Researching with Factories and Building with Labs is Crazy!

It is but one of a list of several things that are crazy

I would add having a million BC credit a week income, but you receive an income penalty if you have over 20K in cash reserves.

Coupled with, of course, shutting down all you industry if your Million BC economy has more than 500BC of debt.

Upgrading ships in the middle of space. Where are the docking facilities? This should be done at a planet.

The collection of buildings that you should never build because there is a standard alternative that is both cheaper and more effective.

Having ships orbit a planet improves their offense, but not their defense? What's the justification here? Why doesn't it affect defense as well? Weapons are more powerful in orbit?

Trade is now bizarre. As in one previous thread, the AI wouldn't trade Phasors II for Phasors V.

Galactic resources, while fun, don't really make any logical sense...AKA they seem to be able to affect an infinite number of planets, yet they don't run out? Just exactly what are they?

Off type defense actually works.

A ship must always survive every combat. Thus some people have built strats around ships that always survive with one hit point.

The Torians can go from ~500 Million people to 4-6 Billion people on a newly colonized planet in a month and a half.

I'm sure there are more....

Edit: Just because they are crazy doesn't mean I don't both like and use some of these!

Hi!

Signed. More than a year ago.

BR, Iztok

Strange, but nothing really wrong with it from a game balance perspective. Very low priority.



Also strange, but in practice you'll never have more than 500 BC of debt in this situation. Very low priority.



Actually it already makes sense -- the further you are away from a friendly planet, the longer it takes to upgrade. Feature, not bug.



Okay, granted. It would be nice if the currently totally worthless buildings were improved. But the game still functions without them. Low to medium priority.



Strange, but doesn't really matter much.



There are quite a few situations when "lower" techs are more useful than "higher" techs. Playing Evil, for example, if I acquire Phasors V via invasion, you still may not want to trade Phasors to me for it since that gives me much easier access to Psyonic Beam. So, yes this should be looked at, but it may be tougher to implement properly than you think.



Beats me.



Yeah, this invalidates the entire combat model. High priority, assuming that it still isn't working right. (Though can someone resummarize exactly how combat is supposed to work right now? I want to crunch the numbers and see if the observed strange behavior is just an unintended consequence of weapons firing separately.)



This is dumb, too, and allows for degenerate military strategies that make the late game too easy. Medium-high priority.



This is by design. The DA Torians don't have many other abilities for a reason. There is some tuning to be done, the super ability should probably be a bit less powerful and the other Torian abilities a bit more powerful to rein in custom Super Breeders, but there are lots of other race balance issues that are comparably important.


As for the initial thread topic, yeah, I definitely think all-factories and all-labs strategies completely violate the game design's intent. Focus should just act like a change in the planet's spending ratio. Kryo, has this been brought to Brad's attention? Given how strongly he has defended the game's spending sliders, I'm sure that he'll implement that change or something similar once he understands how these strategies completely subvert the sliders.

I would say its more than building a strategy. IMO, this is the only way to play endgame wars. It also makes attacking any world without an OFM cake.
This same rule can also be used to destroy entire AI fleets that YOU NEVER DAMAGE!

As for all factories or all labs, I just follow where the math leads me. It produces more. Should it be fixed? Maybe, but that would change the game quite a bit as it stands now.

Coupled with, of course, shutting down all you industry if your Million BC economy has more than 500BC of debt.


Also strange, but in practice you'll never have more than 500 BC of debt in this situation. Very low priority.

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I've actually had this problem a few times. The issue is that when you have huge amounts of money you want to spend it down until you are under 20K. I usually do this by buying huge ships that range from 40-60K. I know this is a common practice with others. When you are doing this, it's pretty easy to buy one too many and go to low. I actually have to hunt around for a partially built one on the last buy, that will not drive me too low.

I hear you on this one Purge. Late game, most of my time in a given turn is spent hunting for a planet with a half built ship, so the cost is more in the 20-30k range to spend off that last bit of money.

