Egao No Genki

Join Date 07/2006

Please add the Early Loan Repayment option

Missing Feature: The ability to pay loans back early

I'm alt+tabbed out of the game at the moment because I bought a user-created troop transport, and chose the "Mitrosoft" option since I was low on BC at the time. I didn't like the prospect of having to pay off 637 weeks a ship that may be destroyed in a battle in a few months.

I searched for an option to repay my loan early. I couldn't find it anywhere. I consulted fellow players in the #galciv chatroom and they said there was no such thing. They directed me here in order to entreat the devs to add an early loan payback feature on a future patch (as soon as possible). I think it's common sense that many other players want this too.

Please tell me what you think, and whether/when you plan on adding this feature. Thank you very much.

-Egao No Genki

economics

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GreenReaper

Join Date 05/2001

+32

Loan companies are sharks, and they have no reason to let you get out of their loan agreement. That's part of what you have to consider when you take out a loan: look at how long you'll be paying for it, and how much it ends up costing you. If you don't want to end up paying through the nose, I think you should save up until you can afford the ship to start with. Of course, if you really need the ship, you'll have to take it out anyway . . . but that's where they make their money.

In game mechanics terms, it's a punishment for not having saved up the funds in the first place, while still allowing you to survive - for the moment, anyway.

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Actually...I like the idea.

Although a stiff pre-payment penalty must apply! Say you borrow 1000bc to repay over 100 weeks at 20bc per week. A week later, pre-pay the loan for 1100bc. The loan (shark) company loses out on its payment stream of 20bc/week, but gets a 1-week profit of 100bc, and can now loan the 1000bc out to another loser at hefty interest rates. Makes even more money for the loan shark.

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To encourage civs to save you could remove the economic penalty when you reach 20000BC.

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A user by the screenname of "kryo" in the same #galciv chat told that some loan companies who don't want customers to make an early payback charge penalties for repaying the loan early. If repaying a loan early means having to pay a percentage penalty fee atop it, then I'm all for that.

I propose the following:

- Mitrosoft should charge a 50% penalty fee
- United Builders Inc. should charge 25%
- Terran Manufacturing should not add a penalty fee at all.

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That's absurd. Credit and investment is the basis of a modern economy: characterising anyone who lends money to a government as a 'loan shark' is just ignorant. You certainly CAN pay loans back early, and it would be unusual for a business loan to penalise you for doing so. Get this - the lender gets x profit over 637 weeks, or can get that SAME profit RIGHT NOW in one lump sum. What do you think they would prefer? Why does anyone want to make the economic model MORE unrealistic? Have you guys been owned by banks on personal loans or something? Trust me, when you've borrowed more than a million dollars, they stop being 'loan sharks' and start being your best friend.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

and it would be unusual for a business loan to penalise you for doing so. Get this - the lender gets x profit over 637 weeks, or can get that SAME profit RIGHT NOW in one lump sum.

Because when you pay off a loan early, you don't just sum up all your remaining expected payments. You pay off the remaning principal, which is considerably less than the sum of the remaining payments because you avoid all the compounded interest you'd have to pay if you went for the long haul. Considering that that's where the profit is, many loan companies will add penalty clauses to the contract should you do such a thing, so they still get some profit out of the deal.

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GalCiv2 loans are simple loans: any moron with a calculator is aware of how much the total repayments over x weeks are. The obvious 'early repayment' option is to allow this full value (principal + interest) to be repaid at will - hence the lender isn't losing money, and the borrower isn't getting credit for free. Adding some ridiculous 'you have to pay fifty percent more for no reason other than game balance' is not required. The Galciv loans strike me as mobile phone deal '$25 a week for two years' delayed purchase contracts, and nothing more complex as a regular compounding loan. Indeed, the loans can really be expressed as 'borrow (value of ship)+(profit) over (time)' so it's really a zero-interest loan for this combined value and not a compounding loan.

Certainly I'd be happy if the game actually had a proper credit system, with actual loans (ie, not just loans for construction/upgrade projects). Being able to borrow heavily, pay off just the interest and carry a huge debt from early game until later when you can pay it off easily would be fantastic, and realistic. But hey, it's not like governments and wars are run on credit, is it? Oh wait, yes it is.

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you cannot begin to apply real-world economic models to GalCiv2. When you think of it, a race's entire economy can grow up by at least 30% every year. That's just plain impossible.

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I think of it like my car loan. No benefit for early repayment -- the total amount is the same.

