techn0mage

Economy Tip/Rant: Military / Social wasted allocation handled differently

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Economy Tip/Rant: Military / Social wasted allocation handled differently

Why does it have to be so obscure...? :(

from GalCiv2 Forums
I am really enjoying GC2 and I'm thrilled to see that it is getting the recognition it deserves. My hope is that it will shame some of the larger development/publishing houses into not acting like sleazebags and actually making better games.

Disclaimer aside, my biggest gripe with GC2 is about the economy. For those of you interested in my "book", see post here:
https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=346&AID=101763#813913

I'll sum up that rant here though, I'm disappointed at how unnecessarily difficult managing the economy is. The difficulty comes mainly from 2 things:

- Lack of transparency or explanation as to what the economy is doing and how various production values are calculated

- Poor methods of management offered to the player, that is, the way that the player actually controls the economy. Note that this does NOT refer to changing the rules of the game, i.e. setting different research% on every planet, I am talking about how the economy could be better controlled without changing the rules of the game. (i.e., today the player says "I want to use 50% of the total industrial capacity" instead of "I want to spend 300 credits on all industries")

My classic example is that in MOO2 you could click on the number of hammers to see how the computer arrives at that number. In GC2 there is no such luxury and we are forced to try to deconstruct the game in order to figure out what the economy is doing. For example, the 'spending' value on the planet screen appears to equal the production values for all 3 categories, plus the 'maintenance' value for that colony, I just noticed that. But the game never actually comes out and says it in the style of: Mil(100) + Soc(50) + Res(50) + Maint(50) = Spending(250)

I just found an interesting quirk - if your planet has no military project, the military spending value is displayed in parentheses and no money is spent. However, if you have no social project, the money seems to vanish. Whether it gets used for anything, I have no idea. So until anyone discovers where the money goes, beware moving up the social slider to 100%, make sure all your colonies are using the money!

I think the most important thing to realize about the economy is that unlike other games, i.e. Civ4, building factories/labs doesn't get you production or research, what they do is increase your capacity to CONVERT money into production or research. So when you find that precursor mine or artifact and start building/researching to the tune of 400beakers/turn, keep in mind that unlike some 'artifact' bonus in Moo2 which gave your bonus research for free, you are actually paying the same amount of money for each research point, and that precursor mine/artifact just made that one planet ten times more expensive than all the others (assuming you utilized it).
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Reply #101 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
To the game developers: Like all these people, I found the economy very difficult to figure out and I STILL don't know how some alien planet I just captured is putting out fifety something influence, and it has no influence structures on it, and how my planet with several is only putting out forty something... and my planet has a large population. But answering all these little questions isn't the answer. The answer is to realize that most of us are struggling with this aspect of the game cause it's not well done. Please fix it.

Love the game though.
Reply #102 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I think that giving each planet their own spending and production sliders can allieviate the waste of production or spending to a certain extent. Or maybe it'll fix up the whole thing. It is rather irritating when my homeworld needs to produces Colony Ships and Miltary Production, but my current new colonies need Social Production in order to actually be useful some time in the near-future (not near-never) If that's a little too much micromanagement when you get to 30+ colonies, provide a universal slider somewhere that'll adjust every planet's production values and spending.
This is just some random stuff I thought up after a while when I read the posts. I'm not really the stat-crunching type, so I don't really know if this is workable or not.
EDIT: In even more focus to the event in which 30 colonies need to be managed with individual sliders, you could implement something akin to the Governer tab in the Civ window, where you change rally point directions, shipbuilding directions, and etc.
Start11 - Customize the Start Menu and Taskbar in Windows 10/11.
Reply #103 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
OK, so SD has obviously decided it is time to get me off the forums, and has proposed the following for 1.1:

- Color coded the hammers/etc. based on whether they are bonus or not. Then on mouse over, which by then should be very nice, we can display where these numbers come from.

- Unused Social Spending routed to military spending (or back to treasury if nothing is being used)

I can see this going a long way towards addressing both the "issues" of the economy and the difficulties understanding the system. Looking forward to seeing it!

Thanks again to SD
Reply #104 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I am not sure if this was addressed in a different thread, but I would like to know what FOCUS actually does to a production value (other than "increases it"). How much does it divert, and what is this based on? That would make decisions about where to set the global sliders a lot easier.
Reply #105 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
OK, so let's go beyond this and talk about how to use the current sysetem to strategize. It seems like here are some good strategies:



1) When more than 1/2 of your planets have no social production is to shift the social slider way down and then focus social on the few planets that are producing buildings. Right? It seems like a lot less money will be "wasted" that way.

