Money Question

[SoHappy]

Does anyone know of a good way to find out how much money you are going to make from turn to turn? For example the social settings window gives you a good figure, early on in the game it is usually smac on right, but latter when commerce etc seems to pick up it can become way off target. The other option is check out the old global budget window, but again same problem.

This becomes annoying when jamming the majority of your energy into research, you can (of course) end with a negative cash flow. But roll on next turn and your cash goes up!! I am assuming this is commerce at work, but how can you tell??

This becomes important when you want to squish the last dime out of your faction slaves into research while balancing the books.

Does anyone know of a good reliable method of measuring your cash flow (apart from going through each city with a calculator)?

Help!
[This message has been edited by SoHappy (edited January 24, 2000).]

[RedFred]

SoHappy, you have put your finger on a major bug.

I don't know exactly at what point in the new energy bug starts but it seems to be at or near the point in the tech tree when you get tree farms.

I wish I could tell you exactly how far off the SE settings screen or the "might" summary screen is off but I can't see any logic to it. I hope someone who is more enlightened will also post.

I do know that it does not seem to be off by the amount of trade or something simple like that. I also know that when the program does its calculation to see if you have no money it will use the info from one of the screens I mentioned above, not your actual energy income. This means you can be running a surplus of several hundreds of energy credits and still have one of your city's improvements sold off. This will happen when the program claims that you are having a deficit. The program thinks you actually do have a deficit.

I still run big (fake) deficits but I now make sure that at the end of each turn I have at least as much cash on hand as the alleged deficit. It is now a finer line between energy overload and energy crashes.

[Urban Ranger]

I reckon the program pays your maintenance costs city by city. So when you run out of credits in the middle somewhere, you are forced to sell stuff off. This is done regardless whether some of your other cities are running huge surpluses.

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If I can't believe in my own eyes, whose eyes can I believe? Yours?!

[zsozso]

I aggree with Urban Ranger. I often run 100% or close to that research with large negative income. What I do to check if I'm in danger is to look at the F3 screen, it shows on the bottom left the net income of each base. If you start going down and some up the +/- values with your current energy value and get negative somewhere, that city will have to sell-off a base facility unless you do something to help.

So, if you have your earlier bases (top of list) in positive, then you are safer.

The total energy sum problem (reported by F3 or the SE screen) might come from 2 known bugs:
1. The maintenance bug of transcend difficulty (pre-v2 SMAX or plain SMAC)
2. BugID #0123, Bonus_Stockpile is not taken into account, so you will get some extra energy if you have base facilities being completed with nothing else in the queue.

Zsozso
[This message has been edited by zsozso (edited January 25, 2000).]

[RedFred]

All I know for sure is that this new "feature" appeared with SMACX and has not been addressed by the patch. It is a long shot maybe... but I wonder if this is somehow tied to the (ill-advised) repositioning of tree farms on the SMACX tech tree.

[SoHappy]

Sounds good zsozso, I should be able to squeeze some more drops of research out by your method. But in what order are the bases proccessed, as I never thought this was done in any particular order ???

[zsozso]

They are processed in creation-order, which is the same order they are listed on the F3 and F4 screen without special ordering on best something. You can get back to the default order by clicking on the title bar of the list.

This processing order can be annoying sometimes. E.g. if you complete a Secret Project with a base in the middle of your list, the bases before that will not get the benefit in that turn only the next. It happened to me, that I completed the Telepathic Matrix and I switched off all psych-specialists to maximize production for that turn already, but then got a lot of drone riots because the base doing the project was in the middle of the list. That's how I first learned the importance of the order in the hard way...

[RedFred]

zsozso - I just went through the entire bug list, but I can see nothing which corresponds to the bogus energy calculation you suddenly start getting at or about the tree farm tech.

With all the sharp-eyed folk around I would have thought that this would have been one of the first bugs spotted.

Maybe I am just not understanding the transcend difficulty 1/3 cost energy bug. Does it suddenly kick in at tree farms? Could someone please post the transcend difficulty energy maintenance bug so that I can understand it and the list could be more complete?

