Erik Rutins
Posts: 37503
Joined: 3/28/2000 From: Vermont, USA Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Fishman I'm not sure how the "inefficiency" mechanic makes that much sense, really. And why does the private sector get afflicted by it as well, anyway? Isn't the entire point of having a private sector that it improves efficiency by breaking everything down into small, individual "every man for himself" actors? Inefficiency only affects the planets themselves. quote:
What would make more sense, rather than creating a global punishment factor, is to do what GalCiv did: Make it so that the revenue of a planet does not simply scale linearly with the development and population of the planet, but rather, to some lesser exponent, to reflect the fact that if you have a large population consuming the same resource pool, you're not actually going to get much more money out of them because you'll have a lot of poor people who don't have much to give, and more rich people, who are better at avoiding taxes. That's exactly the effect that you end up with as a result of corruption/inefficiency. This is a matter of semantics or how well things are hidden in the game design I guess. quote:
"Distance" based inefficiency is just silly, on the other hand: It has no real-world counterpart, as in the real world, distance-based inefficiency is created by distance from where something is produced, vs. where it is consumed, this difference being lost in transport costs and delay: Something produced and consumed locally suffers no extra efficiency penalties no matter how big your country is. Since on an empire level, most consumption is going to be occurring at your frontiers, where you are building defenses and whatnot, as opposed to the core, where you are too far away to do anything useful, you'd think the smaller colonies would be more efficient than the bigger ones, which ties into the above, as opposed to everything being 75% corrupt. The point is that in DW, there is no instantaneous travel. It actually takes time to get to the other side of the galaxy. The distance-based inefficiency reflects actual corruption or inefficiency in the sense of the distant planets not using their money and resources on the same priorities the central government might choose. Given that it actually can take weeks to cross the galaxy in DW, there is room for the kind of inefficiency or corruption that existed in older times, like the Roman Empire or the Chinese Empire. I think you're assuming that because DW is in a future sci-fi setting, that travel and communication times are instantaneous, whereas that's not actually true. Regards, - Erik
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