I don't see why changing a world from balance/balance to balanced/farming shouldn't be a bigger penalty / delay than mining/mining to reserach/research. Making small changes to focus shouldn't be that huge of a deal, and shouldn't be stupid to do occasionally, imho. Transitions that are bigger for big changes and shorter for short would deal with this.
There's a money cost associated with changing focus as well, or at least a money cost has been discussed before. The cost increases dependant upon delta between switch, population, and perhaps the construction meter.
So switching focus would cost money. Also, the number of turns Focus Transistion penalty is inflicted might be based on the type of transistion.
Anywho, it looks like a few people want this transistion stuff. *If* it gets into the design doc, I'd like to see it described something like this:
For each of the resource types, there is a Max Meter and Current Meter. Effects from technologies, buildings, racial picks, events, other meters etc. are applied to the Max Meter. The exception is destructive events: for example, earthquakes, riots, and enemy bombing act on the Current Meters.
After all Effects have been applied to the Max Resource Meters, they are normalized to the range of 0 to 10.
New colonies start with all Current Meters set to 0.
Each turn, if a Current Resource Meter is greater than it's associated Max Meter, the Current Meter is reduced to match the Max Meter.
Each turn, the value of the Construction meter is added to an accumlator. If this accumlator is greater or equal to 10, Current Meter with the greatest difference between it's associated Max Meter is incremented by 1. (If there is a tie, the meter with Primary Focus is chosen, otherwise the tie is resolved randomly.) The accumlator rolls over: the new value would be 10 less than the current value.
If a Build Project (including Terraforming) is currently in progress on a planet, the Construction meter is not applied to the accumlator. Build Projects halt all construction on infrastructure.
The Current Resource Meters are multiplied with population to determine the quanity of each resource produced by the planet. If there is a Build Project in process on a world, the number of resources produced is reduced by half.
On the Sidebar UI, each resource meter should be represented by:
a: Filled in boxes or icons for each point in the Current Meter
b: Greyed out boxes or icons for each point of the Max Meter above the Current Meter's value.
c: A numeric and/or iconic display of the total resources produced by the planet.
d: An indication of which resouce meter is enjoying the benefits of the Primary and Secondary Foci. (Player should be able to maniplute this indication to change the Focus of the world.)
Actually, spelled out like this, it doesn't sound so bad, so I'm changing my vote to: either this or my own planet special type labels.
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drek: What meter bonuses would primary and secondary balanced give? Minimum specialized bonuses were +2 primary and +1 secondary... this doesn't leave room for balanced... (up them a bit and make balanced +1 for all?, or make specialized focuses also have a -ve effect on other meters?)
There is no secondary balanced focus.
Balanced primary would grant +1 to all resources. Probably the base specialized bonus should be bumped up to +3 to compensate. Obviously there should be some mid/high level techs that improve the balanced bonus so it keeps up with the tech improvements to specialized bonus.
A bit off-topic, but I think the player should be forced to choose a different focus for secondary. Otherwise, we'll just end up with a bunch of doubled focus planets....that would seem the optimal strat for an empire with more than a few worlds.