A few new-player questions

1-3: I am not an econmic expert, so I can't/won't comment

4:  Luck raises your minimum damage by 25%, that is all it's been proven to do...as well as I think someone from SD confirmed.

5:  This is Willthemailboy's territory, so I'll let him take this question

6.  Yes.  When you have at least Low inteligence with a race, you can see the IP (influence point) ratio in parentisis.  Once this number hits 4.0 (aka 4x their IP) the planet will start rolling to see if it flips to you.  Getting extreemely larger ration than 4x thoguh doesn't seem to affect the randomizing.  Having the Mind Control Center (and Evil galactic wonder) will flip the planet the week after the skull/bones appears on the planet (if you have TA...which you do).

7:  Yes, but IMHO it's better to just to avoid those low-yeild upgrades and just use constructors to build another base and upgrade with the bigger yeild ones.

8:  Can't help you here, I haven't played with that yet.

9:  The global ones will set the standard for all planets, image it as a % of your workforce being spread to those 3 things.  Planetary focus will further specialize a planet, but at a cost.  I forget the new % of the resources that are lost when focusing.

10:  Again, I'm not an economic expert, I know dystopic had done some serious research into this...

I'll try to fill in the blanks:

1) Yes, the economic capital increases the income from taxes on the planet it is on. So the more people the better. It does not increase the effect of other economic structures.

2) I have never heard of a planet having a cap on its economic output. You can test it out by adding yet another economic structure to that planet and see if the income from that planet goes up. I do not think there is a limit.

3) No. The manufacturing and technological capitals do not work the same way as the economic capital. Those two DO multiply the effects of their respective structures on that planet. So your tech capital should have as many lab type buildings as you can get and possibly on a planet with good reserach bonus tiles. The same for the manufacturing capital. Keep in mind a mistake many people have made, the capitals themselves multiply the output of other buildings but do not generate any of their own. So DO NOT put a capital on a bonus tile, it will be completely wasted.

10) Trade routes. Economic starbases can have modules that increase the value of the route. The incrrease amount is based on how long the freighter stays withing that base's influence ring. So the best way is to have the freighter go through the center of the base, that would mean it in there the longest. However, trade isn't really all its cracked up to be, the amout you get becomes insignificant early on (unless yoiuput a lot of effort into building a chain of starbases along the entire route.). Trade routes are really good for relations and some early bc.  There was a recent post aboiut trade routes i believe.

Thank you for these fast replies, cleared the answered things up quite a bit ^^

I would like to add a few more questions:

11.) What is the mechanic with the influence capital?

I understand now that the economic capital is linked to the people who pay the tax, not to the buildings which raise the income and research / production capitals are linked to the building because these buildings use the workforce (or bc) and turn it into something else (research or production) so I guess the influence capitals are independent from influence building as well because influence is created by the people like tax and not from influence buildings?

12.) You wrote that the special tiles dont give bonus to capitals and so on but I found this post in the wiki:

• Once i have builded Political Capital on the tile giving 100% Approval bonus, the result was doubled morale bonus.
• It was easy to check so i'm specially checked this, and found no mistake.
• Also next time when it was influency tile bonus, at planet screen 'Summary' tab show influency 50%

(Political Capital 25%*2) May be the bonus applies to SuperProjects?

Here is the direct link: https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Special_resources
I must ad that he is using the DA version so maybe this info is outdated, I will definately check this in my next game.

13.) Is the info right that unused social production goes to the military area and unused military production is wasted but costs me money nevertheless?
So assuming I have only one planet and the planetary sliders are set to standard 33% / 33% / 34% and I have no social and no military project going on i am wasting 66% of my efforts this turn? The solutions would be to shift all sliders to 100% research because the "focus research" button on the planetary screen comes together with some kind of "penalty" or "cost" you mentioned above and would not do the job equally well as using the sliders?

Hrothgaar

Yea, i wasn't replying to the influence capital (by that i think you mean the political capital) so my answer didn't reflect how they work with other structures or with bonus tiles.

for #11 and #12, i think you are correct, they behave like economic capitals in that they do not boost what other structures have, they just add to it. And its been a while since i thought of it, but i do remember that the political capital does in fact use the morale bonus tile and maybe the influence bonus tile too (?) . As a side note, stovk exchanges have an influence bonus that takes advantage of the influence bonus tile.

