Reserve infusion

[Zeraan]

Reading this thread made me think of a scenario where it may be impossible to test without some memory editing. What happens if a planet is infused with sufficient cash to last a few turns, and is captured in ground combat the very next turn. Does the cash disappear, or are they still there and the winner gets to use it up?

What about bombardment? Does it reset the cash to 0 for that planet if colony is destroyed. What about bioweapons that leaves factories behind? Does that leave cash or disappear as well?

This discussion has been very interesting to me, as I'm implementing the reserves/production boosting right now in my game.

[RefSteel]

While I don't know the answer with 100% certainty, I've always assumed that any "leftover" reserve production is lost when a planet leaves (via conquest, destruction, or sporing) the empire that originally spent the reserves on it. If I were designing a new game similar to Orion, I would probably dump still-leftover reserves back into the planetary reserve at that point actually: The main point of leftover production is to avoid the micromanagement of adding reserves to the same planet(s) every single turn, and the possibility of losing lots of reserves (or worse, giving it to a rival) if you added more than necessary in advance would just encourage that micromanagement again. [Edit: Not a big deal though, since it never really comes up unless an attack with a chance of breaking through is expected imminently.]

[Zeraan]

While I don't know the answer with 100% certainty, I've always assumed that any "leftover" reserve production is lost when a planet leaves (via conquest, destruction, or sporing) the empire that originally spent the reserves on it. If I were designing a new game similar to Orion, I would probably dump still-leftover reserves back into the planetary reserve at that point actually: The main point of leftover production is to avoid the micromanagement of adding reserves to the same planet(s) every single turn, and the possibility of losing lots of reserves (or worse, giving it to a rival) if you added more than necessary in advance would just encourage that micromanagement again. [Edit: Not a big deal though, since it never really comes up unless an attack with a chance of breaking through is expected imminently.]

While your answer is probably what the developers intended, I was wondering if it actually is implemented that way. From the bugs with reserve carry-over, I'm wondering if this kind of bug exists as well.

Of course, it makes sense that a conquered planet with extra reserves should return the reserves to its original owner, because the idea is that you're paying a planet each turn, but not have to repeatedly pay it each turn manually.

[RefSteel]

Yeah, understood. I can think of some decent ways to test this without resorting to editing (although editing in the right fleets in the right places would make it quicker and easier). If you start with a game where you've reached a winning position but haven't actually taken the win, then, for instance:
1) Establish a small colony on a spud world with an alien fleet incoming.
2) Dump ridiculous amounts of reserves into the colony - say many thousands of BC.
3) Let the aliens conquer the world.
4) Conquer it back from them ASAP.
5) If it's not obvious from the newly-conquered planet's production, try dumping more reserves into the planet to see if its production doubles as a result.

Though as I said I'm not 100% sure, I'm still very sure that you'll find leftover reserve spending for a planet disappears completely whenever it's conquered or destroyed, regardless of any factories that may remain.