At the moment it's turned the game from being pretty micromangement free in terms of economics (Note: I hate micromanaging economics), into a nightmare of screwing around with finding where I've got buildings turned on on planets, and generally pain-in-the-ass fiddling around with production queues. Take for example the following very, very, VERY common task in my current (sometime around the 9th or 10th try) at an AI10 game: I need lightning missiles.
I think that, in the 1.014A release, hopefully economy micromanagement will be at an all-time low. That's the goal, anyway.
Here's the scenario I see:
1. Under normal operation, you have some number of docks (with some number of engineers) churning out ships at a fairly predictable rate. This all now works just like 1.013 and before, except that you are billed in little chunks over time instead of a huge bump right at the end. This lets you see outflows over time, which will bounce around with ships that cost varying degrees of metal/crystal in the same queue, but which overall will prevent your economy from mysteriously and suddenly tanking like it could before.
2. You will probably also leave some sort of excess positive income level, so that you have some spare metal/crystal built up for turrets and other defenses, and other fixed ships. If you do not, then you can crank out more military ships, but you won't have disposable savings if you suddenly find you need them.
3. Now you fight, and largely forget about all of the above unless you need to adjust your queues, and you don't need to much worry about this (or the Mark IV ships being built less than lower-level ships), since everything is so predictable and flow-based. Nice and simple to understand what is happening with your economy pretty much at a glance.
4. If you need a lightning missile and you have been doing the above, you probably have the buffer you need in order to build one. Just add it to the queue of the missile silo, and you won't be getting any more excess income for a while (and you might even draw it down some depending on your levels), but otherwise it just builds and that's that. Also nice and simple, and no more micromanagement required unless you want to turn off one dock in favor of your silo if you are running right at capacity and don't have a savings buffer, for instance.
I don't disagree that this might take some initial adjustment for the most experienced players in particular, but honestly I feel like this brings the economy of the game more inline with the better entries in the genre. Yes, the experimental prerelease had a lot of Bad Things about it, but I'm pretty confident I've removed all of the most egregious of those and what we now have I think is just the good advances forward. There might be more room for even more advances forward, but I don't think we've taken any steps back at this stage.
Previously: I have lightning missiles in a queue. At some point it finishes, but I don't need one yet, and I'm running under the 15k a piece, so nothing happens. All is good since there's a 100% completed missile just waiting for me to need it. I decide I need it, I hit the "pause all" button, it stops all production of my ships all around the galaxy. (Yes, I do actually have ships being produced on planets other then the one or two main ones to pump out offensive ships.) At some point in time soon (a minute or so usually, it's pretty easy to estimate since I've got a little number underneath that says +X/second resources), I have greater then the 15k I need, so I hit "pause all" again to un-pause, and out pops my nicely completed Lightning Missile (or it could be a scout cruiser or whatever, I tend to produce all big ticket items like this).
This is something that is shifting, though. You can't just queue up your item for free and leave it anymore, then have it pop out. I'm not particularly sad about this, it was always a bit hokey although it was the intended prior behavior. However, now you have a nice tradeoff of a "cheap over time" way to get missiles. It requires a bit more advance planning on average, but it also lets you amortize their costs over time which means you don't have to stop everything else to get the fast cash you need for one of those big investments (that's still the case with force fields, though).
Currently: I have lightning missiles in a queue. Except they may or may not be producing at any point in time, since I may or may not have positive resource balance, so I have to hunt down as to what's chewing up my resource.
Now there's one little button hover that lets you see this easily. But if you have an overflow of income like you probably would want to in most cases, that shouldn't be too much of an issue in the first place now.
This is only going to get worse if it gets changed back from the current rather, well, boring method of having ships only cost one resource or another, since suddenly you'll have to micromanage every one of your docks, etc.
I think it's gotten a lot better actually, but I'll be curious as to what you think. I really can't see how this is going to do anything but reduce micromangement, but we'll see. It may be that some of your previous unintended-interface-shortcuts will no longer work, in which case we simply need to put in new interface shortcuts that are designed for the same purpose in the new system. I think everyone's goal here is the same: have the economy be as simple and as understandable as possible, with a fine level of control but no need for continuous micromanagement. With 1.014A, I think I'm pretty sold on the underlying mechanics on offer there, but I'll be curious what everyone else thinks. Beyond that, it sounds like you may have some specific interface requests, but we really need to separate the discussion of that from the discussion of the underlying model -- even though both updates really need to be happening in tandem, and even though interface enhancements of that sort are something I am going to take very seriously and will try to implement rapidly if at all possible.
Also I never had a problem previously with estimating how much resources I was using.
That makes one of us.
With Mark III cruisers and Mark I fighters in the same queue, for instance, the resource usage jumps all over the fricking place, so that no meaningful estimation is possible. Maybe you were more organized than that, but I tend to have space docks all over the place and don't care to build more than 2-5 per planet, which makes micromanaging the ships in each queue so that they have similar costs way too much of a chore. Other people also seem to have been having a problem with this -- while I don't think it's been a huge hassle for most people, I think we can make this work better for everyone, you included.
