Yeah I got the feeling of forcing you to use the money too...

let me quote the Civilization 4 Manual, Section "AfterWords" Page 175

The term “ICS” is a well-known one among our Internet fan
base. It stands for “Infinite City Sprawl,” meaning that the best
strategy in Civ games had always been to build as many cities as
possible. Corruption and waste were meant to discourage city-
building by adding diminishing returns to expansion – your 20th
city would be much less productive than your 10th. In the first
version of Civ III we turned corruption up significantly to – in
our minds – once and for all kill ICS.
We were both right and wrong; the change did put an end to
building as many cities into as tight a space as possible, but it was also
the number one complaint raised against the game. Gamers simply
didn’t like having their production taken away from them – there
was nothing fun about founding a city and then finding out that it
can only ever produce one shield per turn.

Similarly, there is nothing fun in taking away my money behind my back,  just to encourage me(the player) to spend it or perhaps to prevent having such insame amounts of money that you could abuse some game system perhaps ... (like diplomacy)

I guess I'm talking for nothing anyway... it's just too late for galciv2, and too many added features broke things here and there (like some superabilities which don't always update things correctly). Don't mistake me, galciv2 is still a lot of fun...

edit:I just noticed I got a little carried away, sorry about that guys

GW, it may be a bit too much cheese for your liking, but i have had econ booms last over 5 years. Set your autosave to one turn and if you lose the econ boom, just reload the previous auto save and keep going. The econ boom will still continue.

Just rinse and repeat. I have had to do it say about 10~15 times in a 6 or 7 year game, but retaing that boom is often too much to pass up.

@OP. I do beleieve there is also a treasury penalty at 10,000BC as well. Though i am not 100% sure on that but as i recall it is no where near as severe as the 20K one. Having a gentle penalty at 10K though does make the 20K a bit more understandable in it's severity.

But your certainly not doomed if you continue to incurr the penalty. You are still making BC, albiet at the reduced penalized rate but you can continue to prosper. I have had millions in the treasury in games before, i just simply ignored the penalty.

Where it does hurt you though is in your econ score. Your econ score is based on pure income before all leases and penalties. So in comparison to a under 20K treasury incurring the penalty will hurt you in the long run score wise. If you don't play on the MV though, then this is likely to be not worrisome.

As for modding it out, i seem to recall discussion on this in the past, and IIRC i think it is hard coded. Someone like Zyxplosion or a Dev though would be better equipped to answer that for you 100%

My main problem with game-cheese is that I love real cheeses, even some scary-stinky ones, far too much to like the slang. Right after that is the eye of the beholder problem--one player's evil exploit is another's brilliant strategy. So, formally speaking, I don't balk immediately at re-loading your way into an Eternal Boom. But GC2 is the first 4x game that's left me very, very rarely re-loading just because something happened while I was playing, and I really like that. I basically re-load only to hide from a few mega-events, and the idea of doing it to perpetuate a beneficial event is indeed outside my comfort zone.

I'd agree a bit more than halfway here, but even if you don't sweat your score, the lost income can be a horrifying amount once you know what's going on.

p.s. Re save patterns, I strongly recommend *against* making your autosave every turn. If you set it to something larger, say 10-15 turns, *and* remember that CTRL+S is your friend, then the quick save is your immediate ditch option and the autosave gives you some time to figure out that something really, really bad happened.

Well, what I was really trying to talk about was finding a good balance between having a game that's engagingly surprising but doesn't drive you insane with "too-random" things. My autosave is at 12, so 12-15 seemed a natural range to suggest. The x/10 breakdown you give is interesting, but given my play tastes, it's the kind of math that I'd rather not know and will likely forget while I'm playing.

However, I like you mentioning it here b/c, if it is really that simply hard-coded, it is another good example of why I think more things should be arrays and formulae, not fixed numbers. We should not be able to find and use that many one-liner rules to share about how the computer players work. The fact that we still can is a major reason why I try to avoid calling them AIs--they're good, but they are a long way from being a Turing-test mystery to me, and I'm not even a real scoremonster like Magnumaniac, KseAli, or Neilo.

Good info guys. I had not actually heard the numbers before about the AI attacking you based on X number of turns. i do recall discussion about this not being randomly based but to nail it down to 10 turns is interesting.

I couldn't agree more though GW that it's something that should never have been hardcoded, or at least hardcoded at such a set time.

It's fine for the AI to evaluate and re-evaluate their Mil against yours, but i'd rather see the AI do that every turn no matter the difficulty instead of every 10 turns. This explains why when you are slaughtering the AI and offer them peace they will not budges and look at you as if they just droped the bomb on ya.

On suicidal if you wait around for the AI to even think about being able to attack you on even terms, then you have lost the game already.

As for the autosaves. On the giga abundant alls i used to get quite alot of OOM's so having the autosave set at anything other then every turn was killing me, especailly when you do so much in each turn (over 2 or 3 hours worth of game play at times) and hit turn only for it to OOM on you.

@SSoul. Your quite correct too, it is trade i was thinking of. Thankyou.

I had not thought about upgrading ships. The "issue" is worse than I first envisioned.

Thanks for all the comments.

I hate the -500 rule.

Deficit spending availability should be based on a galactic 'pool' (Like the Tourism pool), and how far you can deficit spend should be based on the combination of your 'credit rating' and the interest you're willing to pay, and how much of that pool is used up - if the galactic economy is doing well, the pool should shrink (People investing in better things like stocks) if it's doing badly, the pool should expand (exact opposite - investing in 'safe' government bonds)

Go to war, have interest rates go up, if everyone everywhere 'likes' you, you're galactic credit rating may be better (Good press never hurts), if you're making 2,500 bc/week, who cares if you're carrying a 25 bc national debt?

Jonnan

I think part of why it is there and is OK for many players is that the click overhead we feel "forced" into probably leads to a higher score than you'd get just passing turns on the way to Ascension (via mines or labs) or even filling out your influence territory.

The main thing I end up spending on is ship upgrades (I play long games, often have a hundred or more turns with no infrastructure to build except on newly acquired worlds). If I understand scoring correctly, the late added firepower isn't as valuable as if it had been around a long while, but it still adds points to your total score.