I have been theorycrafting a bit and doing minor experiments in a turn based game. It seems that you can generate money out of thin air by doing the following:
Have a planet with at least 51 Resources and no Industry.
Have at least two players in proximity of said planet
Build economy 1 (cost: 9$ or less) on said planet.
Have ships from alternating players loop, so that the planet changes ownership every tick.
Rebuild economy 1 every tick.
This will generate various amounts of money, depending on the resources and terraforming levels involved, as destroying economy yields 10$ per level destroyed.
Of course, there is only a very short period in the game where this strategy actually yields more than just having economy built on the planet, still I believe this is not intended.
Cheers,
SpaceOfAdes
Almost acceptable for any Econ priced less than $10, but you gotta
1 buy a few carriers and
2 stay awake/active for the series of econ repurchases.
I personally do not play that way.
The small credit gains do not justify diverting my limited attention from all of the other borders / focus areas of my empire.
I understand that this is hardly gamebreaking, but it is also easy to fix, if it isn’t wanted as a game mechanic.
The formula for Economy purchases could simply be changed to max(10, floor(500/resources)(ecolevels+1)) instead of just the floor(500/resources)(ecolevels+1). This would fix the minimum price per economy to 10.
Your proposed patch would defeat the purpose of tech Terraforming.
I think this (IMO not really a bug) is really an unintended consequence of the correct working of the tech Terraforming. Most players are too busy fighting wars and capturing new stars to worry about swapping stars with a complicit ally to generate small cash.
Besides high (51+) resource stars with high levels of Terraforming are more desirable than low resource stars because they allow larger purchases of cheaper EIS WG infrastructure. Most players will buy a lot more ECON on high resource stars, which increases the price of ECON on that star, which then impedes this cash generating loop that you are describing.
Big growing empires are making big fast growing gains, that this small cash may not be worth the time to focus on.
Small empires on a losing trend may be uncomfortable alternately trading a high resource star & losing cheaper IND SCI WG to suspicious neighbors.
There are players who role play as pirates. I vote that this scheme should be allowed, and not fixed. LOL
My proposed fix would set the minimum price to 10$. So even if you would somehow reach 250 resources, you would pay 10$ for levels 1-5, then 12$, 14$ and so on. You are right, this is a lot of work for a small cashflow, but as you pointed out yourself, a small consistent cash bonus may yield bigger rewards than you would think over time. Especially in slow(48h production) games this may be the dominating factor in income if done correctly.
I am sure to be using this scheme in the semi-early game if it is not deemed exploiting here.
I don’t consider it exploiting either. However, one of the conditions was to have 0 industry on the star. I try to get the cheapest economy possible, which means I rarely (if ever) have a star with 0 industry on it, especially if it is high in resources. I’d much prefer to build industry on that star, and probably save as much or more on building the industry there rather than building the industry on a worse star which costs more.
While I agree it’s a way to “manufacture” money (LOL that in long-running games, the cost of the first Economy can be ONE dollar!), it’s a lot of work for a small payback … and there are tradeoffs in not being able to use that Industry. So I don’t think anything needs to be “fixed” as not a “big exploit” … but sure, could be used in certain cases for a small benefit.