and on about how to turn this into Civilization's first true rival, but I don't generally talk about games anymore. All I'm saying is that the sliders have annoyed me enough to make this suggestion. It will work and almost totally automate the sliders.

As for stealing it, haha, go ahead, I'd never use sliders like this Besides, it's been done before anyway... But you do have to keep your mouth shut around game indsutry people, they are the biggest talentless hacks and plagurists I've ever encountered, that's for sure. I've more than earned the right to say that...

 

[unmerged(37820)]

There's a couple of problems with these suggestions:

Reinforcement slider: During offensives, it can "spike" from 5 IC to 500 IC. If the slider was auto-balanced you'd suddenly have no excess IC for producing consumer goods at all. Usually not what you want (not what I want, anyway).

Upgrade slider: It should normally be at 0, but when you research a new tech you may suddenly have hundreds of units that need upgrading, pushing the requirements to 250+ IC. Having the slider auto-balance would again kill all other production.

Production: Here, there's a different problem. You should almost never have full IC allocated to this slider. It's a queue, and the purpose of it is to let you add more units than you can currently produce so you don't have to mess with the production each time a unit is finished and the requirements drop.

Consumer goods: This is the one slider that should be auto-balanced, simply because there's very little use of overproducing (it's better to trade for money if you need it) and the penalties for underproducing are crippling (even a minor dissent increase will cripple you in the long term).

Supplies. Merge with Consumer goods? Don't know. I don't see an overwhelming need for it, but maybe I'm missing the point.

So, what do I think should be done for the sliders? Here's a suggestion:

The way I set up the sliders, it works like this:

First, I set the CG slider as close to the exact requirement as possible. As I said, I trade if I need money and I have never felt any desire to ramp up dissent. This one works well as-is as long as the consumer goods requirement doesn't change. That's because the demand is proportional to your total IC, just like the slider. Auto-balance would be nifty for democracies if their requirements change like in HoI 1, otherwise this one is fine the way it is now. I almost never need to touch it.

Then, there's the remaining four. They ALL share one problem: the demand is an absolute quantity whereas the slider setting is relative to your available IC. That makes balancing these an annoyance. Do I really want to set the slider to a set percentage of my IC (which is variable) when the demand is an absolute number? Maybe. The problem with fluctuations is that the excess is lost, really. So, the easiest fix would be for me to be able to redirect the excess to one of these four sliders.

By doing this, the slider setting would function as a "cap" on the expenditure in a particular category. If reinforcements are set to 5% of my available IC, I can safely leave it knowing that should the requirements for reinforcements fall below that any excess would be used to produce upgrades or new units instead. Conversely, if the requirements rise dramatically I needn't worry since there's a cap at 5% preventing the demands for reinforcements from killing the rest of my production.

That's all, really. This would let you set the sliders and not worry about them unless you want to make major changes (like up the cap for producing reinforcements from 5% to 10% when you intend to launch Barbarossa).

The changes needed in-game are:

- Change the CG slider to an "equilibrium" thing with "zero" (producing just enough to meet demands) in the middle and a positive part (where you produce more money and reduce dissent) and a negative part (that allows you to allocate IC to other things at the expense of dissent). Having it set to "zero" should obviously mean that production follows demand; if you install a new minister you shouldn't need to change the slider (unless you wanted to start reducing dissent, of course). Note that this slider would not be linear as described above. You could make it so, but then it would be more confusing to read, IMHO.

- A radio button letting you set which of the remaining sliders should receive excess production (and the numbers would only go red if that slider had excess production).

- Optionally, include some form of visual feedback showing you what the current demands and production allocations are. The important thing is to show how much excess production is going to your "excess" slider. For example, if I have my sliders set to 35% supplies, 5% upgrades/reinforcements and 55% production, I want to see that due to lower-than-usual demand for upgrades my production is actually getting 57.5% of my production capacity instead of 55%. Note, even though I am expressing myself in percentages here that need not be true in the game. I think actual percentages would be better, though, to emphasise that you are not setting the sliders to absolute values (i.e. any slider you set to 5 IC might produce 6.2 IC tomorrow, so the IC figure is meaningless).

I mostly let the production slider be the "excess" slider simply because the penalty for underproducing is the greatest there (you may lose gearing bonus) so that's the one that most of all needs a constant allocation. The others can be fudged. Alas, the above system isn't perfect since you'd really want to set the production slider to an absolute # of IC instead of a percentage (if you want to maintain X serial builds you want to make sure you always allocate enough IC for those), but you can't have it all. The above would be the best solution considering the current engine, I think.