I would have to say that the problem isn't that every ship has to survive every combat so much that 'there is no tactical withdraw'. Apparently in the future, even peace-loving species completely populate the crews of their ships with marines, or something, to the death and nothing less.

Now, I know, there's noplace to hide in space and all that, but then if all science fiction worked with this same rule, there'd be plenty of times when our favorite spaceships would have been killed in the first two seasons of the show. Running into superior odds is just a part of the whole naval mystique of the space opera, and hence the 4X appeal in general.

Hey, couldn't that be something like a super ability in itself? Super Tactician or something? Every ships pilot is smart enough to use their Hyperdrive to cut out of combat when they receive x amount of damage or something?

Of course not! Though crazy is not the word I'd use...   



I wouldn't call that a strategy, but rather (ab)using poor design.



One that goes against what in any other game would be called an undisputable rule (labs research, factories build).



Every scale in the game is way off. Not only the spatial scale as you mentioned, but also temporal scales (going from imperium to republic to democracy to federation in a few years for example; taxes every week); size scales (the hulls' sizes, tonnages, etc; components' sizes; special modules about the size of early weapons; fighters that don't feel like fighters); cost scales (components' costs, projects' costs, etc); and miscellaneous scales (people eat 1 kg of food per week   ); etc.



That would be one way to go. Spending doesn't make any sense whatsoever.




Actually, I think it'd be a lot easier to list what is *not* crazy in this game   



Like blank hulls have integrated (latest model) drives (which can cost more than the hull itself), plus Sensors and Life Support?

Initially civs have one ship for which they don't (and won't any time soon) have the techs for - the flagship.

The UP both exists and doesn't exist while you don't meet any/all races.

Tourism income (as tourism) doesn't make any sense.

The Universal Translator has to be researched, even though you're part of the UP already, and can even do stuff without it.

You can't colonize special environment planets you don't have the tech for, but you can invade them.

Population growth and tax income being some strange functions.

Sizemods.

A load of doubling effects, like miniaturization/research, farms/PQ caps, techs/bonuses.

You don't actually need starports for some actions which you should.

An Orbital Terraformer that besides occupying a tile works for *all* planets.

Peacekeepers that aren't really peacekeepers, Pirates that aren't really pirates.

Population in flipped planets that converts automatically to your own race (including soldiering bonus).

Sensors and Life Support modules are cumulative.

Orbital Construction that requires ships to be launched.

The way trade routes work.

Almost all of the invasion tactics, really out there!

Some races start with Ion Drive.

It's 2226 but you start with almost a clean slate (the background story doesn't make any sense either, the game follows part of it but contradicts most of it).

You start with a cargo hull (which just got much less useful now) even though according to the techtree you don't have the knowledge to put hulls bigger than small through a warp field.

You start with your homeworld almost empty, but you already have 3 ships in orbit, and once colonization starts you develop planets quite fast.

Rush buying items, from anywhere in the galaxy, any item, whatever race, always from the same corporations (earth corps at that), in a single week.

Taxes at 79%, and sustainable.

Undefefined trade system, and with Trade Goods that aren't traded.

The Drengin, Korx and Korath all having alignment 1, when the Korath should clearly be the most evil of them.

And lots and lots of other stuff.

@ ToS -
Why do you still play the game if your opinion of it is so low?

Why do you spend your time here continuosly criticizing the developers?

No flame intended - just really curious.

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As far as being able to use research facilities to get some production - I have worked at a 'Research' facility for a metals producer - and it included a small scale factory and smelter - used to produce test runs of new alloys. It could easily be used as a limited production facility if the need arose.

And large manufacturing facilities may also have small research and testing labs integral to them...

the logic behind the game mechanic is not such a stretch.

As far as the game mechanics go, they are what they are...perhaps SD will look at this strategy in the future and change the slider structure for GC3...as it stands, I personally find the system to be innovative (but I will say it is not necessarily intuitive so it takes some time ot get used to) compared to some other TBS games, and enjoy the change.

