Newbie economy/research questions

from GalCiv2 Forums
Hey all,

Just got the game today and I'm wondering about a few things. I'm sure they must have come up before, but browsing these forums and the wiki pages are just making me more confused, so I'd really appreciate some help...

1. When a tech lists, for example, "Social production +10", what does that actually mean? A 10% bonus to social production on all your colonies? If so, is there anywhere that lists all the bonuses you've gained from technologies?

2. Is the mini-map the only place you can see which areas you've explored and which you haven't? There doesn't seem to be any indication on the main view of whether you've 'seen' a specific parsec or not?

3. I'm struggling to get my head around the 'spending' aspect of the economy.

My home planet has a Civilization Capital that, according to the info, has an Industry capacity of 24mp and a research capacity of 24rp. According to the manual, if I set my 'Spending' slider to 100%, I should be using my full industrial and research capacity. I assumed that meant I would be generating 24 industry (split between social and military) and 24 research, for a total cost of 48 BC (24+24). I'm not. I'm getting 15 indsustry (7 military, 8 social) and 8 research.

The only way I seem to be able to use my full capacity is to use the Spending Distribution sliders. In other words, the only way to get all 24 research that my Civ Capital can produce is to sacrifice all my industry.

Is that the way things are supposed to work? You can only utilise your full capacity in one area (social, military, research) by sacrificing your capacity for the other two?
economics
61,921 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
1. Check out the "Stats" screen in the "Civilization Manager." it will give you the list of all your bonuses.

2. Zoom out on the main map.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
3) Yes, that's the way things are supposed to work. There is quite a bit of disagreement with it in the community however. Basically, if you have 100% spending, and 33/33/34, you will be getting 1/3rd of each of your production values. At 50% and 33/33/34, you'll get 1/6th. More or less, what this means is that the rest of that industry or research is used for "other" things, disease research, civilian production and the like. No matter what, unless you set your research slider and spending to 100%, you will not get all 24 of that research. Same applies to production, except that you can get all of it through dropping research to 0%. I believe there is talk of adjusting this somehow by the devs, but I'm not sure how nor when that might be happening.
Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
On the economy - don't try to rationalize it with the real world, or make up some story that the people move from one job to the other when you change the sliders. None of these explanations will ultimately make perfect sense.

You just have to realize that the economy is run this way for flexibility purposes. If you didn't have the available industrial or research capacity, then you couldn't shift your economy on a dime when an enemy declared war on you. That's all.
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Ok, I look at it this way:

Your Income:
Your population earns a certain amount of money (potential collected taxes).
The first slider lets you decide how much of the potential tax money available you are collecting.

The rest of the sliders are independent of how much money you are collecting.

Your Spending:
Your population then has a certain amount of people available to fill jobs and work in any industry to which they are assigned. These people of course need to be paid.
The second slider lets you determine how much money you want to spend paying the workers, thus how much of your potential workforce you employ. Each worker can only fill one job at a time, which is only in one industry at a time.

The 3 sliders under that let you decide how many of the jobs are put to use in that industry.

If you put them all on one, you can't put any on another. If you are spending 50% of them on your military production, then will receive not half of your total potential military production, but the output of half of the total paid workers.

This basically means that when all sliders are set to the same level (33%) that you are simply employing all of your paid workforce, spread evenly between each industry. By moving the funding over to one from another, you are giving that industry more people at the expense of the other. Therefore, you can only ever produce as much as your paid workforce will allow.