TIPS NEEDED: How to unconfuse the ROY.

[ILIKEDMOOB4THIS]

Okay guys,

I need some help again. :(

The roy has really got me confused and annoyed with him. On my planets with 4000+ industry, good'ol viceroy is building me a bunch of Hackers unasked for. On my planets with about 1,000-2,000 industry, the viceroy is building me Indirect Fire battle cruisers (~ 6,000 AU: probably more than 15,000 PP since my HFOG is now above 2.5), also on its own accord without me having to do a thing.

Now I have read several other threads, so I know enough to make sure I had enough shipyard capacity. Although, my military slider is only at ~12% of ~2,000,000 total budget (My empire tax is at 17% System 1%), money does not seem to be the problem as the Roy is over-driving my 1,000-2,000 industry (That is over-driving industry, isn't it?) planets to produce ~6,000 PP. Leaving my 4,000 industry planet to twiddle its tumbs producing 2-3 hackers a turn.

In conclusion, could somebody also tell me how to reduce the HFOG, after the patch? I think the patch readme says that swapping governments does not work. I think I am going to look for the validator to make sure Microsux WinCrap XP Professional did not FUBAR the game.

[hoof1]

HFOG does not go down with government changes. On the flip side, it doesn't automatically rise either.

Apparantly it's based on Population, your current opressometer setting (not sure on this), and a few other details. Since it isn't an accumulator anymore, in theory it'd go down if you lost a lot of population (say you were losing a war), or drastically reduced your opressometer.

The population factor largely nullifies the Gas Giant race's population advantage. Having a lot of full Size 12 worlds can really hurt your HFOG. This makes the species that prefer smaller worlds (like the Cybernetic races) competitive, for a given number of planets.

[Zyphyr]

Since it isn't an accumulator anymore, in theory it'd go down if you lost a lot of population (say you were losing a war), or drastically reduced your opressometer.

I can confirm that it does go down as an empire shrinks. The first game I played post-patch I actually checked the HFoG of the first empire I invaded and it did decline for them as I took their worlds from them.

[MarcP]

It would be interesting to check if it is just population or number of planets. My HFOG starts to climb when I hit 50 planets, which would indicate that a raw planet count is at least one factor.

cheers,

Marc

[hoof1]

I'm fairly certain that population plays more of a role than number of planets. I'm playing the Ithkul in my current game, and the Ithkul aren't very efficient as far as population per planet (as I get terraforming techs, this is getting better). I have 137 planets now, a population of around 2000, and a HFOG of around 1.5 . The next most "powerful" empire has 100 planets, and a pop of 4000, with a HFOG of around 2.4 . Either the Ithkul get a big HFOG reduction bonus, population is a huge factor, or there's something else going on here. My empire consists of 37% more planets, yet has 1/2 the population of the other empire.

Even so, my border system is still getting hit with about 30-50 ships per turn =)

[malekith]

I have been getting the same behavior as the original poster. Large industrial world blowing through three marines/mobile/armor per turn while the lower industry planets are left to do the majority of the ship building. The simplest, though no exactly most convenient, solution is to manually control the queues for those industry giants. Late in the game though, you will either have to spend way too much time doing this, or create a narrower definition of what constitutes an "industry giant".

Another solution, albeit a bit of a hack, I'm currently trying out is tweeking a few entries in modifiers.txt. The most significant modifier is the one pertaining to ship cost. Currently cost has a negative impact on viceroy decision making and a (fairly small) multiplier associated with it. What I did was change the modifier to a smaller value. I think I decreased it by a factor of about 10. I also increased the postive modifier for hull size. Lastly, I also tweaked an infanty related modifier. Don't remember what it was called, but I reduced its value from 3.3 to around 2.0. What all that should do is make ship building more likely.

It doesn't really address the problem of why planets with more industry are less likely to make ships (sometimes) than planets with less. In my opinion, that involves some sort of thresholding error going on somewhere. My results with the mod have been positive so far. In a couple games set to simulate the first 100 turns I noticed a significant difference in the number of ships in my reserves when I took over. Without the mod I think there were like 20 while afterwards it was up around 100. I haven't actually played through an entire game with it, but I have already started to notice its effects on the AI (they threw an IF pack at me around turn 50). As far as my build queues, I don't really have any good industry planets yet, just a lot of mediocre ones.

[RobNelson]

Well, if you only want 3 different types of ship, you can queue them up and lock the build queue... That would have the same effect as always building exactly what you want, but doesn't actually fix old roy.

[Steely Glint]

You definately need more control over the build queue I am getting so ****ing sick of the viceroy wasting production by building more hackers, troop ships, pickets magazines etc than I actually need. I'm getting pissed off with having all my warships deployed and still having 80 pickets left over.

The way it should be done is this: each planets MBQ is accompanied by either check boxes or a drop down menu telling the viceroy what to put in the MBQ a selection like War Ships (IF, LR, CX etc), Support Ships (transports, point defence, colony ships and pickets), Troops and Support Troops, Planetary Defence and All.

If I have a size 12 world of etherians with high industry I don't want the sodding viceroy building ground troops there because A: Etherians are ****ty ground troops B: that world would be better suited to constructing warships C: producing ground troops would be more effecient on worlds with less industrial capabilty.

[AlanC9]

I've seen the same behavior too. I haven't really worked out at what level the error happens, but it seems to always strike my top few production planets.

In practice, this doesn't bother me too much, since I usually prefer to lock the top planets' queues; those planets are the only ones that can build my largest warships, so I want to ensure that they do just that.

[hoof1]

Another approach would be to have the equivelant to devplans for military building. A "Military dev plan" would be great.

What you do is specify the proportions of certain types of ships you want in your navy. The spreadsheets do this to some degree. Thus if you want 25% SR ships, but lost your entire SR compliment the last turn, your Viceroys will probably build SR ships if the other ship quotas are met.