You could just design a ship that costs 20-30k, and give it a name so that it appears near the top of the alphabetical list when you're rushbuying. And save the game before doing your rushbuying spree so you can simply reload if you accidentally do it one too many times. (Yeah, apparently reloading gives the AI an extra turn, but by that stage of the game you could hardly care less.)

There are many other things that are more annoying when it comes to managing a large empire. (Such as having to manually disable the auto-upgrade on every single planet...)

Then these buildings should produce some research WITHOUT using focus, like the Initial Colony and Civilizational Capital.

Right now, the sliders do one thing, and focus does something TOTALLY DIFFERENT that's so powerful as to make any research slider choice other than 0% and 100% just dumb. If focus did the same thing as changing the slider settings for one planet, the problem would be gone.

The opposite is true, too: our semiconductor factories are doing tons and tons of research. Many job openings at the fab require postdoctoral work.

Amen to this one, brother. This along with autopilot not working dependably is the source of 90% of the unnecessary micromanagement in this game. While I agree that many of the things pointed out in this thread don't make a whole lot of sense, I'm willing to suspend disbelief on the basis that it is a game after all. I'm also willing to tolerate inefficiencies between research and production, but things that make the game take at least twice as long as they would otherwise have to take should be top priority issues in my book.

Using the planetary pop-up, switching to one of the military sorts and the mouse scroll key work reasonably well. Still, I tend to blow a turn or two every game to this.



Ah! Mumble has moved to favorite bugs to hate!

This used to be #1 for me. It's now #2. Not getting a popup box on the right hand of my screen for completed ship builds is now #1. Of course, this only seems to happen when you have lots of planets and ships. It is an indescribable pain to try to find all the new ship builds when you don't receive notification and are running 600-900 planets. I actually eject ALL ships from orbit around planets just so I can "browse" the map screen looking for the ship in orbit icon and find my new ship builds. That is annoying!!!!

Apparently you don't know my opinion about the game. So let me try to enlighten you. On a conceptual level, no doubt the game sucks. I'm just being honest here, since you asked. It lacks imagination and depth for a *space* *strategy* game. It does, however, have potential, it's just a shame it's not fully (and efficiently) explored. I think the devs give too much importance to words that have a ring to it, like "new" and "gfx", and are clumsy in implementing what in their little world is classified as sci-fi. I see a lot of excuses being given in here, in the form of self-promoting threads, when there are incisive criticisms; and clumsy replies, generally dodgy and pointing the finger at something else. Even being a small team (though they're 40+ people in the office), I'd expect fixes to be faster, especially because they publish their own stuff. Add to that that the fixes aren't really fixes or create new problems, and that there's a lot of old bugs still to even be addressed, and that everything about the game is unbalanced and isn't taken care of - not because it's hard to balance, mind you, or even to edit the xmls. I find the new additions thread(s) to be nothing but carrots - I wouldn't expect anything but money slider-like improvements (not really an addition) for 1.6 - I mean 1.7.
I love space TBS games. This game, as most TBSs, has the "one more turn" feel, and a potentially good universe feel. Most gfx are good, but as a strategy gamer I don't really care much for that. The game does play nicely. Kryo is a great asset. That's about all the good things I have to say.
I could say a lot more, but I won't. I hope I have satisfied your curiosity. BTW, you're still short of a reply to one of my posts    I see you're not *that* busy to post.

As for the subject of in RL factories producing research and labs actually building stuff, let's remember that we're talking about building *spaceships* and *buildings*, not test runs of alloys, and researching *weapons* and *terraforming* and *trade*, not semiconductors.

Apparently you didn't read. Upgrades need a docking bay. Period. You don't get the *new* components from the Precursors. You don't build the new components aboard the ship. The distance modifier doesn't cut it. Feature, yes, bad one. One of the simplified "strategy" features.



Which is not really an answer. Unless you want to make it look like the game has a *lot* of buildings and a lot of techs.



Again, standard answer. A lot of stuff "doesn't really matter much". Is that normal? Maybe it's just me.