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If I was the evil emperor I would just stiff them. What are they going to do? Break my legs?! HAHA!

I DON'T HAVE LEGS! I'M MADE OF PURE ENERGY! So please, try to sap my life energy away and see what happens...

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I'm all for an early repaiement option.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

If I was the evil emperor I would just stiff them. What are they going to do? Break my legs?!

No, they'll just hit their big red remote-repo button (read: self-destruct) that they had installed for every ship you bought...

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"No, they'll just hit their big red remote-repo button (read: self-destruct) that they had installed for every ship you bought..."

LOL. I usually buy the one with no loans. Come to think of it thats a pretty good idea..... In any other case, I would try to black-mail mitrosoft into giving into my evil extortion or else...well accidents happen.

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Sorry, the result of defaulting on loans is that you can't get more loans. This happened to whole governments in the past. You'd end up lost post-Revolutionary France, where your finance minister ran around assuring everyone you could repay your debts while taking out more, sinking your entire economy, depressing the value of your currency, breaking forgien trade, killing quality of life through inflation, ruining investment, all that jazz. Hence, stiffing your creditors is an extremely bad idea. Of course, in game terms, most people run without debt most of the time anyway: however, with a decent credit model you'd be at a serious disadvantage if you COULDN'T get credit as all your opponents would be using finance markets to drive their economies and you'd be stuck with your 'real' money.

When you think about it, almost all non-business games only let you play with 'real' money, cash that you actually have: this hasn't been the case in the real world for literally four thousand years.

EDIT - Everyone who thinks 'lolz i can just not payzor', imagine what would happen if a major first-world country (like the US) wrote off all it's debts. We're talking about trillions of dollars, all over the world, in all kinds of markets, suddenly disappearing. It'd be a global economic catastrophe, and the defaulter would be as badly hit as everyone else.

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"EDIT - Everyone who thinks 'lolz i can just not payzor', imagine what would happen if a major first-world country (like the US) wrote off all it's debts. We're talking about trillions of dollars, all over the world, in all kinds of markets, suddenly disappearing. It'd be a global economic catastrophe, and the defaulter would be as badly hit as everyone else."

(spits drink out of mouth) Geez! I didn't know the US was in debt so bad? Wow, I'm surprised all of the nations haven't been a stickler for loan payments. Even Bill Gates wouldn't put a dent in it (well, maybe help some) and he has 52 billion dollars (somewhere in that area).

PS: on the olde forums, I knew how to use the "quotes" button. Now it doesn't work! Please tell me how to do it.

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No, but you... you... you're thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's in Joe's house... right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin's house, and a hundred others. Why, you're lending them the money to build, and then, they're going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?

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Now that I thik about it, to counter kyro's "repo button", I would have bio-implants that could kill any citizen on command. Kinda like implanted poison to kill any law breaking citizen on the touch of a button. It would make them think twice to dodge their 95% tax rate

...

So if they DID blow up all the ships, and I didn't kill him on sight (presuming he did it in person), I would push the button to take care of him...FOR GOOD!

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

PS: on the olde forums, I knew how to use the "quotes" button. Now it doesn't work! Please tell me how to do it.

You just highlight the text you want to quote, and click Quote. Alternately if that doesn't work on your browser, the forums here use the same BBcodes for quoting as most other boards do (quote and /quote in square brackets), so you can copy/paste and add the quote tags manually if you need to.

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Hmm doesn't work. I highlight the text, click quote, nothing happens. Copied quote button cand clicked paste, nothing happend. Please give me the raw data. Like the (quote/)(quote) thingies.

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

I just said it above. You need to copy the text in question, NOT the quote button... the tags are standard quote tags: [quote] and [/quote].

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I think of it like my car loan. No benefit for early repayment -- the total amount is the same.

You need to use a different bank or loan agency. Virtually all consumer loans today are simple interest loans.

EDIT - Everyone who thinks 'lolz i can just not payzor', imagine what would happen if a major first-world country (like the US) wrote off all it's debts. We're talking about trillions of dollars, all over the world, in all kinds of markets, suddenly disappearing. It'd be a global economic catastrophe, and the defaulter would be as badly hit as everyone else.

It's all funny money anyway - not really based on anything other than the BELIEF it's worth something.

And, yes, being able to pay off a loan early (if maybe you got some good space junk) could help, but I'm not sure it wouldn't just provide another avenue that the AI couldn't exploit.

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