Oberlus wrote: ↑Sun Feb 10, 2019 6:03 pmJust to be clear, here you are not talking about the increasing costs of ships with their numbers, but only about increasing cost of techs (from "tier" to "tier"), right?
Actually, here I'm talking about resource production and consumption in general, not specifically PP/RP/IP or whatever (primary) resources we decide to come up with. That said, with RP and techs a cost increase mechanic might actually make sense (see my post in the other thread), but for everything PP related it doesn't.
And I'm not only talking about ships (although these are currently the only assets that work with a cost increase mechanic IIRC), but about all the instances where such cost increase mechanics have been suggested (stargates, shipyards). Basically whenever we stumble upon that issue (that there is a thing we can't really prevent from becoming build-everywhere by raising its costs sufficiently) someone suggests a cost increase mechanic, and IMO that's a flawed approach (for all the reasons cited).
Basically, instead of countering an exponentially increasing income with correspondingly exponentially increasing costs (which cancel each other out), just bring the exponentially increasing income down. Much less complicated.
We have techs that increase production per population or per planet, techs that increase population of planets, and increasing numbers of planets (and population) with production.
That in itself already is a challenge to keep from snowballing. Now look at the actual numbers: We start with a production capacity in the one digit range, but have a lot of boni granted by techs, specials, etc. that
start with something like 0.1PP/pop, up to 1PP/pop. Much,
much too high! With numbers like that, and no maintenance mechanic in place, you skyrocket like there is no tomorrow. Completely insane.
Reasonable numbers would be e.g. when the basic production granted by the focus setting is 1PP/pop, and the bonus granted by a tech 0.1/PP, or even less. Then you need
ten kind of boni (granted by techs, specials etc.) to double your production. IIRC,right now, the base production granted by the focus is 0.1PP/pop, which means researching
only one tech that gives you the same bonus (0.1PP/pop) doubles your income. Ridiculous.
With increasing influence upkeep per colony we can get the desired growth of production (without having to mess with the production itself of each colony) but only if we do a good job with influence production.
Yes, exactly. Striking the right balance here is paramount.
The point is that having more colonies must not allow you to have even more colonies. If every colony is able to produce influence for itself and not more, and the capital is able to provide influence for itself and a few more, when your last batch of colonies is growing full influence production you will have space influence to expand to a few more planets, but it will always be "a few more planets", in a linear instead of exponential way.
I think the plan is to go even farther: unless a colony is set to be an influence producer (basically by setting it to the influence focus), then each colony actually
consumes influence. Meaning, you need an influence focused colony for every n non-influence focused colonies. With the influence costs basically going up exponentially, so if you grow too large too fast, you might end up needing several influence focused colonies to support one more non-influence focused one, thereby effectively curbing exponential growth.
Of course you need to be able to bring your influence costs down, by researching techs, getting specials, etc., so that
constant growth is possible, but
exponential growth becomes very difficult to maintain.
If the same consideration is applied to the influence we expect to be consumed by ships, buildings and influence projects of any kind (say, each grown-up colony can provide influence to maintain itself an a certain number of PPs_in_ships and PPs_in_buildings, as well as to contribute to influence projects), I guess we should be able to come up with some solid equations for influence upkeeps.
Something along these lines is the general idea, yes.