AND

2) When you have no more social projects, start "upgrading" factories into research centers or trade buildings, because you will have social slider down you will be getting more military prod anyway. This minimizes the waste!


Do them both at mid-game, and bump social back up again wehn you get a social tech!
Reply #106 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Hello there, i started playing Galciv2 1 week ago and ended up with serious understanding problems concerning the game mechanics, especially the eco model.
This is the first game i need to plunge into forums and try to find help or answers to my questions.
Bonuses not showing up correctly in summary screen, production/research output numbers not relating to anything reproducable.

This game, as is, was very promising for me at first glance when i didn't look closer trying to find my way through the new game.

But the longer i play the more confused i get? How is that? The economic model is VERY CRYPTIC.
And the fact, that i cannot decide directly on a per-planet base how i split up my production/research is very tedious.
I followed several threads about the "unused social production goes down the drain" and maybe 85% of the gamers posting here are unhappy with this "wanted game feature".

Here is a simple suggestion by me: Why not get rid of the general spending slider and incoperate a individual spending slider on a per-planet base? Of course this means more micromanaging but it also gives control about where the BC's go exactly. This way i could slide my research planet to 100% reserach and 0/0 military social, assuming every tile is used properly and no constructions have to be made and its having no starport.
As soon as research upgrades become available i could then adjust the individual planet spending slider and maybe adjust the spending to 50% social for the upgrades and 50% research for example.
If slider stays untouched the upgrades then would show up as "never being finshed" or "infinite construction time" which could be shown in the colony screen catching my attention.

If this issue is solved i will continue gameplay and enjoy GalCiv2 to its fullest potential. But for now i will leave the box closed; if nothing is done to resolve this issue i will sell GalCiv2 on ebay. It is ridiculous that if so many gamers are stumbling over such a "works as intended" feature and nothing is beeing changed it is a lost chance for one of the most promising XXX turn based Sci-Fi games i have ever gotten my hands on.
Reply #107 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Regarding bonus tiles:
I've never noticed any discrepencies for bonus tiles. If it's a 700% tile, I seem to get a 700% bonus from the tile. (I'll look more closely at it next time, though). I do know that the bonus I get from a 700% bonus is HUGE, so I never bothered to look closely at the exact numbers...



Regarding game economics:

If unused social spending and/or indivudal planet production sliders were incorporated, then the game would simultaneously be made much easier and less enjoyable (for me atleast). Seriously, the game is not that difficult, and increasing micromanagement (at all) is not fun -- imho.

Keep in mind that it's not innefficient to "upgrade" factories that you don't need *currently* to something else (like research labs). I use 3 factories MAX on my worlds, unless I'm building a military. Using the upgrade feature is the key. It only takes a handful of weeks to turn a research planet into a manufacturing planet -- using only 3 factories to do so.




In conculsion, I don't have a problem with the economics of the game. I don't want to be able to tweak an individual planet's production more than we are able to currently. But if they do add this feature, then I'd appreciate (and I'm sure many others would as well) higher difficulty levels than Suicidal, since there's no multiplayer capability.

Please fix Technological Capitals.

Reply #108 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I posted this in another thread, but that post doesn't appear at all so I'll post it here.

The Upcoming patch says "Unused Social Spending routed to military spending (or back to treasury if nothing is being used)"

But How will this work? I am concerned this will work worse than advertised by other players.

The problem is if I spend 150 (Military) on a Ship that only costs 120, does that 30 go back into my treasury? I don't know that It does, and adding the Social +50 to the 150 only makes it 200 spending on a ship that costs 120. So the end result would be 80 wasted. If thats an accurate account of what will happen I'm not sure it will help much with waste. I don't see how it solves anything, and only increased the problem of accurately figuring out how much you need to Build a ship at a Colony. If I have to add 38 Social to 128 Military to figure out how much is being spent on a ship in every colony then it would cause alot of problems. You would have to continually add numbers together to figure out how much is being spend on your ships every time you touch the slider. And if you wanted to reduce waste by making sure your Capitols are producing ships without too much waste, this will cause a huge problem because you now have to add every Social and Military every time you adjust the slider to figure out how much is being spent on the Ship.

I'm not sure this (transfer to military) is a good Idea unless the unused currency from Ships isn't wasted, I wouldn't want to spend 200 on a 120 ship and find out that the +50 from Social just went into another way that wastes it. The only time I see this improve your situation is to shut down your Manufacturing Capitol all together, not building a ship or building, then you save some BCs for not building anything. But, who wants to build a Manufacturing Capitol that doesn't produce anything at all?

