Economy vs Research

economy will help with research, you don't need that many labs actually. just one or two on each planet, but if you have a postive economy going with high morale for each planet, it is easier to swtich focus on research on each planet, because morale might drop back a bit, but you can always switch back to social production later on.

Oh yeah, i forgot to mention, if you just concentrate on research and neglect too much of your economy, then when the AI starts to declare war, you are screwed, because you might be on a tight budget and can not beuild ships fast enough.

Definitely economy. Everything in this game runs on bc. You can still win if you are lagging behind in research (my usual situation), but if you neglect your economy, you are toast.

So you are saying that if I dont have my focus on the social area the morale of the people on the planet drop?

100% agree - Economy rules (and Morale does effect economy as in real life). Like anything, no one size fits all. Its a Balanced game, which means its built to react to your strategy. Spend too much, you go broke. Take too much time and effort building an economy, and the Bad Guys roll over you. Concentrate on social spending tech bombs out etc etc - just like real life, the approach has to be balanced. If however you get the economy wrong to start with its real hard to learn the rest as you are struggling from Get Go.

Learn how to build a Great economy first, then you can learn the rest as time goes on - take the long view on this initially in terms of learning curve, as no doubt you discovered with DL & DA. Dont try to go for major conflict and fleets whizzing everywhere just yet. The old adage "the slow route is often the fastest" is oh so true on TA as it was on the DL & DA learning curve. The game is well balanced, and will catch you out very quickly if you dont get the basics right. The key to the latter is take time - lots of time - understanding the economy. Do that and TA will fly, and you'll have huge fun. Dont do it, and you'll put your fist through the screen :LOL:

Regards
Zy

Hey Zydor

Your absolutely right. Started a game, and advanced quite quickly by building tons of colonizers to catch planets. However this time, from the start, I did not built anything at all on them. As soon as I got them, I waited for them to have more income than expenditure. This threw me a little in a yellow income, but it soon turned green. This strategy worked flawless, slowly I had 4-5 planets, 70% approval, and 200 BC per month in early game. With imperialism, but of course, my custom race had also tons of economy as bonus. Dont know if it's the best strategy yet, but I am experimenting!

T.

Great! I also found it a little strange, leaving planets to just grow population and no production initially. Then it sunk into the brain that there was no rush, the bad guys are expanding as well, so as long as I had a few low value defence ships around, they left me alone in the early stages. I have had a go at a "Year 1" win, and made it a couple of times thanks to the techniques I have seen posted from others - but I still much prefer the "longer" game.

This is going to sound daft - but in the end what I did was literally put a Post-It Note on the side of the screen "economy economy economy". I found that even though I knew I had to watch the economy all the time, I was getting sucked into the whole "zap the aliens" thing.

Next thing that happened was almost a virtual message from the devs "not until you pay for this lot you wont", and Boooom went the economy, and the bad guys slavered over the Galactic economic wreckage, and me leaping off the Galactic Street skyscraper :LOL:

Regards
Zy

I've always thought income first and everything else after that. Even though it often isn't the most efficient method, you can buy anything you want. You can buy ships directly or save a bit of cash by building or buying the hull and then upgrading to the final ship.

You can also buy tech. But research or production capacity can't buy you income and without income you can't afford to use your research or production capacity.

I've long been a promoter that early in the colony rush the best thing to build is nothing. You have to be careful to not let this last too long but production without the income to support it is worse than useless. Remember even if you can't afford to produce anything in your factories you still have to pay the maintence.

I assume you are still playing DL only, Mumble?

The reason I ask is that there is a new building in TA called a Recruiting Centre which provides, if I recall correctly, 20% population growth and 10% economy, with a maintenance cost of 1BC. It's pretty quick to build, about the same as a Starport or Fertility Centre.

It seems to me that this is something that should be built on every planet immediately, even if you won't get any benefit from the economic bonus until later. I'm not sure how to work out the math, but I'm pretty sure the increasing population's taxes will pay for the maintenance earlier rather than later.





"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."
--Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

Yeah, and yeah I agree. In a similar light my first build is often a marketplace, but something that gives you a pop growth bonus *and* an income bonus would be high on my list.

By building nothing I more mean not building standard production buildings which more often than not people build just to be building something and once complete it lies fallow for a good while anyway.

