NEVER use building queue, as it will cost you

I was experimenting with something else when I came to this find. It exists for DL, DA, and TA.

Using building queue costs a lot more BCs than choosing what to build one by one manually.

You can test for yourself easily.

Start with one game of any type, choose any race, then start game. Immediately set total spending and social spending to 100%, this way, no other things like research will mess with our BC expenditure. Now save. Queue up three buildings, any buidlings, and hit end turn until they are all done. Note the remaining treasury. Now load the savegame, build the first building, when it is finished, build the second, and the third. They finish at the same game time. And you have the same building results. Now look at the remaining treasury. Comparing to the first try, see the difference?

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Interesting.

Tested on a tiny, but thought tourism interfered, so tested on an immense.

I do see a difference of about 50bc, and I'm not sure as of yet where it's coming from. (Testing group was 3 research labs.)

I'll have to look into this in more detail.

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KzintiPatriarch

Join Date 05/2007

+95

Very interesting. Good catch Konming!

Sentient species taste better...

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The reason for the disparity is that the game calculate the expense (and maybe income) incorrectly.

Instead of caculating projects cost as they are done, the game first builds everything, updates the product queue, then uses the updated production queue to calculate production cost. So when you finish one building and the queue is empty, you are not actually charged the building cost.

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I was trying to figure out if overspeading in social and military project gets refunded. That is, if a planet spends more production capacity than needed to finish the current item, will the extra production cost refunded? Due to this game misbehavior, I have yet to find the answer.

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Quoting Konming,

reply 4

Military-no, it's wasted.

Social-no, but it counts towards the next project you build on that tile-all social production used towards building it does, so long as it actually costs something to upgrade to the new building. That is, upgrading a discovery sphere (250) to an industrial sector (400) nets you a discount based on what you've already built (but then that 250 is already given credit for and if you were to overbuild with something else it would need to be >400 to get a discount, which would be 400-250 or 150), however if you for instance build a starport over anything, you don't get a discount on it and it is set to an upgrade cost of 50 production-which is incidentally more than a starport costs to build on an empty tile.

Quoting Konming,

reply 3

The reason for the disparity is that the game calculate the expense (and maybe income) incorrectly.

Instead of summing up the cost for one turn, then build everything, the game first builds everything, then uses the updated production queue to calculate production cost. When you finish one building and the queue is empty, you are not actually charged the building cost.

I noticed this, but wasn't ready to post it yet. Right now I'm trying to determine (not that my perspective has anything to do with it) just exactly how large of a bug it is-and I think it's smaller than I originally thought.

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