So I think Social should go back to the Treasury, or rather not be spent at all if no building is in production. But then if there was no waste, then you would be running your Economy at 100% and the AI would suffer some because it relies on inefficiency from the player.

So that leaves only one option for now. That is not to change it until we have a more information and figure out if this is the right way we want the games economy to be run.

Reply #109 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Oh I think there's some projecting going on there my friend. I suspect it's a much smaller number.

You have spending. Spending goes into 3 areas, military, social, research. You have 3 sliders. I don't think that many people are baffled. If they were, you wouldn't have the occasional post about it, it would be everywhere.

I think most gamers prefer being able to build one or the other. But I think in GalCiv III we should revisit the whole thing. Besides, it makes coding the AI easier.


I suspect that most people don't understand how it works, it's just that they don't realise they don't understand. My economy kept nose-diving and I hadn't figured out why yet...

Arguably, if I had it to do it over again, I probably would have eliminated social spending completely and instead had buildings on the planet that employed laborers to construct buildings. But changing that would be a radical change and, in the bigger scheme of things, it's not that significant.

However, in the scope of a 1.x, it could be doable to have a "Guns" vs. "Butter" slider that determines where that factory production goes -- buildings or ships.

Secondly, the labs -- research would be de-linked and would go between 0 and 100% on them as well.

Unused social production would then be transferred to ship production. And if no ships were being built, it woudl simply go back to your treasury.


This to me is the solution. The sliders should represent the allocation of resources, and that is the most logical way to do it. It also keeps the game fairly micromanagement free, and as someone who used to manually upgrade their buildings in Space Empires III, I am in no hurry to return to that world (the minister AI would build new buildings, but wouldn't destroy old ones).

Combine this with, as techn0mage keeps asking for, an icon in the civilisation manager noting the focus of each planet (if any) and you have what I would consider to be a near perfect system. Or at least one that achieves, in decent fashion, what it set out to achieve.

I would prefer to avoid things like double-focus, because then we really are entering the world of micro-management, and I don't want that as an entry requirement to compete.
Reply #110 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
A minor problem related to this is that it is easy to increase spending via starbases, but much harder to increase revenue. Economic Starbases, despite the help text, generally result in no more revenue, rather you pay for the extra production/research they probide. Upgrading the freighter portion of these bases can give you a little more revenue, but this is tiny in comparison to the massive increase in spending they can cause.

If these bases had modules that could increase tax or tourism revenue, then there would be more options for a player on how to handle things.

Of course, the problem this thread discusses is compounded by the fact it is very expensive to buy buildings. Hence a strategy of buying buildings in low production worlds doesn't work. At least this will largely be fixed in the next patch. Still, I'd like to see more revenue related modules for starbases.
Reply #111 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Not that real world economics would make a great difference in the way SD will creat GC3 or some heavy duty patches for GC2 but read some material from the Austrian School of Economics.


Good heavens, what a pleasant surprise: another Austrian! Wow, sometimes we find each other in the weirdest places, eh? Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito.

Back on topic, I think having the ability to view and change a planet's "focus" from the domestic policy screen or the colony list would be a good feature, and an adequate short-term solution if the focus were to remove a much larger part of whatever kind of production you didn't want and convert it to the focused production of your choice. While it's not a "guns or butter" slider, it does give the option to go all out for one or the other, or just don't focus to keep the regular mix of production that you set for your whole empire in the domestic screen. It has an advantage over the slider in that it takes far less micromanagement while at the same time being easier to implement. On top of that, it deals with the planets at the extreme ends of development, which is where almost all of these problems come from anyway. I wouldn't guess that it would take an AI overhaul either, since the AI already uses the focused production feature as needed. Doesn't it?
Reply #112 from Stardock Forums Top
Wow. This is BY FAR one of the best threads I have read here.

The information on the economy and wasted production was an eye-opener to me. I had that feeling that *something* wasn't right but I couldn't put my finger on it till I saw it all spelled out here plainly.

It especially explains why when I go down to 10% social spending my newly acquired planets never actually produce anything because the big ones gobble up all the money.

I have an idea about this that could be done in a patch and would require no new sliders or menu's or micromanagment for the player while at the same time no longer wasting resources 100% due to social spending.

Here's all the needs to be done in the code:

For each planet the game checks to see if there is any social project in the build queue. If there is, the social spending for that planet is applied toward the project.

If there isn't any social project in the queue, the money isn't returned to treasury but is instead applied to reseach/military for that planet in the percentages for those sliders.

Example:

You have have social spending at 20%, research at 20% and military at 60%.