Or it may be simpler than what you think?



I think he meant that off-type defenses don't really make sense, like in point-defense partially protecting against beams.



The question is if it is *intentionally* by design, which I doubt. Sometimes things aren't completely thought through, and strange results happen.



He hasn't till now, no reason to I guess. It'd be like admiting the system doesn't work. This is not exactly a new issue.

False. When your need to spend your cash surplus each turn to avoid this penalty, it is easy to over spend (when you are playing at 2:00 a.m.). Regardless if they make the debt relative to GDP; they should add a simple pop-up warning dialog.


The ships should not receive a bonus but should auto-fleet so my fleets can't take out the AI's planetary defenders one at a time. Eliminating the bonus would stop players early in the game from placing cargo ships (1HP) in orbit with 1 beam, 1 missile, and 1 mass driver attack which appear to the AI as strong 2/2/2 attack ships.


Armor should provide defense against lasers but not chaff. I prefer the SE combat model but it has a stupid AI.


I totally agree! Once high attack ships appear it is better for me to have a single ship attack an enemy ship rather than a fleet (unless I have first strike); otherwise, I might lose a ship.

Some crazy things like fast population growth are necessary and others are fun like galactic resources. Others like the sliders just lead to strange strategies by advanced players. My suggestion would allow less experienced players and the AI to fully fund their factories and labs.

I always wondered at game start who I'm buying planetary improvements and ships from. Wouldn't it make more sense that I could only rush build; build in half the time at double the cost.


Well as least they streamlined things for selling tech in this latest beta. I'll think I'll go back to tech trading (at least for cash) in my next game.


I noticed in my last game (DL 1.2) that if a click on the Menu button, they appear. Then just click on Continue to go back.

I actually meant both.




I hadn't heard that one before! I'll have to try it next time I play and see if it works for the current rev of DA. If it even only works some of the time it would help.

Wow, there are a lot of interesting takes on all of this so maybe it's time for me to throw in my two cents worth.
Maybe we are all missing the 'bigger picture' with this in the sense that the MAIN, at least in my opinion, feature of this game is 'supposed' to be the AI... nothing more. I believe that Brad wanted to introduce this to us more than anything else. All of the other things obviously were thrown in 'around' the AI more than being added during the 'development' phase. Now mind you, I am not a programmer nor do I claim to know a damn thing about it so I could very well be waaaaay off base on this, but again, just my opinion.
So here Brad sits, an awesome idea for an awesome new AI. How does he 'implement' it? In a game of course. Everything else came 'after the fact' and now needs to be meshed together in a way that it 'all makes sense'. Does this game make sense? Of course not. But then really, how many games actually do 'make sense'?

It always worked for me in that game and I think this is one of those old bugs that has not changed from the initial DL release. When I reached this point the game was long over (just building for higher score) but I needed to move them from starports that were full to others that had room. I wanted to leave my ships in orbit because I thought that would give me a higher military score due to the attack bonus mentioned above.
Speaking of old bugs, I recently spotted this one in DL 1.2 (likely was always there) and it is still present in DA 1.6b2. Influence/Morale Bonus Wrong on Planet Summary Screen for Bonus Tiles Makes me wonder which of the two different displayed values the game is actually using.

In my DL 1.2 game my most expensive ship was a huge hull with 3 doom ray and 3 ultimate defenses (armor or point-defense), and 5 HyperWarpIII engines for speed 34 which cost ~1400BC to build and ~15000BC to purchase which neutral's discount. I know in later releases of DLs they fixed the problem with miniaturization allowing more room for expensive weapons and defense. Mumblefratz, what was the build cost on those ships that cost ~40000BC to purchase as evil and what was on them?

p.s. Where the sliders and focus buttons like this in GalCiv I?

The distance modifier is comparable to moving back to the planet, docking, and then returning to your current position. The time doesn't match precisely, and you can argue that that needs to be fixed. But the interface is fine.