 

[unmerged(20208)]

I'm not on any crusade to get this changed or anything, I just made a suggestion. If you read my original posts and think it through it does work. It doesn't matter if Reinforcements or Upgrades go to 500 each, because the consumer goods would bottom out at breaking even, it wouldn't ever go negative. Going over on production is not a problem, because you still have the ability to uncheck and lock production if that is your goal. The point of combining supply with consumer goods is that this whole thing wouldn't work unless they were combined. Consider why that is, and you get that all of the problems you are envisioning don't actually exist.

I've been doing this all my life, this would work and make adjusting the sliders at all rare and actually manually moving a slider almost a thing of the past.

 

[Evans]

A very nice idea, I like the idea of it balancing to demand... A simple lock button would still would suit me as a temporary solution in 1.2

 

[unmerged(37820)]

I'm not on any crusade to get this changed or anything, I just made a suggestion.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. All I'm saying is that I think your suggestion would not work as well in practise as it might seem to in theory.

I absolutely agree that the design of the sliders is atrocious, and there are many better ways to do it.

If you read my original posts and think it through it does work. It doesn't matter if Reinforcements or Upgrades go to 500 each, because the consumer goods would bottom out at breaking even, it wouldn't ever go negative.

That wasn't immediately obvious from your description, though I still don't think the effect would be desireable since it would kill my production - or am I missing something else here? Also, how do you trade IC for dissent (underproducing CG) in your model?

Anyway, I think the CG slider is the wrong one to receive excess production. The gain from overproduction is simply not very useful, whereas extra production applied to producing units/replacements/upgrades is very important.

Going over on production is not a problem, because you still have the ability to uncheck and lock production if that is your goal. The point of combining supply with consumer goods is that this whole thing wouldn't work unless they were combined. Consider why that is, and you get that all of the problems you are envisioning don't actually exist.

Well, maybe I'm just not understanding how you envision your solution to work, though I think I do.

I guess combining the supplies and CG sliders is because you want them to be an absolute requirement, never to be neglected. However, that is far from true in the game that is HoI2 because of the ability to trade. Also, there's the matter of keeping a stockpile that means managing supplies simply isn't as easy as you might think it is.

Furthermore, you seem to be making the assumption that excess production is best utilized by producing extra CG/Supplies. That, too, is not true in HoI2. It is much better to turn that into other things.

The thing I don't get is how you're suggesting that remaining production should be distributed among the remaining three sliders. You seem to be concerned with where the excess should be going, but any excess is more or less a case of player error. The interesting problem is the opposite situation: what do you do when production of units, reinforcements and upgrades are each higher than the total IC that is available to you?

In that situation the important thing is that you can decide how the available production is distributed. It is quite possible that units, reinforcements and upgrades each requires 500 IC - but it is absolutely critical that the stupid game doesn't decide to allocate the available IC 33% to each of them in that case. More likely, you'll want the distribution to be 70/15/15 or something.

I've been doing this all my life, this would work and make adjusting the sliders at all rare and actually manually moving a slider almost a thing of the past.

No offense, but there are lots of people that suck at things even after a whole lifetime of trying. Let your ideas speak for themselves instead. If you don't mind, let's work out the results of a sample situation. I think that'll be easier than comparing credentials, and since I don't quite understand how you imagine your solution will work I think it would be enlightening.

I have 250 available IC, and of those I need 50 IC to produce supplies + CG. My production queue contains 225 IC of units, my current reinforcement requirement is 75 IC, and my upgrade requirements is 100 IC. This is a pretty "normal" situation.

What would the possible slider settings be, and how would the production be distributed if I set everything to auto-balance?

 

[unmerged(20208)]

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. All I'm saying is that I think your suggestion would not work as well in practise as it might seem to in theory.

It's actually pretty simple, I've just been explaining it vaguely to save time. You ought to get it after this post...


I absolutely agree that the design of the sliders is atrocious, and there are many better ways to do it.


That wasn't immediately obvious from your description, though I still don't think the effect would be desireable since it would kill my production - or am I missing something else here? Also, how do you trade IC for dissent (underproducing CG) in your model?

This is a fix designed for a patch. It doesn't redesign anything other than combining supply with consumer goods, which if you think about it makes a lot of sense just from a logical standpoint all by itself. You can still move and lock the sliders, so locking the consumer goods slider would essentially render the checkboxes moot until you unlocked CG. So to reduce dissent you could just slide CG up and lock it.

The priority for the checked auto-balance would be Production and then to Reinforcements/Upgrades... meaning that IC first went to Production until that was full, and then is divided evenly between Reinforce and Upgrade. Of course, if one of those has no requirement it would all go to the other, and any excess automatically goes too CG. So if you slid CG up, this would work backwards, and IC would first come from Reinforce/Production evenly, then production, and would max out with everything in CG if you went with everything you had.


