stability and robo growth penalties for 0 energy exploiters

[hart30]

One very famous exploit being around for machine Empires for a Long time is the 0 Energy exploit. An Energy deficit only reduces the Mineral Output. Especially machine empire Players can heavily abuse that. They put all their machines on science and alloys, while ignoring the deficite. If they then Need to go to war they have some empty Energy districts Ready, to where they with a few mouseclicks can assign their Pops to solve the Energy issue. Especially with ring World start this strategy is extremely effective.

But all of this can easily be prevented, if Energy is in the future handled like Food for machines/robots. So a negative income of Energy would give an Penalty to robot and machine Pop creation. Maybe even causing a Pop decline, because of robots shutting down due to the lack of Energy. I mean - it works with organic Pops (u really dont want a Food shortage for them).
Additionally it could reduce the stability on ur planets, as Major infrastructure just shuts down without enough Energy (a Food shortage causes a reduced happiness, for machines this would not have any effect, so stability makes more sense).

If Energy deficites would get such penalties for all empire types in General, even organic empire Players would probably start to avoid the 0 Energy exploit, as they probably also have a large robo workforce in their empire. And they would try to avoid that small stability Penalty on top.

Summary:
These two penalties for low Energy, a machine/robo Pop decline and a small stability Penalty, would in my opinion be enough to annihilate the famous 0 Energy exploit and cause the game to be played in a more intended way.

 

[mial42]

I really think deficits need to be reworked in general. Right now, unless your entire economy is completely destroyed, they're irrelevant, because you can just sell a tiny bit of any resource, buy a tiny bit of whatever's in deficit, and never see any penalties at all.

 

[Colonizor48]

Make deficits have more consequences. Make them reduce stability and cause civil wars over economic issues. And make them incresse war exaustion.

 

[Maethendias]

before you .... do something like that...

how about we give gestalts actual mechanics in the first place, hm?

instead of machines only having to.... care about 2 ressources instead of the 5 that are in the game, just to keep it simple

 

[mial42]

before you .... do something like that...

how about we give gestalts actual mechanics in the first place, hm?

instead of machines only having to.... care about 2 ressources instead of the 5 that are in the game, just to keep it simple

Let's not get crazy!

 

[Mastikator]

Right now it makes no difference whether you are 1 energy short or 1 million. That is a bad thing, the penalty should be proportional to the shortage. It's impossible to find a good balance with the current system. Yeet the system.

The best possible system would be that when you are running a deficit then a building or job or pop that needed (and didn't get) that resource simply becomes unemployed.
For example: you are at -1 motes/month, it hits 0 motes and now one of your building using motes becomes disabled, the rest of your empire is fine, two metallurgist simply become unemployed. DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL and MAKES SENSE.
Same deal with food, if you have a food shortage then pops start to die from starvation, you just get a decline = your missing food across your empire. If you are running a massive food shortage then guess what, lots of people die. That's what happens when there's famine in the real world.
Robots will not have this problem since they run on energy and you can just turn off buildings to save energy, or shut down unemployed robots to save energy.

 

[Colonizor48]

devs pls take note here.

 

[Lazy Name]

I'm not sure if this is too overcomplicated, but what about a "Shortage Severity" system? Every month that you have a resource shortage, the Severity increases, and the larger the shortage the faster Severity will grow. At low Severity the drawbacks are relatively small, but they grow more impactful as Severity increases. At certain levels of Severity more extreme events will start to occur, such as disabled buildings, pops dying, reduced stability or special events. Severity could still take time to return back to normal even when there is no longer a shortage, which would mean buying small amounts of resources off the market would only prevent things from getting worse instead of completely mitigating the effects. It makes the most sense to me, since in real life brief shortages can be relatively unimpactful and it's usually extended shortages that cause major harm.