I'm saying it's a lower priority than fixing stuff that actively hurts the gameplay experience.



Stardock isn't a large company. They can't fix everything. When they do try to fix stuff, I would prefer that they spend their time on stuff that does matter much, which there is still plenty of, than on stuff that doesn't.



Describe a good algorithm in sufficient detail to be implemented, then. You seem to think you can do this job better than Brad can; prove it.

I do, in fact, suspect there are some easy improvements to be made in the trading model.



Just use your imagination, "lasers cancelling out", etc.



That doesn't seem like a strange result. What does "super breeder" sound like, anyway? There are species in real life for which 10x reproduction in 1.5 months is a low rate.

I already agreed that there is probably some tuning to be done. I don't see what else there is to say about the subject.



The slider system does work, it's just that focus, as implemented, completely bypasses it.

If Brad has ever specifically defended the way focus bypasses the rest of his slider design, then yeah, I won't expect any changes. But I suspect he isn't actually aware of how this works, despite it being a somewhat "old" issue. The moment he can articulate how all-factories strategies are effectively doubling the number of buildings you have, is the moment he decides to close the loophole, I think.

I've put together all BHE ships with nothing else on huge hulls that were about 65K to purchase (captured Hyperion Shrinkers from various AIs). I don't remember the BC to build cost though.

The focus thing is an addition that was added with a patch and wasn't in earlier versions of GC II even. I think it was the 1.4 patch, but I'm not sure now.

Since I kinda got this "things that aren't realistic" thing rolling hard core, I do want to emphasize one thing I did indicate up front. Not being realistic isn't necessarily bad. Sometimes it actually adds to the fun of the game.

I do prefer realism when it is reasonably possible, but I would rather have an unrealistic thing that works sometimes. I guess I am trying to say that something that adds to the fun of the game is always more important than realism and "Is it fun?" is really the more important question...But I think we still all recognize that there are a lot of compromises made (and that must be made) making things less realistic.

You're buying a game, not an AI.



That doesn't preclude throwing them in in a logical and intuitive fashion.



Which is exactly what?



When is "now" supposed to happen?



Hmmm, how many don't? Do you know of any other game that so extensively makes no sense? And I don't mean the arguments about being (in this case) sci-fi, stuff that doesn't exist (yet), etc. Sense is a fundamental tool in immersion. IMO anyways.

I consider the OT a serious matter. The rest, they're just lists of silly stuff. That's all. It's a discussion, like any other. At least it's not politics  

OOhhh! That I have to respond to. I remember building a battleship in 1200AD in Civ II on hard difficulty level game that happened to be going really well. Sending it out to attack a phalanx and having it sink in its first battle! Now that was realistic!

In addition to the new ship built pop-up not appearing anymore after you have several hundred ships, the ship list truncates at ~700 ships. I was using fast (46 speed) troop transports to move population from maxed out planets to others but would sometimes lose track of them when they would enter orbit. All my 474(out of 475) planets had starports near full with dreadnoughts, due to 100% military spending. Is this still a bug in 1.6b2?

As for the all factory or all lab strategies, I could see where all labs would provide more output than all factories since labs produce more than factories at the same level, plus the tech capital gives a 100% bonus vs. the 50% in DL and 33% in DA bonus of the manu. capital. However, you may only divert lab output to military or social not both, so with all labs planets can only have research, and military or social, not all three.

Last night I noticed the economic bonus of the gov. types went from 25% (in DL 1.2) down to 10% (in DA 1.6b2) In my last game for the first 18 months my focus was to quickly grab as many of the best planets and galactic resources as a could. Tech trading and those 2500BC anomalies provided lots of cash to fund my rapid expansion until my stock exchanges came online (with 30% bonus). This game with ~30 planets vs. 475, tech trading disabled and money anomalies reduced, I'm having to focus much more on research to grow my morale and economy to get my deficit spending under control. It's like playing a whole new game!

Here's a thought, replace the useless 300% farm bonus tile with a 100% economic bonus tile.