Anyway, I think the CG slider is the wrong one to receive excess production. The gain from overproduction is simply not very useful, whereas extra production applied to producing units/replacements/upgrades is very important.

Production has the first priority, so there would never be excess IC if there was a production need. The only way there could be excess IC is if all needs were fulfilled, that's kind of the point. What this basically does is, if all three boxes are checked, the sliders automatically optimize your IC usage. That's why supply has to be combined with CG for this to work, so that "unused" IC has only one logical place to go... CG/Supply.

Well, maybe I'm just not understanding how you envision your solution to work, though I think I do.

I guess combining the supplies and CG sliders is because you want them to be an absolute requirement, never to be neglected. However, that is far from true in the game that is HoI2 because of the ability to trade. Also, there's the matter of keeping a stockpile that means managing supplies simply isn't as easy as you might think it is.

Think of it the other way around. Now whenever you want excess supplies to trade, you'll also get extra money and dissent reduction out of the deal And managine supplies isn't changed either, the CG slider is still the supply slider, you just get more for that IC now.


Furthermore, you seem to be making the assumption that excess production is best utilized by producing extra CG/Supplies. That, too, is not true in HoI2. It is much better to turn that into other things.

The thing I don't get is how you're suggesting that remaining production should be distributed among the remaining three sliders. You seem to be concerned with where the excess should be going, but any excess is more or less a case of player error. The interesting problem is the opposite situation: what do you do when production of units, reinforcements and upgrades are each higher than the total IC that is available to you?

The point is to make the sliders mostly take care of themselves. It's especially hard to keep up with them when you are at war. Have you ever been Japan? Fighting in Rangoon, DEI, Wake/Midway, Russia, and all those other little islands all at once doesn't leave much time to think about the stupid sliders, haha. So the whole point here is to provide an "auto-pilot" for the sliders so that they can pretty much take care of themselves. There may be cases where you might want to uncheck the autopilot and do something specific, but this system will handle things pretty well on it's own.

And when Production, Reinforce, and Upgrade are higher than what you have Production comes first, any excess divded among the other two. So first you would lose Reinforce/Upgrade, and eventually it would cut into your Production. CG (with Supply), of course, would have been bottomed out from the beginning because it is the last place that IC would go.


In that situation the important thing is that you can decide how the available production is distributed. It is quite possible that units, reinforcements and upgrades each requires 500 IC - but it is absolutely critical that the stupid game doesn't decide to allocate the available IC 33% to each of them in that case. More likely, you'll want the distribution to be 70/15/15 or something.

All production first. And the types of situations that you are talking about are exactly why they are checkboxes that you can turn off. 80-90% of the time you'll be fine letting the sliders run on auto-pilot. Wouldn't that be great?


No offense, but there are lots of people that suck at things even after a whole lifetime of trying. Let your ideas speak for themselves instead. If you don't mind, let's work out the results of a sample situation. I think that'll be easier than comparing credentials, and since I don't quite understand how you imagine your solution will work I think it would be enlightening.

I'm trying in this post, let me know if you still aren't getting it, or you do get it and see a fatal flaw. I'm not comparing credentials, I just do have a lifetime of experience with this stuff. If only anyone in the computer game industry cared... they don't like the concept of a game designer. They use the title but they don't hire the people


I have 250 available IC, and of those I need 50 IC to produce supplies + CG. My production queue contains 225 IC of units, my current reinforcement requirement is 75 IC, and my upgrade requirements is 100 IC. This is a pretty "normal" situation.

In this case you are using the production as a cue. I don't typically do that, so my way with these checkboxes is more convenient as it automatically leaves the most available IC for Reinforce/Upgrade. But using the production as a que works fine with the auto-balance checkboxes as well.

If you want to use production as a cue you would want to uncheck the auto-balance box for production and set the IC you want spent on production manually. After that, with the other two still checked, 50 IC would be on CG because it never goes below the minimum required unless you set it there and lock it. The amount that went to Upgrade/Repair would be based on what you set the Production slider at (-50 for CG) would probably be divded evenly unless you spent very little on production (if you covered that 75 any extra would go to Upgrades).

So I guess the sliders might make you change your playing a little, voluntarily, because you might decide to stop using production as a cue so that you don't have to play with the sliders as much. But that would be a voluntary choice, you could still do it your way and the auto-balance still helps you because you still don't have to mess with any of the other sliders.

...and just think about all those times you waste IC because you are busy with other things. That would never happen again, at least any "wasted" IC will always be making you money, building up supplies, and lowering dissent.


