Production vs Research.

thanks for the math ya put in there

You should start work on a GameFAQ for GalCiv II, PirateRob!

One of the ramifications of the current model is that you can never drive your planets economy to its maximum extent. There will always be unused capacity somewhere even if you have budget surpluses. At the default slider settings (50% industrial capacity and 33 M / 33 S / 34 R distribution) you are only using 33% of your manufacturing capacity and 17% of your Research capacity. (for a total of 23% of your total capacity)

Great post, I like how you tested it all out and made things clear.

I think it would be better if they did away with the three sliders for Research, Social, and Industry and have one Industrial spending slider. Your planets will always produce whatever you set them up to produce and the Industrial Spending will just modify the amount of money that is put in as it does now. Otherwise, like you said, there will be huge wasting of resources. I could see I was wasting a lot of resources, but now it looks kind of ridiculous how much wasting is going on.

nice you put a lot of effort into that

I think it would be better if they did away with the three sliders for Research, Social, and Industry and have one Industrial spending slider. Your planets will always produce whatever you set them up to produce and the Industrial Spending will just modify the amount of money that is put in as it does now. Otherwise, like you said, there will be huge wasting of resources. I could see I was wasting a lot of resources, but now it looks kind of ridiculous how much wasting is going on.

I prefer the idea of:

a) having the one industrial capacity slider

b) removing the 3 distribution sliders

c) removing the "focus" in the planet screen

d) putting in 3 sliders in the planet screen that would function as the inustrial capacity slider does. E.g., if you had military to 100%, social to 0%, and research to 100% the planet would be spending as much as its facotories and labs could handle, directing it all to military and research, respectively, with none towards social.

This system would also provide a way to completely avoid the "Social waste" issue.

My 2 cents.

I think it would be better if they did away with the three sliders for Research, Social, and Industry and have one Industrial spending slider. Your planets will always produce whatever you set them up to produce and the Industrial Spending will just modify the amount of money that is put in as it does now. Otherwise, like you said, there will be huge wasting of resources. I could see I was wasting a lot of resources, but now it looks kind of ridiculous how much wasting is going on.

Wait, I'm rethinking this...

But then you will waste lots of resources on a planet that has no social projects left. So how about if they don't have social projects all the industry goes towards military?

Ok, I got it: All three sliders work independently from each other and each planet has its own set of 3 sliders. This way we control exactly what the resources are being used for and everything can be run at full capacity at the same time if we have money to back it. This way a manufacturing planet can be run at full capacity at the same time a research planet is running at full capacity. Makes more sense to me.



We specify how much of each individual planet is being utilized for what purpose. Why should a planet with no research labs waste money in research for example? Why not just let it do what it is good at and reduce waste? This also lets us shut down a planet if we choose and save those resources in the form of money.

Maybe they could add an option such as "global or domestic sliders".

Ok, I got it: All three sliders work independently from each other and each planet has its own set of 3 sliders.

Wow.... I like this idea.

I prefer the idea of: a) having the one industrial capacity slider b) removing the 3 distribution sliders c) removing the "focus" in the planet screen d) putting in 3 sliders in the planet screen that would function as the inustrial capacity slider does. E.g., if you had military to 100%, social to 0%, and research to 100% the planet would be spending as much as its facotories and labs could handle, directing it all to military and research, respectively, with none towards social. This system would also provide a way to completely avoid the "Social waste" issue. My 2 cents.

We think the same. Good idea.

In reply to # 5

I agree with your idea. Makes more sense if you can determine your spending for each planet instead of for your empire . This system would also allow to specialize your worlds better.

Yeah... the more I think about it, the more I want it.

Further, when it comes time to upgrade planetary improvements due to a newly discovered/acquired technology, there could be a pop-up screen along the lines of:

"Sire, we now have knowledge of how to construct super-dooper-scooby-doo-Labs. Currently, *X* of our worlds could use this improvement, but are directing none of their resources to social production. What would you like to do about this?

O Purchase the improvements directly on these worlds, for a total cost of *C$$* bc's.
O Set social production on these worlds equally to the highest amount possible that would not lead us into a spending deficit.
O Do nothing, I'll handle this personally."

In reply to #5

The best idea for an improvement I''ve seen so far. I'd really like to see this kind of system...

My understandong of the economic model is the following : to produce, you need 1) cash and 2) workforce (includes manpower, logistics, etc.)

Unlimited amount of cash can be spent : it is not a hard limit to your production, as long as you have money in your chest.

On the other hand, workforce limits your production at all time. Manufacturing/research points actually reflect your maximum production that can be achieved if and only if all your worforce is devoted exclusively to social/military/research producion. If the workforce is split between different activities, none can achieve maximum production.

The inductrial capacity slider sets the amount of available workforce you want to use. Typically you want to use your industry/research infrastructure at 100%, but when cash is scarce you may want to use only a fraction of your workforce and let the rest unemployed.