Yea, I have found the recruiting centers to be great. All you have to research is galactic warfare, or whatever that early pre-tech to planetary invasion is. Some races, like the Korx and Krynn, get some really cool buildings they can stack with recruiting centers that are fairly cheap, also. It can help a lot with the early money crunch, especially since your starting capital seems to have been dropped to 3000 BC from 5000 BC. Didnt notice that change the first few games

Nice advice everyone. I've just started playing and found myself doing my old strategy of expansion and concentrating on Economy/Technology/Production. I've realized that this strategy is very slow and potentially dangerous because my ship production is slow.

When I finally get good ships all is well.. but I've also found it's very easy to get beat up by a technologically inferior enemy..but he has ships and I don't!

I'm trying to find that sweet spot but I have also found this game will make you think and change strategies..just like a real war.

I suspect that your question comes from a misconception about the game.

Most people would think that "Research +20%" means that if you pay for 100TP of research, you actually get 120.

This would make sense. If this were the case, you could use the Research picks to get more research while spending less money and fewer planetary improvements on this.

Unfortunately, this is wrong, wrong, wrong.

"Research +20%" means that if your labs are otherwise capable of producing 100TP of research, you're allowed to purchase up to 120.

You still need the economy to actually pay for the research you get.

So unless you're running your economic sliders above 80+% Research, taking the +research pick is wasted - you aren't funding research enough to get anything out of it.

Not necessarily, you still get more research on a per tile and per bc of maintenance basis if you have a high research bonus. Even if you're not outproducing the enemy in terms of pure beakers, if you can do it with half the labs they use it's still a concrete advantage.

It's true that you get more maximum beakers per tile, and more beakers per maintenance.

Nonetheless, you still must pay for each beaker itself.

Quick example with some impractically large numbers (just to illustrate):

If you have 1,000,000 BC income, and you're giving 10% of your income to research, you can only get 100,000 beakers.

This is true regardless of your research bonus. The research bonus allows you to max out at 100,000 beakers with fewer tiles and therefore lower maintenance, that's all.

But think of it the other way around. Let's say that your current tile build-out (before considering any bonus) is capable of producing 200,000 beakers. With the 20% bonus, this would be a maximum potential research of 240,000 beakers. However, you still only get 100,000 beakers of research, regardless of whether you have a bonus or not.

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This is to say... the research bonus only matters when you're already fully funding your before-bonus research. In this case, it permits you to purchase more beakers - if you decide to fund those additional beakers.

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I'm saying that a different implementation would make more sense:

If you're funding 100,000 beakers, and you have a 20% research bonus, you get 120,000 beakers for the price of 100,000. This gives you a BONUS of 20%, on top of what you're paying for.

This way, the bonus would apply all the time, regardless of your base research amount or level of funding.

Since it would always apply, it would be more valuable.

A research bonus (my understanding of it anyway) means you get x% more research than without it. So if you would be gaining 100,000 beakers without any bonus, with a 20% bonus you'd get 120,000 beakers. This costs you 120k gold instead of 100k of course, but the bonus is still there.

So if you think you'll have a good economy anyway then a research bonus is probably better than an economic one. If you think you'll be struggling to make any money then there's no point getting a research bonus since you won't be able to afford the bonus research it will provide.

Hi!

Slightly wrong. In GalCiv-2 you pay only 50% of bonus, so in your case 110k BC (your "gold"). Missing 10k tech points (50% of bonus) are free. For more info check wiki on research.

BR, Iztok

This is an interesting discussion on Research, would you mind confirming that the bonus' work as I expected:

Say I start with a race with a 40% Research bonus through picks and party.

I have Labs with a capacity for 2,000 research points
I fund Tech at 50% so actually only produce 1,000 points
My 40% Research bonus adds 400 points
I pay 1,200 bc to get 1,400 points.

Hi!

Correct to the last line, but only for for DA and DL. I don't have yet the TA, so I can't check if it's correct also for that version of the game.

BR, Iztok

I respectfully disagree with some of these posts about economy being the #1 priority. In my current game with 9 Civs + 8 minor races on a large galaxy I have been running a negative economy since the beginning of the game and doing pretty well.

How do I do this? By selling technology. Selling technology brings in ridiculous cash. It almost seems like I'm cheating. This strategy only gets easier the more AI players there are. Once you research a tech that no one else has you can then turn around and sell it to every single AI player out there for 400+ cash. One technology can bring in thousands of bc.