What would the possible slider settings be, and how would the production be distributed if I set everything to auto-balance?

If you set everything to auto-balance, all of your IC would go into Production, which is why players who like to use Production as a que would want to uncheck that slider.

I bet you get it now, huh? Like I said, it's a "band aid and string" solution, but it is something that can be done in a patch. That's important, if it can't be done in a patch you won't get it in a patch. This is a whole lot of bang for very little programming buck.

Exactly he kind of thing the industry apparently isn't interested in

 

[unmerged(20208)]

Oops, never tried to use quote on here before. Most of my response is actually in the quote:-(

 

[unmerged(20208)]

While I'm here, I'll add another example.

You could also use the auto-balance in a limited way. For example, checking one checkbox actually turns two sliders on to auto-balance, the one you checked and CG/Supply. So you could only check, say, Reinforcements, manually set Production and Upgrades. If you did this, you would basically be "linking" CG and Reinforcements. The manually set sliders would always remain as you set them, but you could provide a "pool" of IC that will automatically switch between Reinforcements and CG as needed. I think anyone can easily see the usefullness of this ability during periods of heavy combat.

This works the same with upgrades, if you are in a stage of the game where you are very busy with other things and you have upgrades that keep coming up sporadically as sometimes can happen, you can do this same thing with upgrades. Because it changes nothing, other than combining Supply with CG so that there is only one choice for excess IC to go, all it does is greatly reduce all of the messing with sliders. Uncheck all 3 boxes and you have what you have now, but no more lone supply slider although it's really still there.

It really does nothing but good, and doesn't change anything about how or when you can do anything. It just takes over most of the fiddling for you and in most cases does exactly what you would do.

 

[Zebedee]

There are times when I want to burn off some Supply stockpiles (eg after taking Paris or Moscow or Washington) and so I turn supplies right down to get a boost for another area (usually upgrading units but you get my point).

Under this proposed system, I'd be a fool to do it because I'd take a hammering in dissent.

It's also useful to trade IC for dissent without starving your troops. (Especially if you know that an event will clear the dissent eg an election).

It's a useful idea in some respects but it doesn't really fit in well with allowing players freedom of choice in gameplay.

CG/Supply need to be kept separate because they represent totally different things. CG=civillian use of IC, Supply=military use. One might as well just have two slide bars for iC - one marked "Civillian" and the other "military" and then there would be no slider issues at all. No freedom of choice either though.

The ideas are sound. But not for this game.

 

[unmerged(20208)]

There are times when I want to burn off some Supply stockpiles (eg after taking Paris or Moscow or Washington) and so I turn supplies right down to get a boost for another area (usually upgrading units but you get my point).

Under this proposed system, I'd be a fool to do it because I'd take a hammering in dissent.

It's also useful to trade IC for dissent without starving your troops. (Especially if you know that an event will clear the dissent eg an election).

It's a useful idea in some respects but it doesn't really fit in well with allowing players freedom of choice in gameplay.

CG/Supply need to be kept separate because they represent totally different things. CG=civillian use of IC, Supply=military use. One might as well just have two slide bars for iC - one marked "Civillian" and the other "military" and then there would be no slider issues at all. No freedom of choice either though.

The ideas are sound. But not for this game.

You're right, I sometimes accept a supply loss as a form of "reserve IC" and just let some of the stockpile burn for a while to get a temporary boost. That ability would be lost, so there is something that would be lost with this change. Good catch, I had missed that. The question becomes does burning supplies to raise IC make any sense any, and after that even if it does, is it worth lossing this ability for the gain of the change. Certainly people would take sides on this issue.

As for point two, taking advantage of foreknowledge of events that you shouldn't have is more of a design flaw in itself than a reason not to fix something else. But it is also a lost ability that could cause debate.

So there are two minor things that are lost by combining supply with consumer goods. Nothing else is changed so say that there would be "no freedom of choice" isn't accurate at all. But there are, unfortunately, two minor little issues for people to obessess over. It's so much gain for almost no loss, it could even be argued no loss since both losses are questionable features anyway, I would certainly do it, but I know how much gamers hate to see anything ever changed

I'm sure everyone understands what I am describing by now, so I'll just leave this for everyone else to discuss. Unfortunately since it does actually change something I doubt it will ever happen:-(

 

[unmerged(37820)]

I bet you get it now, huh? Like I said, it's a "band aid and string" solution, but it is something that can be done in a patch. That's important, if it can't be done in a patch you won't get it in a patch. This is a whole lot of bang for very little programming buck.

