Is it possible to change the formula for inflation easily? As things stand, I don't think it's a very good mechanic at all. I posted my concerns on the discord, but I'll repeat them here as they motivate the suggestion I'm about to make.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that inflation shouldn't be a thing, or at least shouldn't work the way it does. As it is, it effectively acts as a hard cap on the number of things you can hurry per N turns, no matter how much gold you're generating. If you go above that, your gold generation will permanently decrease until you repay the "debt" by spending turns without hurrying anything. Which means that rather than hurrying being a reward for having a lot of gold generation, it's just a "free building" button you can click every so often assuming you remember.
Basically, it doesn't matter whether I'm generating 100 gold per turn surplus (before inflation) or 1000 gold per turn - the optimal way to hurry things is to hurry one building, then wait for the inflation to go back to 0, then hurry another, etc. If you hurry any more often than that, then your inflation will go up, very rapidly. At this point you'd have two options: keep going, hurrying buildings as soon as the inflation drops enough that you can afford to, or let the economy recover by not hurrying anything until inflation is back under control. With either option, in the long term you don't end up hurrying things any faster than if you'd kept inflation low in the first place, and you lose a whole bunch of gold.
This is a pity, because hurrying things is an obvious way to spend surplus gold you might be generating, and it becomes available just as you're finishing the early economy-draining expansion period. I often seem to end up with large amounts of extra gold hanging around, with nothing to spend it on. (I suspect that's partly a result of my game settings, but in a mod with as many moving parts as C2C it's bound to happen from time to time whatever settings you choose...) Hurrying has the potential to be a correcting option when this happens, much like how you can build science/gold/culture if you have a surplus of hammers. But at present, it...isn't.
I suggest that instead, if it's possible to code this, the consequences of a given use of hurrying should last a fixed number of turns, no matter how much more things you hurry in the meantime. But while you're still feeling the effects of that first hurry, any future hurries will quadratically increase the inflation generated. So, picking some plausible-sounding numbers, the formula could be something like:
I=n^2
where I is the total inflation this turn, and n is the number of times you pressed the hurry button within the last (say) 5 turns. This is scaled off a (hypothetical) gamespeed in which inflation currently increases by 1 every time you hurry, and decreases by 1 whenever you spend 10 turns without hurrying anything.
Let's see what this would look like in action. In all these calculations, when I talk about the total cost I'm ignoring the gold spent by clicking the hurry button, as that's the same in both cases.
Case 1: I hurry one wonder, and nothing else for the next 10 turns. Under the current system, inflation goes up by 1 for 10 turns, costing a total of
10 gold. Under the proposed system, inflation goes up by 1 for 5 turns, costing a total of
5 gold. In both cases, inflation is negligible compared to the direct cost of rushing.
Case 2: I get invaded, and need an army urgently, so I hurry 20 units in one turn. I then hurry nothing for the next 200 turns. Under the current system, my inflation goes up to 20, then gradually decreases over the next 200 turns. Using the triangle number formula, the total cost is 10* 20*19/2, or
1900 gold. With the proposed system, my inflation will be 400 for 5 turns, for a total of
2000 gold. Very closely comparable costs.
Case 3: I have a 200gpt surplus I want to turn into production long-term. Under the current system, I am simply unable to do this, as discussed - it doesn't matter how big my surplus is, I will only be hurrying
one item every 10 turns in the long term. If I do things correctly, I will also keep 199gpt of the budget surplus. Under the proposed system, I hurry 14 items, causing my inflation to increase to 196 per turn. I then wait 5 turns for it to go away, and hurry another 14 items, and so on. Overall, I end up hurrying
2.8 items per turn, and using the whole budget surplus.
Case 4: I have somehow managed to generate 2000gp per turn I want to turn into production. Under the current system, I again end up hurrying
one item every 10 turns. Under the proposed system, I can rush about 44 items every 5 turns, giving me a hurrying rate of
8.8 items per turn. This is a significant advantage which will probably see me pull ahead of my opponents, but isn't too ludicrous.
One criticism I can see of this formula is that it's very abrupt - you go from (say) 400 inflation down to 0 in a single turn. However, this can easily be corrected by modifying the formula; for example:
I=(n_0 + 4n_1 /5 + 3n_2 /5 + 2n_3 /5 + n_4 /5)^2
where n_0 is the number of hurries you did this turn, n_1 is the number you did last turn, n_2 the number you did two turns ago, etc.
Thoughts?