I think this is a bug. The same thing happens when you disband a star base.

20 turn cooldown after disbanding to get your administrator point back.  Status quo definitely not great.

Other (probable) simple to fix things the game really needs!!!

1. Asteroid Notification if any come within your influence (they're so important you don't want to miss out on not mining them immediately)

2. Individual Hotkeys for Ships/Planets/Starbases/Shipyards tab key for all is not enough.  It causes a lot of unnecessary micro without hotkeys.  You've done a good job of removing it in other areas e.g. economy and construtor/transport spam.  More hotkeys are needed!

3.  Rush buy possible from Govern Screen on items, it's not currently.

Depends how cruel Brad wants to be on the player for making a mistake 10 is fine, but with 20 you're less able to abuse scrapping tons of starbases/surveys for some short term tactical gains.

I like the permanence, but also see how it needs to be mitigated to prevent crippling.

How about immediately getting 1 back for every 2 lost.

I don´t see the point in losing admins permanently.

If you want to just have unlimited administrators, then just mod the XML to give yourselves 1000000 administrators.

I've given you the reasons why you don't get admins back when you eliminate starbases.  I think decomissioning ships and such is more reasonable.

Brad - thanks for jumping into this conversation - the Stardock team's availability for discussion is what sets the company and its games apart from the pack.

Some observations in relative priority from a MP perspective, which still have relevance to the SP game (based on a 3-hour MP session tonight):

1)  Asteroid mining is extremely OP - 1 base production point for $100 is insane based on the purchase price of a factory which gives 2.5% at $1k.  In our quick game, my starting planet had 8 avail asteroids to my opponent's 0 - that provided an immediate early-game +8 base production which a MP opponent can not overcome (everything else being even, my social and military prod rates were +22 vs. his +9).  Asteroids either need to be a percentage boost like factories or a smaller base boost like +0.2.  This impacts the SP experience as well - I'm going to re-roll galaxies until I get a huge number of starting asteroids and then steamroll the AI and boast about how great a player I am.

2)  Administrators not broken, but could use refinement.  Maybe break administrators out of the citizen pool.  Instead of 1 administrator per colony/starbase/ship, you can slowly grow a base pool starting at 100 or so.  Each colony would require admin points equal to its max terraformed size (ie 12 available hexes requires 12 admin points).  This way, a single size 12 planet would require the same proportion of administrators as a size 8 and a size 4 planet combined.  Starbases would require, say, 5 points, which would provide enough starbase admin for an average of two starbases per planet.  You could choose to place six SB around a planet, but have to make the choice to neglect other planets.  For starships that require admin, you would need a number of admins based on the hull size:  tiny = 1 to super dreadnaught = 5 (sorry, I used to play P&P Starfire).  You could still have "Admiral" citizens that could be assigned to ships for promotions, etc, and their assignment would "trump" the admin requirement.  If you chose to disband a ship, you must do so at a Shipyard or Colony in order to regain the admin points or Admiral.  If you scuttle the ship in deep space, all hands go down with the ship.  I wouldn't worry about recovering admin points for colonies or starbases, but you could do a "project" that takes X number of turns to complete.  Once completed, you disband the colony or starbase, but recover the admin points.  If the colony or starbase are destroyed/captured in the interim, your lose the admin points (good CEOs are hard to find).  For colonies, this process could actually end with the production of a colony ship with part of the original planet's population so you could move the part of the planet's production capacity "east of the Urals" in time of crisis.

 3)  At least for MP in Crusade, the map generator seems to be somewhat broken.  We restarted four times on small and medium maps using abundant star systems and habitable planets.  In each case, the majority (8 out of 10) of star systems had zero habitable planets.  When you did find good planets, they were almost always found in clumps of three per star system.  It seems like the Crusade map generator is calculating resources first which then exclude planets within a certain distance of the special.  A suggestion would be for the generator to work on habitable planets first - on abundant, every star system would have a high chance (80-90%) to have a decent to good habitable planet (size 8-14) with a small chance for a great planet.  A second calculation with a much lower success rate (20%) would spawn a second poor to decent planet (size 4 - 10).  A final "lucky" roll would check for a third, always poor planet (4 - 6).  This would create a much more balanced play map, still with the thrill of exploration (papa needs a multiplanet system).  That would also mitigate the imbalance of being able to cover multiple planets with a single econ/cultural starbase.