#13 unused social production does go to military. i THINK that unused military then goes back to your treasury as cash. If you have a planet that is not building anything at all, it will have more of an income that the same planet with something being built. You can test this easliy. If I'm wrong, you can set that planet to focus on research instaed of moving sliders which effect all planets.

BTW you hit on a strategy that many people here have used, The all reserach strat. There is probably some old threads on it. Basically you set the slider to 100% reserach and build nothing but labs, no factories. But you'd need an expecrt to give details.

4. As Loup said, luck affects only your attack rolls. It sets your minimum attack to (your luck %)*(maximum attack roll). So if you have a weapon that does 4 damage per shot, 0 luck would let it roll 0-4 damage each time it fires. 25% luck would roll 1-4 damage.

5 & 6. A short way? Not really. A not-very-short way? That I can do.

The important thing to know about influence is that all sources of it are independant. Having one planet in isolation generates just as much influence as an equivalent planet in a cluster of other planets, either yours or someone else's.

Planets generate influence as a function of population and the buildings you have built. In all cases, influence diminishes over distance. For planets, this is a linear relationship.

For influence bases, their modules DO NOT affect the influence output of planets in their AoE. The modules affect the output of the base only. Influence from a starbase decreases as a function of distance squared, so when placing them, put them in contact with the target planet(s). Their effect 8 spaces away (where the ring is) is small at best, usually negligible.

Influence is calculated per square. As in, each turn the game calculates the effective influence at each square, summing the distance-corrected influence from each source of influence from each race in the game. The borders are drawn where this sum of influence equals one, or where one race's influence is greater than another's. The race with the highest influence in each square "owns" that square.

Planets can flip when another race's influence is at least 4x the planet's owner's influence on the square the planet occupies. Once you reach that threshhold, additional influence doesn't help - a planet with 10x influence won't flip any faster than one with 4.1x. Also, the actual flipping event is a random roll. It may flip the first turn, it may take dozens of turns. I once held a planet at 80x for more than a game year before it flipped. There is evidence (not yet proven) that the loyalty ability affects the probability of a planet flipping on any given turn; to put numbers to this, if the probability of a planet flipping any given turn is 5% (a guess, I've never done the statistical analysis to derive the actual chance), a 100% loyaltly bonus would reduce this to a 2.5% chance.

There are two exceptions to this. The most important is the fixed Mind Control Center in Twilight of the Arnor. In both Dread Lords and Dark Avatar, the MCC gives a economic bonus and pretty well PREVENTS planet flipping. In TA, the MCC lost the economic bonus, but it's intended function was restored. It forces any planet at 4x to flip the first turn it can do so. The second exception is the building (whose name excapes me at the moment) that prevents the planet it is built on from flipping. Period. No matter what you do to that planet, it won't flip - including the fixed MCC.

Asteroid mines flip in much the same manner, except they flip far more easily because they don't generate their own influence. Getting to 4x is thus much easier. Note that asteroids are immune to the MCC as well.

I'm in the process of collecting data in order to put real numbers in influence equations. Hopefully in the near future I will be able to just give equations for all of this crap.

7. Yes. Obviously the high bonus line is more efficient, but there are times when you need all the bonus you can get. In DL and DA, with all techs researched, you can get 337% bonus on each base. In TA, this will vary as to the particular tech tree you are using, and what traded tech you have.

11 & 12. Manufacturing, research, and farming bonus tiles (group 1) do not work the same as influence and morale tiles (group 2). Group 1 tiles require a building that actually produces output to give any bonus. A factory will gain the bonus, the manufacturing capitol or a power plant (or any race-specific variant) will not. If it says anything about a % gain, it won't get the bonus. Same with the tech capitol and research coordinator building on a research bonus - they won't work. If it says 8 manufacturing/research/food production, it will get the bonus. If it says adds 25% man/res/food production, it won't.

Group 2 works differently, as none of their buildings give absolute production. You can't get a building that gives 5 morale, they give 5%. Due to this, buildings of this nature DO get bonuses on % basis. If your morale building gives 20% morale, it will give 40% on a bonus. This holds for the political capitol, stock markets, counterintelligence center, and anything else that gives a % bonus to that planet. Bonus tiles do NOT affect things like the Restaurant of Eternity or any of the morale trade goods. These give empire-wide bonuses and are not affected by tile bonuses.

