This time I got a question concerning Production Allocation. If I examined that right, if you have no construction order but allocate something to it, it goes into nirvana. Is this on purpose? Usually if nothing is constructed, it should jump to "trade goods". Even if I would say, i do not want any production points spent into construction but spent it to the other two areas, I would have to go to the sliders and lock the construction to 0%. When I am at the pyramid, I have to be at the top left side. So to break it down to one sentence it would be: It would be nice when production would never be wasted. If someone of you would like that, then a toggle button would be nice. MOO2 automatically switches to Trade when no constuction is done. Switchable was there only the option if in case a new build order was given, trade was deleted. To explain it a little further, if nothing is being constructed and we drag the pyramid from pic1 to pic2, trade should be activated. If any construction is in the queue, no waste is done.
Makes sense rxnnxs, and we'll certainly give this a thought and consider adding it to the game at some point. However, consider this. When a construction project ends, the game informs you that the construction queue is now empty and production is still being allocated to construction (after you press end turn you get the idle production warning). You have two options at the moment when that happens: a) do nothing and lose the production allocated to construction as you wished (and keep being informed every turn about it), or b) after you are given the warning that you may want to construct something else in that colony next, and you then click the pop up, go to the colony and pick something else. This is what you can do now. Now, if we automatically (and more importantly silently) switch construction to trade goods without the player being fully aware that a construction had just finished, the player could go ahead and proceed many turns without realizing that that colony is now producing trade goods, and the construction potential was somewhat wasted. This is exacerbated in mid to late game when you have a lot of stuff going on. So, what we could consider is, keep the idle construction warning to inform the player that there is wasted production going into void construction but then and only then switch to trade goods automatically, and probably only after letting the player know about it first, and only if no other project had been picked in the process, of course. Then and only then could we probably switch production to trade goods, if there's production still allocated to construction, that is. What do you think?
Starbase Orion handled this exact issue very elegantly. Colonies could be given a default / background order that was completely separate from the build queue. This would be used here for "trade goods" thing (and other options could be added down the road maybe?). If there was nothing in the normal build queue, it would automatically switch to this default action and notify the player - exactly as you suggested above in your last paragraph. So a big +1 for doing this change. It would be neat to see if there are other default actions that could be added (maybe unlocked via tech?). Boost to research is one obvious action. But also a boost to production? Of course, getting more money lets you invest more surplus in research or culture, so maybe that's redundant.
All good Ideas, and I make it now short. There are two solutions that come to my mind. 1 The first would be a warning and maybe Plan B. It is activated when the slider is somehow in the Construction region and no construction selected; Falling back to Plan B presetting (Maybe at the slider Menue) On Colony level: Now this should be warning enough, even for me ;-) At the Overview and for all turns after, the Exception Mark is shown there, where this automatism/Plan B kicked in. Way 2: The slider can not be drawn into the construction when there is no construction When a construction is done and nothing is in the queue, the slider for construction goes to zero and the warning to the right (At the main screen) pops up, once. The player then decides if it shall stay this way or if he wants to build something. Also an excplamation mark could be present as in solution 1.
I would just add a new notification item in the normal notification list saying that the queue is empty and production is being diverted to extra trade goods.
But this is only possible in the next turn. The production would get wasted for this turn. The Game could me ask then "do you want to reload the game to select a construction?". Im serious, this would drive me nuts a bit. Energy ist not going into the void, its going somewhere Now I know, it rised my blood pressure! From the virtual world into the real world!