4)  MP needs to be able to create custom races.  In our play group, we like to let skill rather than chance dictate victory.  We will often create vanilla, identical races to level the playing field instead of allowing each of us to min-max a race.  Think of MOO where someone picking Creative (damn Psilons) was a certain path to victory - research simply snowballed too quickly and could not be overcome short of a lucky, early rush.  Currently, by forcing MP to pick the pre-generated races, there is always a small benefit to one of the players that allows them to pull ahead too early.  That extra 1 movement point can be critical in identifying the first star system to colonize, and that 5-turn headstart reverberates throughout the remainder of the game.

Until some of these issues are fixed, we are going to have to play with house rules excluding asteroid mining, limiting the number of starbases to a multiple of planets colonized, and restricting which races are available for play (we could all be the same race, but haven't found a way to change just the color sets).  Then we'll have to roll multiple galaxies and pray for an even distro of habitable planets and systems.

Hope some of the above makes sense.  Thanks. 

Read the repsonse but I am not sure that it´s such a big problem. How many administrators can you actually save using this method in the midgame?  1, 2, a dozen? Haven´t played this far, a bunch of things not working properly were a real downer.

I don´t see the response "if you have problems with parts of the system, rip it completely" out as particularly helpful. There is a difference between refunding with a limited pool and no pool at all.

But well, in case I tale the advice to rip it out, where can someone not familiar with the modding in GC 3 find the starting number of administrators?

I think the 10-20 turn delay is a good balance. It doesn't make regearing too strong but doesn't make it silly that I'm committed to a survey ship for all time

I like having administrators be a limited resource.

So here's my thought...

If you make no changes:

Change the tool tip to show them as used rather than active   Once the admin is used it is used.  doesn't matter what it was used for.. it was used.

If you refund admin for decommissioned ships/starbases   add a bureaucracy cost   first one is free,  next is 100credits then 500  then 1000      as money is much harder to come by  in the game now...  making the "red tape" machine behave like a red tape machine might be sorta fun.

Also could make techs that lower this cost.


I think destroyed ships/starbases should also refund...        I had the peacekeeper mega event and they went and blew up a bunch of my starbases....     this cripples me for the rest of the game...     Same is probably possible with the space monsters.

Perhaps have these refund once peace is declared?     So you don't get them back while you are at war, but once you are not at war, or once the space monsters are all killed etc you get them all back...

Another potential thought on the possibility of recovering administrators from decommissioned/destroyed ships/starbases:

Rather then a flat 10 or 20 turn 'recovery period' for disbanded administrator projects, what if administrators effectively went on vacation after their project was ended, to the tune of 10 or 20% (subject to balancing) of the time their project had been operational?  Ex: starbase Joe's Durantium Store has been in operation for 100 turns, but the empire's stocks of durantium are looking good and they want to relocate Joe to a new project. Upon scrapping the starbase, Joe cashes in his 20 turns of vacation (20% of operational time) and you don't see him reenter the pool until that time is up.  Doesn't punish you if you make a mistake and pop out one too many colony ships (could have a minimum vacation time to prevent any gamy scenarios that I'm not clever enough to think up) but really makes you think about those long term projects.

In terms of destroyed things, what if instead of the administrator being gone forever, the civilization that destroyed the administrated object captures the unit involved. It could be a new resource pool effectively that can't be used by the capturing empire for their own projects, but perhaps as something that could be ransomed back to the originating civ, similar to POW exchanges in times of war. Might make a fun little meta-game for privateers especially if you can pick off some of your opponent's administrators and bargain them back. You could even allow them to bartered around between other civs.  Worried about the Drengin declaring war on you soon? Pick up some of their administrators on the black market, ransom them back for a temporary non-aggression pact.

Just a few thoughts on the subject. While I can understand the concerns the devs have about gaming the system, for something as difficult to replace and as essential to standard gameplay as administrators, it seems that having a way to recover lost resources with a light penalty (for disbanding) or a larger one (things blowing up) would help improve game flow overall.

Be better, balance wise and to stop them been gamed, to return admins from bases/ships destroyed by enemies/events but not if decommissioned.

I think varying cooldowns based on what they are used for would work and could be balanced.   Administrators assigned to decommissioned survey ships you might get back in a couple of turns.  Those assigned to starbases take a few turns longer.  Those assigned to colonies might take longer still.  Alternately, if the ship/starbase/colony was destroyed, there's a good chance the administrator died too (though the game should indicate this.)