This system is realistic if we assume that workforce can instantaneously switch from a production job to research work. In a our world this is obvously not true, but GalCiv is a game so things have to be streamlined a bit

Being able to use 100% manufacturing and 100% research at the same time does not make sense.
On the other hand, I understand people asking for more control on every individual planet. I think the "focus" option is good enough especially if your empire tends to be big. The bigger, the more inefficient, and micromanagement would really be a pain.

Unlimited amount of cash can be spent : it is not a hard limit to your production, as long as you have money in your chest. On the other hand, workforce limits your production at all time. ... Being able to use 100% manufacturing and 100% research at the same time does not make sense.

1. It only fails to make sense if your assumption on workforce being the limiting factor is true. Which isn't documented, nor even likely considering that so much of this is supposedly automated, and that your production capacity does not increase with population.

2. It's all well and good to want flavor to match the mechanics, but it's more important (imo) to get good, sound, and intuitive mechanics set up first. You can always find flavor to fit them after the fact.

3. Interesting to hear that you think focus is "good enough" though, it's the first comment along those lines that I've yet to read. You understand our request for more planetary control, so I'm curious if you'd be disappointed were the proposed idea adopted, and the focus idea discarded.

Being able to use 100% manufacturing and 100% research at the same time does not make sense.

Why not? We don't make research labs and factories and then only have scientists working one year and then factories running the next. That wouldn't make sense. We run both at the same time to their capacity. We can do this because we have the money to back it. The number of each type of improvement represents the distribution of the workforce. The number of structures is an automatic limiting mechanism. You can't research more than the number of labs you have will allow for example.

The thing that bugs me is when I only have 1 planet working on social projects and I have to direct at least 20% even with focus to get things moving just for that 1planet. Three independent sliders for each planet would be great.

On the other hand, workforce limits your production at all time. Manufacturing/research points actually reflect your maximum production that can be achieved if and only if all your workforce is devoted exclusively to social/military/research production. If the workforce is split between different activities, none can achieve maximum production.

Yes, but why should there be a empire wide slider system for workforce when each planet has a very different situation from the next? This game is geared towards specialization of planets with the capitals and bonus tiles. The 3 empire wide workforce distribution slider system hurts this specialization scheme.

I'll illustrate our point:

Let's say you have a research planet(mostly labs) and a manufacturing planet(all factories and manufacturing capital) so you set the sliders to 50/50 military and research. Instead of the research planet running at its full capacity in the current system it will run at half capacity even though the whole planet is geared towards research. And on the other hand we have the industrial colony (let's say no research labs) running at half capacity as well.

Why would this planet need to waste half of its resources in research just because the other planet is a research colony? Neither planet can run to full capacity even though you have the funds to make them do so. You'd have to set the slider to 100% to make the research planet run to full capacity while the production planet didn't run at all. This makes no sense and is an unnecessary and counterproductive game mechanic.

If you design a planet for a certain purpose then you can assume the population will be educated to fill this purpose for that planet. If a planet has only factories why would scientists live and work on that planet? They would go to the research colonies where they would have a job and a living. You see what I'm saying?


I think any unused production should return to you as money the next round. If you have to take away our resources for no good reason, at least have a good idea like corruption that can be controlled instead of a faulty game mechanic.

Ok, I got it: All three sliders work independently from each other and each planet has its own set of 3 sliders. This way we control exactly what the resources are being used for and everything can be run at full capacity at the same time if we have money to back it. This way a manufacturing planet can be run at full capacity at the same time a research planet is running at full capacity. Makes more sense to me.

This is a great idea. Every planet has unique circumstances and I would like to maximize capacity on a per planet basis rather than empire wide. I am hoping that Stardock takes a look at this!

There would need to be a global version of the sliders still, along with a lock function for the individual planets to prevent the global set overriding the individual set.

I take it that you guys havent read today's news?

https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=164&AID=106645#828060

Brad is talking about a) social waste going into military spending and military waste going into the treasury. b) Making the research slider independent from the manufacturing slider.

On your points though. I personally think it would not be a good idea to have a slider for each planet. This is potentially absurd levels of micromanagement if you play on gigantic maps with 50, 60, 100 worlds. An overall spending slider for manufacturing with waste being passed on to military/social or to treasury covers all the bases imo. Further removing the research codependence on manufacturing gives you all the tools you need to micromanage without doing any micromanagement.

I take it that you guys havent read today's news?

Thanks for the link.

Reading it now

Is there any way to get your precentage of a certain type of production to be spent on only one planet? Like let's say in my financial screen I have 56 going into military spending. Can I have 56 just be spent on one world where I build my ships? As it stands right now, each planet only has about 13 shields or so. If I only want one ship, how do I make one without wasting the shields on the non producing worlds? Would it help If I trashed all the factories on every other world?

