I strongly favour constant payments as well. In the AI I wasted a lot of effort trying to get a stable priority for the resource influence (compared to production and research) due to this constant ups and downs. I hope things will get smoother with constant costs.Ophiuchus wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 11:00 amwell said. +1 to changing Bureaucracy policy to a constant influence cost based on that ratio; having the cost as big lumps of prepaid IP at certain points in time does not add much i think (multi prepaid lump payments is notably different from the normal costs - but probably not better).Oberlus wrote: ↑Tue May 17, 2022 10:15 amYes. And in that case, that's the same as adding a constant IP cost per turn.
I think I just don't like the way Bureacracy works currently. Having to reset the empire's bureaucracy periodically is boring (and nonsensical to me). I would prefer something about increasing or decreasing colony upkeep depending on the ratio colonies/IRAs.
So let's see: The adoption cost of both Centralization and Bureaucracy is floor(2.0 * [[POPULATION_OWNED_BY_EMPIRE]]^0.5) and you have to spend every (10 x (Admin Buildings + 1)) turns, unless you keep Centralization. Well, actually it is more, because adopting Centralization for one turn always cost a lot of additional IP the due to the reduced IP production.
Ignoring the drop, we end up with:
-0.4 * [[POPULATION_OWNED_BY_EMPIRE]]^0.5 / (Admin Buildings + 1), which should reduce the capitals IP production after all modifiers, or maybe distributed amongst all populated planets.
While Centralization is adopt, the number would be halved or even less than that, after all keeping Centralization costs a fortune in IP itself as soon as you have more than a few colonies.