On planet 1, you have no social project in the queue. So on that planet the spending is allocated as 75% (base 60 + 60/80 military/research+military * 20 social spending ) military and 25% (20 + 20/80 *20) research.

On planet 2, you have a social project in the queue. So on that planet the resources are spent as 60/20/20 as you'd expect.

This way on developed worlds the production is not *wasted* it's used as military or research and on conquered or developing worlds those will actually get money to build something. The only waste is converting factory production to research production which seems reasonable given factories are really designed for research.

You could with this method run social really high too knowing your developing new worlds quickly while at the same time still doing something useful on developed worlds or super production facilites.

This means no new sliders or econony models or changes to how things work.

I still realize the economy may not be the best design in the world, but if Frogboy doesn't want to do a major overhaul this would go a long way toward fixing a huge part of the problem while adding no micromanagment on a per colony basis.

KGB
Reply #113 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

While I agree there are simpler economic systems out there, the basic thing here is that I wanted an economic system that had some semblance of reality into it.

Specifically: That your SPENDING was not related at all to your INCOME.

The US budget, for instance, has nothing to do with income other than congress's general awareness that the public has an aversion to excessive debt/defitic spending. We have tried to capture that here.


Good to hear that, it's also worrying us here in Europe...
And I really like this part of the mechanic, especially because I hate it so much if I cannot pay for the full 100% of my spending bill.
(If I "hate" a game mechanic that means it's got no "no brainer" settings, which is very good)


I can tell you right now that regardless of how vocal people become, linking your income with your spending is a non-starter. It isn't going to happen.

However, that said, there is one flaw and two non-optimal issues with the overall economics in the game:

The flaw: Social and Military Spending should be linked as one slider. Factories produce the industrial units they need.

Arguably, if I had it to do it over again, I probably would have eliminated social spending completely and instead had buildings on the planet that employed laborers to construct buildings. But changing that would be a radical change and, in the bigger scheme of things, it's not that significant.

However, in the scope of a 1.x, it could be doable to have a "Guns" vs. "Butter" slider that determines where that factory production goes -- buildings or ships.

Secondly, the labs -- research would be de-linked and would go between 0 and 100% on them as well.

Unused social production would then be transferred to ship production. And if no ships were being built, it woudl simply go back to your treasury.

But while that would be doable in a 1.x type scenario, it wouldn't be a 1.1 version. I twould be more like a 1.5 issue since it would require consideable AI reworking to do it along with significant documentation, play balancing, etc.

But as for the tax slider and the spending slider, no, they won't be joined. Ever.


Wow, actually admitting design weaknesses and outlining how, if and when they'll be most likely adressed?
Consider me very, very impressed!

I like it how the most immediate problem (social waste) is fixed in 1.1. If in a further release the social/military and research sliders would be disconnected then I'm really totally happy!

I think I'm going to hug my collectors tin box now.

Reply #114 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
That is precisely the reason to do it. No matter what your justifications are for the system, if 90% of your players (my guess is this number is actually even higher - I would be surprised if any non-developer actually understands the system 100%) can't understand the system, it may be time for a new one.

Ultimately I feel that the system itself is less of a problem than SD's frustrating refusal to provide a resource explaining unambiguously how it actually works, including all aspects, modifiers, and penalties, along with gameplay examples that show how the average player can use the system as intended.

Instead you get hundreds of posts on this or that, with SD responding to a small fraction of them with incomplete or uninformative answers. Why put everybody through this?


Exactly. I want the "secret recipe". The AI obviously knows the secret recipe, otherwise, why do half it's Grade 18 planets have 70% empty tiles and why do I continually find the mfg center, the economic center and the tech center always on their home world?

The developers know the secret sauce if you will and they're forcing us to figure it out. Just tell us how it works FFS!!
Reply #115 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

I like the proposals in Brad's post #94. They address most of the issues I have with the economic system. The coupling of labs and factories had me puzzled for a long time (never understood it in GC1, finally figured it out in GC2). The only issue this proposal doesn't address is the Mega colony starving all the other colonies. I like geoelectric's solution of allowing players to distribute income either by percentage or give essentially equal credit amounts to each colony. Although I admit I would love that feature, that would be a nightmare to document, and teaching the AI to use it would probably take a while.

AS to linking income and spending, I must have missed that in this thread, I didn't see calls for that, and I agree that would be not in keeping with the thrust of GalCiv2.

So, if Stardock looking for feedback on where to guide your efforts for updates beyond 1.1, I would vote for what was proposed in Brads post #94, maybe with some modifications. That would make me happier than I already am (and I'm already pretty happy) I just try and avoid over specializing any of my colonies....