Of course this could end up creating extremes. In the SR example, it might not be very good if *every* planet suddenly got up and started building SR ships to the exclusion of all other ship designs. But a priority boost for ships you're short on (according to your Military dev plan) would be nice, something like what the AI does with troop ships and troop numbers now.

Ever see what the 'roy does if you have no transport designs, play for a while, then make a design? Suddenly huge numbers of these transports get built. If we could extend that logic to a player-controlled system, that would rock my world.

[Ron_Lugge]

My empire tax is at 17% System 1%

FYI: That alone spells problems to me. Remember, the VR will *lower* planetary taxes if you have a high empire tax, in order to balance it out.

And your smaller planets may have more money available to spend than the larger ones (especially if the larger one is all industry or something like that)

[Iskabis]

Originally posted by Ron_Lugge
FYI: That alone spells problems to me. Remember, the VR will *lower* planetary taxes if you have a high empire tax, in order to balance it out.

And your smaller planets may have more money available to spend than the larger ones (especially if the larger one is all industry or something like that)
yeah.... most people i've seen in the forums say 5-10% empire, 2-5% system. i use 6 and 2, respectively, once i've hit about 10 reasonably built-up planets or so.

higher empire to start with - that way your 1 or 2 more built-up worlds are helping your small new ones get going. like about 8-10%, and 2-3% system. then cranking down as your tax base gets bigger.

-rhyssan

[Kyle Katarn]

I have the same problem. And I can't solve it by any "common" means i.e. without moding the spreadsheets.
Planets with 10 K Industry (military policy on "Total war") which spend 65K AU per turn on MBQ!! never ever build a ship, only ground troops.
I get the impression, that ship will be build only if the number of PP per turn is confined between definite margins around some calculated let’s called it X value (apparently based on the cost of the ship)
So, a planet which PP per turn are less than X won't build the ship, but also planet with GREATER number PP than X won't build it either.
All my experience with the game confirms the above statement.
If this is the case they should fix it in the forthcoming patch (for instance let the VR build 5X ship or something…)
What do you think?

[Beamup]

One thing that will help with this sort of thing is modding MilitaryAI.txt to reduce how many support units the AI wants to build. As it is, the AI wants to have almost twice as many support units as combat units, which is ridiculous since you can only use a fraction of that. But, it leads to the reserves of support units being vastly underfilled (by the AI's standards) so the construction of support units gets an extremely high priority.

[ILIKEDMOOB4THIS]

Originally posted by Ron_Lugge
FYI: That alone spells problems to me. Remember, the VR will *lower* planetary taxes if you have a high empire tax, in order to balance it out.

And your smaller planets may have more money available to spend than the larger ones (especially if the larger one is all industry or something like that)

I pretty much let ol'Roy zone the planets anyway he wants to, so they are all pretty balance (Even though I set for specialized zoning). I am a little miffed that Roy does not build 1 government DEAs per planet. On the other hand, I am also not sure if having a government DEA per planet is needed, so I stopped fighting with Roy on that. I just ask him to do stuff through dev plans. Maybe my dev plans combined with the specialized instruction led to balanced planets instead. rotfl.

Meanwhile, my higher empire taxes seems to work okay for me. I play the game at easy difficulty level, so probably any silly strategy will work. What I do not understand is why that would be a problem. With my empire tax that high, it allows me to give my planets a lot in grants. Also I was able to stick to "Peace through strength." and still have a lot of money poured into military grants. Are military grants really all the helpful? Or would a low system and empire tax, result in higher taxes on each planet, leading to the better results for my large industrial planets?

FYI, just before I completed research for the 5th X around turn 255, my total empire taxes (with 250+ planets) came close to 5 million AU, with about 2.5 million AU to planet grants and slightly over 1 Million AU to research and military grants each. Meanwhile, I produced ~82k and used 22k food, 322K mineral, used 60k, and ~629k industry. I could have had more industry if I rezoned many of the planets with more industry. Sadly my HFoG is 3.00 even with the X bonus. Subsequently, I am using a Unification government, and the planets are running a 22-24% tax on average per planet. Does that mean that the total taxes on my people is 22-24% + 1% system tax + 17% empire tax = 40-42% tax?

Meanwhile, could it be that the higher industry worlds do not have enough money to turn all their industry into PP on their own, so they build small army units, and the small planets have enough money to fully fund all their industry into PP, so they try build the big ships? I must try lowering my empire tax to a 5-6%, to see if this annoying behavior stops.

In conclusion, will turning on the lock icon be all I need to lock the production queue with what I want? Does that mean that I have to queue planet improvments? Will I have to turn off the econ AI?

Thanks a lot everybody.... :D

[Iskabis]

Originally posted by ILIKEDMOOB4THIS
<snip>
the planets are running a 22-24% tax on average per planet. Does that mean that the total taxes on my people is 22-24% + 1% system tax + 17% empire tax = 40-42% tax?
yep. probably because you're unification they don't mind the high tax as much as others would.

<snip>
In conclusion, will turning on the lock icon be all I need to lock the production queue with what I want? Does that mean that I have to queue planet improvments? Will I have to turn off the econ AI?

Thanks a lot everybody.... :D
the lock icon is only for the military queue. so you can turn it on and leave the econ AI on as well and not have to worry about planetary improvements.

-rhyssan

[Polle]

In practice, this doesn't bother me too much, since I usually prefer to lock the top planets' queues; those planets are the only ones that can build my largest warships, so I want to ensure that they do just that.

How do I lock my military queue? (I'm a newbie, sorry). Is it the lock icon sitting right beside the AU/% option just above the build queues?

[Beamup]

Yup, that's the one.

[Polle]

Thanks Beamup.