The way it seems to stand now walrus, is that if you have 56% of your spending going to military (and for ease of discussion, let's say 0% to social, and 44% to research), then every world you possess will use 56% of it's total factory capacity, and direct it all to military. Anything leftover goes back to your treasury. Further, all of your labs will operate at 44%.
Yes, that would mean that worlds with no social or military production would still be unable to make use of all their labs.
In such situations, assuming you have enough income, you may wish to simply set research to 100% and buy the ship(s).

If the only resource is money then how is it wasted?

The answer is that its not wasted, nothing is actually wasted, it only appears to be because you can't wrap your brains around the semantics of the system in place.

The system is set up to actually discourage planetary specialization, there is nothing wrong with this as a game mechanic, you just have to get used to it. I don't think any changes to the system other than the already (beta) implemented no social waste are needed. People just need to understand that this system is not the same system as you find in other games, once this realization dawns on you, and you start designing your planets accordingly everything will work much better.

The overriding issue will always be cash flow and production/researchpace. If you change the system to where you can spend 100% on both production and research you have effectively doubled the rate at which you produce and research (cash flow willing). Is this actually something you want? That is do you want to speed up the rate at which research and production are done?

If the answer is no, then you will say, 'sure, we'll just scale down the capacities of the buildings'. If you're going to to that though, then why bother with changing the econ system in the first place?

As to adding individual planetary control sliders... that would be a significant change, but also one I'd oppose as it adds essentially forced micro. Forced in the sense that in order to compete on the same footing as the AI you would now have to bother with that nonsense. I truely do understand the motivation for wanting that level of control, I think though that in the end its just another uninteresting time sink into an already somewhat time intensive operation.

The poster before me is right, individual sliders are a bad idea. Forced micromanagement was the main reason MOO III failed so miserably.

This issue is really scratching the surface of a huge tension in 4x games. In the beginning everyone wants to micromanage there planets. Once you have like 5, 10, or even 20 planets though you have absolutely no interest in mcroing them all. If you're anything like me you don't want to feel like you "should" be microing them. So its best if the sliders are left as a macro control in my opinion.

You either have to have a limit on the number of "towns" ala civ 4, or you have to make micromanagement not important. I don't think there are any other choices.

That being said, I do think there may be ways to make how they work more intuitive. I really really enjoy the way the planets are planned, it is very intiutive and its nice that you can set everything up once and then just let it build.

It seems like the way the system is set up now is that you need to plan very far ahead so that when you have a new planet that needs social production you coinicide that with a lenghty bout of upgrades in your original planets...

The production sliders work exactly like they did in GC1. But in GC1 you wasted both Social AND Military production. And there was no "focus" button to minimize waste.

But in GC1 the various building bonuses gave some "free" resource points so constructing some buildings was useful even if you're capacity was well above your economy - something that happened almost all the time.

You can, though eliminate waste completely in GC2. Don't ever put any % into social production. Just use Military and Research and if a colony needs to build a social project use the "focus" button.

Certainly this will increase the surplus cash from military, but this COULD be useful if, upon putting spending at 100%, you would be running a deficit IF every colony was building a military project. Since every colony is likely not building a military project, the surplus money goes to subsidize the other spending.

In my current game, I only have 2 of 6 planets building a ship and 2 or 3 with a social project. So if I had a % of my production going to military and social I am guaranteed to have some surplus from the unused military and some waste from the social. On the other hand, if I put all of the social spending into military and "focus" on social JUST on those colonies with a social project, all of that waste becomes surplus. PLUS my military projects get done faster with the extra % production.

It looks like "focusing" on social/military takes about 1/2 the income spent on the other for "focusing".

Example - 10 military and 8 social. Focus on Social and now Military transfers 5 spending Social.

So, for example, if your military and social % were the same (say, 30% each) and you instead put 60% into military you would DOUBLE your military production. By using focusing, you keep your social spending at what it was before but the planets with no Social project now have NO WASTE.

Example - With Military/Social at 30%/30%. Switch to 60% Military.

Planet with:
Military Project/No Social Project - Twice military production. NO WASTE
No Military Project/Social Project - Using "focus" Same Social Production (actually a little higher because production is taken from Research). Same Military Surplus
Military Project/Social Project - Using "focus" Same Social Production / Same Military Production
No Military / No Social - Twice the Military Surplus / NO WASTE

The system is set up to actually discourage planetary specialization, there is nothing wrong with this as a game mechanic, you just have to get used to it.

I thought one of the selling points was that planets could actually be distinct from each other as opposed to just being a number ala GC1. How does discouraging specialization play into that?

Planets still can be distinct, though it is not perhaps optimal to specialize them too much. The point was more that you could build multiple buildings of the same type on your planets, rather than just one of each new building ala GC1.

Certainly the PQ determines more about how you set up planets in GC2 than it did in GC1.