Yes, I get it. It would work - sort of. However, I think it is possible with a smaller fix that is even better since it is even more simple and takes the different functions of the sliders into account:

* CG & Supplies. There really work just fine as they are now (possibly with the exception of nations that change their CG requirements often, haven't played a democratic country so I don't know it they do). There are reasons both to under- and overproduce. Leave them alone.

* Production. Every bit of IC you throw at this one is useful. The player has OK'd any expenses since he ordered the units/improvements built. Setting a minimum level on this one is important, but a max level is unnecessary.

* Reinforcements and upgrades. Sometimes you don't want to upgrade (since you want to keep your old, non-oil-consuming units, perhaps) or reinforce (due to the winter attrition bug, perhaps). Both can also spike heavily. Moreover, the demand should ideally be a 0 (unlike the others). The most sensible option here is a maximum level.

So, if you keep all the current settings, interface, etc. and just redirect any unused production on the reinforcements and upgrade sliders to the production slider it would work quite well. Yes, it might be confusing to figure out how much you're actually producing in this case, but once you get the hang of it you can similarily minimize slider fiddling.

(You could still implement other suggestions, of course. This is just the simplest possible change, but it still takes into account how different the sliders are.)

 

[unmerged(37820)]

The question becomes does burning supplies to raise IC make any sense any, and after that even if it does, is it worth lossing this ability for the gain of the change. Certainly people would take sides on this issue.

See above for how to fix this, too. There's really no reason not to have both: manageable sliders AND the ability to live off stockpiled supplies/exploit event foreknowledge.

I'm sure everyone understands what I am describing by now, so I'll just leave this for everyone else to discuss. Unfortunately since it does actually change something I doubt it will ever happen:-(

Given that you can make it even simpler to implement and remove ALL downsides, I think there is just NO EXCUSE not to fix this. OTOH, I bet they'll just implement the suggestion (pushed by more vocal people) to have better control of the sliders (even though that may actually be more work to implement) - and then not bother trying to automate the sliders.

 

[unmerged(15260)]

Sliders need fixing that's for sure.
In addition to all the other issues i have also seen this:
1. After load my sliders were slightly off (0.08) meaning I i forgot to readjust i would loose my gearing bonus. (I think gearing should not be lost that easy, lets say at least 90% IC on it should be enough)...
2. When i liberate puppet my IC goes down AGAIN forcing me to readjust.
3. Why do all slider locks disapear after load???

The most important slider is production, then CG normally u want those at a fixed amount! For reinforcement,upgrades u never want them above the max IC use. Suplies is very important in being a buffer value, but this one is often much higher or lower than needed. Ok after this analysis what do we do to help us escape micromanagement hell?
1. production slider needs a checkbox called "FIX amount". Sets IC production at amount not percentage! This has the highest priority to be fullfiled. It can be set higher than needed if u want to conserve resources (i never do though...). Also a autoadjust checkbox (autoadjust to exact amount needed for full production) would be nice (whoo now we don't need to have buffer xtra production in the list!)
2. CG goods needs to a checkbox that lets it autoadjust to the exact right level, for 0 disent change. In addition the old slider lock works OK if u want extra money/to lower disent.
3. Reinforcement/upgrades are similar. Mostly u never want to have a higher IC setting than needed. So a checkbox that autoadjusts DOWN from a specified MAX amount.
All excess IC is spent on suplies, including autoadjust from reinforcement/upgrades (except if IC: production is set higher than needed)!

 

[unmerged(37820)]

POJC: If you check out my previous suggestions, they do pretty much what you're asking for. The problem with your suggestions is setting fixed amounts of anything. It just isn't possible. What if your production is set to produce 100 IC of units, and then you run out of rare materials and suddenly produce at 10 IC? There's just no way to ever guarantee a set amount of IC. That's something you'll have to adjust to as a player.

 

[unmerged(15260)]

POJC: If you check out my previous suggestions, they do pretty much what you're asking for. The problem with your suggestions is setting fixed amounts of anything. It just isn't possible. What if your production is set to produce 100 IC of units, and then you run out of rare materials and suddenly produce at 10 IC? There's just no way to ever guarantee a set amount of IC. That's something you'll have to adjust to as a player.

Ok i have to admit that i hadn't read all of it ;-) So our idea was pretty similar, this means we must be on the right track.
Of course resources could be a problem, that why i say that CG+prod are number 1 priority. But if your resources fell so much that u went from 100 to 10 u wold be in serious trouble and would have to readjust anyways.
A fixed amount would help in ALL NORMAL situations and as a human player u are never going to get such a big spike in resources/IC, thats what stockpiles are for ;-)
So whats the problem with a fixed IC checkbox (only for production)?