13. The all research strategy works, but is not nearly as effective as it used to be. While it makes efficient use of your money in terms of planetary production, it also puts a pretty hard cap on how much manufacturing capability you will be able to generate. This usually results in having to rush buy things, which is even less cost-effective than a balanced production model.

Re-Education Center I beleive.

When you have social funded and no social projects building, all of your unused social production is filtered to military-but it gains neither your social production bonus nor your military production bonus; it is simply the base funded value.

Military production over the value of a ship you are building is not returned to your treasury and you are charged for it.

Social production over the value of an improvement is not returned to your treasury, you are charged for it, it does not go towards the next improvement in the queue, however it is counted as part of the improvement's cost when rush buying an improvement over it.

So if you spend 180 industry in a single turn to build a manufacturing center (at 150 industry), when you go to rush buy your industrial sector (400 industry) over it you would pay 400-180 or 220^1.1*6 = 2262BC as opposed to the 400-150 or 250^1.1*6 = 2604BC.  (As with almost if not all other things in this game, the value is truncated before it is multiplied by 6.)

2. If you're talking about the maximum efficiency a given planet can have in terms of farms/economic structures, there are at least two other threads active on that subject currently.  ;)  Long story short is you don't ever want to have more than two farms on a planet (exception if you're the Yor, where your equivalent would be four farms and you may be able to maintain five, as your farms give half the mt/wk and a morale bonus), and in a number of cases a single 6B farm is all you need or want.

X. Focus:

In DL/DA, if you for instance focus a planet on research, 25% of your funded base military production and 25% of your funded base social production is transferred to research; at this point in time it also gets any applicable research bonus.

If you're focusing on military it takes from funded social and from funded research, if you're focusing on social it takes from funded military and funded research.  The military won't add up exactly all the time because as mentioned above if you have unused funded social the base amount is transferred to military (where it is not granted military's bonus, either).

In TA, while 25% is still lost from the production you're not focusing, you only gain 20% of the total value (or, if you prefer, 80% of the transferred value) to the focused value.

You gave me so much more detailed info than what I expected, thank you very much for it!

Its interesting how much more fun it is if you get away from guessing what you do and get to actually knowing what you do! I cant wait to use all my new knowledge in the next game, if some questions arise I will know on where to look for answers

Have a nice weekend!
Hrothgaar

So does that mean that you actually save more money when you rush buy every improvement and ship when it is 1 turn to completion?

The answer is "sometimes".  However, certain conditions need to be met for it to work.  For starters, you need to be producing so much production that you could finish it six times over before you can even think of breaking even with a rush buy.  This will not be the case most of the time.  It does happen, usually when you're only a few units away, we're talking in the ten and under range.  If it looks that close, go in and click "Buy", and compare the price listed with the planet's production.  If the value is under the planet's production, slam the Buy button!  If the value is higher, let it complete naturally.  Alternately, you can use that chance to fiddle with your domestic ratios, or divert production into research for just that planet, but this is very time-consuming tweaking.

Infernal is right. Most often, it's more efficient to adjust the focus on the planet to reduce overkill production. Just remember to put the focus back where you want it after that turn. I don't recommend changing global setting for the benefit of one planet, though - you'll screw up the efficiency of all your other planets doing that.

I have another quick question:

Is it possible to disable custom ship building completely so all you can use our the predefined ships types? Probably a weird question, but that's how it was in Ascendancy so...

Highly doubt it, and no idea why you'd want that.

You could play by those rules, but I know of no way to force the AI to play by those rules as well.

I take that back-you might be able to pull it off, in a sense, by limiting the miniaturization levels.  But that's not really what you're asking for.

It's certainly not in TA, there are no predesigned combat ships. Either it would degenerate into an influence war, or the first person to find a ranger would win.

I still have never seen a Ranger...  I want one

They don't appear until 5 game years have passed now, if memory serves.

Funny thing is, if you don't already have ships more powerful than a Ranger by the time Rangers can appear, you're not doing it right.  You can play with Rangers if you drop back to vanilla DL, along with all the other old ships from GC I.  About the only thing they all have in common is a complete lack of useful application- they're slow, underpowered, and really only good if you're stingy because they're cheap to maintain.