Also, I give away technologies for economic/technology treaties. This is huge as it more than pays for itself in a short amount of time. For me, utilizing technologies to acquire agreements from the AI has been the key. I get them to declare war on each other etc.

Granted I am still a newbie in this game, but I've found money from trade to be insignificant. I can get maybe a couple hundred bc a turn from all the trade routes? Pfffft... Who cares? Sure this adds up over time, but it is nothing compared to selling technology. Of course I keep my unique weapons/defense line to myself, but I sell the others that they will be researching anyway. I have found it difficult if not impossible to get into a positive economy until later in the game when all planets get fully developed with population/banks.

Your tips to not build on planets early on is something I will have to look at as I hadn't even considered that option. I have quite a number of questions about the game regarding the inflow of resources which don't seem to add up, but I'll start a new thread for that sometime.

BTW I play on the tough level which I think is the hardest level the AI plays at without cheating.

Great game!

Nice discussion here. I think everyone would agree that some degree of balance is needed, but despite this I think that there are interestingly different ways of balancing things. I go huge on research (Altaran + all research bonus + technologists party). I also give max econ ability bonus. I do go big on econ and population building bonuses right off the bat, but because my research is so good I can get these researched quickly. And yes, I research recruiting centers and place one on every planet I greedily grab. This is crucial. Moral buildings helps out in boosting population as well.

I find that if you do take the tech route, then you need to pick the techs very carefully to avoid a war as long as you can. Go for diplomacy and definitely trade routes very early on. Even though trade in ToA is buggy useless for econ, it is hugely helpful for diplomacy. On the few planets where I do build factories I can also put effort into getting universal translators etc to help with diplomacy. All the while I research better econ stuff but almost never military. If some race is starting to lick its lips looking at me, what I can do is pay them to attack someone else instead (before they declare war on me). I know its dirty but it works. Send the two strongest militaries against each other so that they are less likely to take advantage of your weak position. The most crucial part of the game is knowing when to finally reserach military. The point however is that while other races have been building military stuff and researching it very slowly, I have built up an infrastructure that will allow me to research the military stuff much faster and then produce ships much quicker when the time is right. I will also have the cash to support my fleets and production. Simply put, I will come out much further ahead.

I build lots of labs but you need 4 factories (2 if planet is less than class 12) for social production and you need an economy building (stock market etc) for every lab you have. A pop capacity of 20 billion per planet is good if you have morale resources else 14. Once you are ahead enough in techs, then a small military is aplenty. Keep your territory compact and contiguous and use preemptive-attack defense style.

I haven't played DA/ToA but in DL initial economy is rather easy to build-up. Maybe bit counter-intuitive but research/production bonuses could be bad and may broke you. My worst start was with Yor with maxed production bonuses and industrialists in charge. While nice for planet grabbing, industry combined with high initial upkeep costs drained money too fast.

In my opinion best ability you can add while customizing is morale, especially combined with pop growth. Higher morale => higher taxes with happy population => quickly growing population even in initial colonization phase. Tech trading for cash is useful but can't support your economy if too high production/research bonuses are picked initially. Beside, better weapons/defenses combined with good soldiering can give as much advantage as economic/production bonuses, since your fleets will be stronger for the same amount of money invested, and you'll lose less pop in invasions which in turn makes freshly conquered planets self-sustainable much quicker.

I might be wrong but it's easier to get huge research output by grabbing other civ's planets through different means than by building your own colonies from scratch. More planets => more space for labs plus numerous other benefits. I'm not fond of military victory but strong military is essential in this game nevertheless. Powerful fleets will keep your adversaries at bay while their underpopulated relatively unhappy planets will flip to your side. Putting one or two labs plus economy buildings on low PQ planets can help research quite a bit. And if there's place for starport and factory, occasional constructor or two can be used to improve eco starbase and as result lead to better production/research capabilities for several planets at once.

Anyway, if given choice between 30% economy and 20% research, I'd go for economy. This bonus is always there, no matter what slider positions are.

But the other bonus(research) is also always there irrespective of what the slider positions are. At least if I understand Iztok correctly in his reply to this post.

In many cases, getting morale buildings first may boost the economy even more than recruitikng centres, if you can get happiness up to 100%, since it gives +100% population growth. Getting +10% morale for 1 point as a racial bonus is also nice.