[XWaste]

Has there been an answer yet to what is happening, and is there a solution? What else effects your energy reserves turn by turn rather that what is in your energy banks screen. I have gone through and calculated the numbers, city by city, and the figures are always correct as shown in the energy banks screen, yet at the start of the next turn my energy reserves will change at some different rate to the net income, this without any random events that could alter my net income, or anything else that could alter my net income. I have had my reserves increase even though I had a negative income, and this at a time when I still had a lot of energy in reserve, so it could not be from a sellout of a facility because an old city uses up the reserves at the start of the ordering of the calculations - you get a message that tells you if a base facility gets sold, and I'm not receiving any.
I have this happen in smac as well as smax, though I have the planetary pack, and have got some weird crossovers when playing smac - I've had the manifold nexus appear in random maps, as well as ogres from pods.
I don't think the 'double stockpiling' is an issue either. Because the new income shown at the next turn is still wrong, and this would incorporate the effect of a city stockpiling...I think.
Anyway, I would really like an answer to this, I've been scouring the message board, and there hasn't been anything about this topic for a long time, but it seems a major bug to me, so if an answer has been posted somewhere else, and everyone has read about it and forgotten this problem exists, then I would appreciate being told where this is.
Thanks

[RedFred]

Do you have the latest SMACX patch, X? My assumption was that this was somehow tied to the 1/3 cost energy bug at Transcend which was addressed in the last patch.

Since loading it in, I no longer have the huge differential between expected and actual income. I haven't bothered to work out if the income is exact, or just fairly close.

My recollection of the bug was that it was worst when running a deficit which is something I seldom do.

[XWaste]

I have release version 2.0 - from the planetary pack, so as far as I know its all up to date. The discrepency does seem to be worse when in deficit, which makes its annoying because your gaining when you should be losing, feels like cheating.
It's not as bad as it was in smac (release v4) though.
If there is any way to get around it, rather than avoiding deficits which in the middle stage of the game I find hard to do (I like building infrastructure...alot)?

[RedFred]

Odd stuff. First of all thanks for bumping this thread because I thought that I was the only one who had this weird energy bug problem.

X, I've gone back into a game about 10 turns away from transcending and did some testing. I am no longer able to replicate this bug.

On my rig, actual to expected energy will now only be slightly off due to end of turn city growth and new improvements built. That is, the surplus/deficit number in either the SE screen or the energy screen is a turn late. That is pretty reasonable as far as I am concerned and no where near the problem that I had prior to the patch.

I have recently started playing Googlie on an IP game he is hosting. Somehow he doesn't get the fake drones bug even though he plays at Transcend level. I do. But in our IP game I don't get the fake drones. I made a copy of the in-progress IP game and fired it up in single play. Fake drones are back.

My suggestion is that, somehow, certain people get bugs that other people don't get. Go figure.

[Helium Pond]

Okay, I get the feeling I'm probably writing something obvious that y'all have already thought of, but you are counting commerce, right? As far as I know, commerce is not reflected in the F3 screen, and the ONLY way you can get a commerce total is by clicking on the MFD until your income summary comes up. AND, experience has shown me that the total given at the bottom of the income summary does NOT include commerce, so that your actual net has to be calculated by yourself, as the sum of the given net and the given commerce.

But you all are already thinking of that, right?

[XWaste]

If you go to the base control screen you see that commerce is added to the bases total energy output which is used to calculate its income(as well as research and psych allocation). Therefore commerce is already included in your total income and doesn't need a separate record in the f3 screen.
Is there a way to find out how the income bonus is calculated for each city, or do you have to just know what all the facilities are exactly contributing?

[RedFred]

I think I am in the unusual position of being one of those who suffered with this bug and (since the last patch) no longer experiences it.

Rest assured that it is not something simple like commerce.

quote: Originally posted by RedFred on 01-24-2000 09:15 PM ...I do know that it does not seem to be off by the amount of trade or something simple like that...