Wasted Resources Solved

I wouldn't mind seeing the Omni-Terraforming techs put into the game. They're not too bad in terms of balance (they're late game) and they give your worlds something that takes a long time to build to avoid the wastage.

~SDC~

IMHO let the "Nothing" project give a boost to morale (equivalent to Propaganda) and population growth (as investment in health care, infrastructure etc improves living conditions). This ensures you get something for your money and avoids the issue of using colonies as cash generators to exploit the system.

If 'nothing' gave a boost to your morale then your population would grow until the boost became a necessity, then if you ever shifted from 'nothing' to a project you'd find your planet with an unhappy face as soon as you did.

At early stages of the game I usually have some huge project like Advanced Quality Control (cost of 500) that I want to eventually build (but not yet) act as a sinkhole for unused social production. Then when you finally get to where you want to build it then it pops out pretty quick. Quality Control is good because the maintenance is only 1 BC if you lose track and actually end up building it. The Economic Exchange and Harmony Generator both make good choices for this as well in the mid-late stage of the game. And eventually you are powerful enough that wastage is really only an aesthetic issue.

Well I see your point, but surplus population has its uses (colonisation, invasion, resettlement) and alternatively you can simply increase tax rate to offset morale/pop boost ie welfare state, you are investing in your populace but taxing them for it. Makes sense to me (I'm Swedish but fled that country...) LOL

Drat. The subject line should have had a question mark.

What is the problem with taking the funds allocated to nothing and redistributing them in the ratio of the other two sliders on that planet?

If a civ is 30 military, 30 social, 40 research, and on a planet, the military is set to nothing, why not send 3/7 to social and 4/7 to research for that planet?

The reason that you spend money on "Nothing" is because you still have to pay your workers, maintain the plants, etc.

We've talked about making social improvements that would convert some of the resources into money, so if we do change the way it works now, we'll probably do something like that.

How about a savings from firing, but a cost for going from Nothing to Something?

Late in the game, the superplanets are done with social improvements for good while the laggard planets still need terraforming. The reason to build nothing is to save the maintenance points for morale boosters you don't need (granted this was a game on a lower level).

If the omni-terraformer idea is no good, how about having a military resource that reassigns workers to social projects and/or research and a social project that reassigns workers to military projects and/or research (all or nothing - no more sliders). THat way my social workers on superplanets could be reassigned to support research while the laggards still work on terraforming.

I tend to run things like Vorlin... for those who don't know, piling the 'surplus-sucking' projects at the end of the queue and switching 'governor overrides project' to ON will make sure your governor spends surplus production on surplus-suckers but will switch to higher-priority projects as they arrive in the queue.

Should multi-module constructors become available, they would IMHO nicely fill the surplus-sucking role for the military queue.

The only time wasted expenditure really shows up in my games is in the late-late game, when it really doesn't matter

~SDC~