1 improvement/ship/tech per turn is a bottleneck on typical production levels

from GalCiv3 Forums

I bought GC3 a few weeks ago. I've through the campaign and several custom galaxies and every time the same pattern emerges. It is very very easy to generate enough manufacturing to produce 1 improvement/turn. With a full transport, the "Prolific" trait, and just a government tech or two, a completely fresh planet can produce 1 basic improvement/turn from the very first turn its settled. Even without those things the first 1-2 basic factories will take 2 turns, and everything after takes 1. The 1 improvement/turn limit turns into a bottleneck whereupon you either micromanage the production palette of each planet that built a new factory each turn, or you end up with an escalatingly inefficient remainder of hammers that will be completely wasted until you finally get to sufficiently expensive improvments.

On dedicated manufacturing worlds, that will never happen. With the proper mixture of factories and farms, they can easily produce enough hammers to make any age of war improvement and a very fancy constructor every turn, and still have a massive amount of hammers going to waste. These worlds will only ever make use of their full power when building capital ships that I purposefully make as expensive as possible. These planets would build 5+ constructors in a single turn if they could, and you might think, who needs that many? But on a large enough map you can and should have 40+ mining starbases, meaning you need to build 40+ new constructors to make the most use out of every new mining tech. The reality is that you will have enough hammers to build a fully functional eco starbase for every single planet you own, but 1 constructor per shipyard per turn is simply too slow to keep up with the hammers you have available or with the number of starbase modules that you actually could make use of.

Even on 75+% research worlds, it is so easy to generate 30-45 hammers that once again, the development of those planets is only bottlenecked by the 1 improvement/turn limit when building tier 1/2 improvements.

And once you have enough of those planets finally taking 2-3 turns to build level 3+ research improvments, your empire will be producing enough beakers to research anything in the age of war in 1 turn (the more expensive ones that theoretically should take 2-3 turns actually only take 1 because of the buffer you build up over-researching the earlier techs). In the game I'm playing right now, I have 77/100 techs needed to advance to the next age. I can tell that I am exactly 23 turns away from reaching that age, because I have researched everything in 1 turn for quite some time now. If I could research more than 1 tech/turn I would probably advance the age in <10.

Since everything can be built in 1 turn and purchasing something actually puts the associated production queue on hold for that turn, BCs are useless for anything other than maintenance and invasions.

This situation simply does seem to be healthy or intended. An empire should be bottlenecked by its total output, but right now by turn ~50 a well managed empire will progress by 1 improvement per planet per turn, 1 constructor per shipyard per turn, and 1 technology per turn.

Possible fixes:

1. Allow planets to sponsor more than 1 shipyard. As previously covered, a full-power manu world could probably power 5+ shipyards in 99% of situations.

2. Increase the cost of everything in the age of war by 5x or more so that your hammers actually have something to do.

3. Remove the 1 per turn limit on everything so that your overflow hammers are made proper use of.

4. Fix the rush-buy / production halt bug.

5. Make planets sponsor starbases to build modules, instead of requiring infinite constructor spam.

12,167 views 13 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

As a quick note, you can research more than one tech in one turn but only along the same tech line. Just select a tech further down the tree, and you will research all the techs up to it limited only by how much excess research you have.

But you are right about building improvements and building ships. You are stuck with a 1/turn limit for every planet/shipyard.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

The one building/ship per turn is here to stay. I would suggest building bigger ships or dial in a project to use those hammers. Also your hammers are not wasted, they do roll over to the next build. 

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I definitely am a proponent for stretching out the Age of War period, say at-least doubling of research costs there on out.  Research victory seems to be too easy IMO.  

 

Regarding manufacturing, yeah, on any reasonable manufacturing dedicated world, you can build something once a turn, but I prefer to keep military and social split, and i typically target social building to finish a building every 3 turns, and keep a decent amount towards military production.

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I remember when multiple ships a turn was a planned feature, DLC maybe? I would welcome it over the many bottle necks and restrictions from tech ages to incremental improvement building.

 

;)

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I don't mind the 1 ship per turn, but I do think manu costs needs a pass. It is very easy to build a manu world that can build any ship I want in 1 turn, which I think is the main issue.

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Having one world sponsor multiple shipyards seems like a great idea for that. You could take a manufatoring hit. 100%, then 80%, then 40%, ect. When you have a world pumping out 4500 manufactoring you can still supply 4 shipyards even at 20%. I get that the hammers roll over but they are still wasted when you can quite literally build any huge ship in one turn.

<X3  

Reply #7 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I think multiple shipyards per planet would just add unnecessary complexity without bringing anything new or interesting. It wouldn't actually make the game any better. It'd just be an ad hoc solution to hide a visible symptom of the actual root problem. Being able to build anything in 1 turn should be an exceptional situation. If it happens routinely then that's a sure sign that the production costs are too small compared to the average production capability a player normally builds. The real solution in that case, I think, is to increase the production costs so that this doesn't happen so often.

If there is a clear difference in available production in early game vs. late game so that a flat modification of all costs would bog down the early game then you need to increase the costs of the late game ships/buildings more than the early ones.

To me the problem looks more like a balancing issue than functionality that's missing.

Reply #8 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I agree Petri. Along with these increased costs a little quality over quantity would be nice as well. We wouldn't need cheap constructors if we needed less starbases. Less and better starbases with a bigger influence range and more spacing restrictions. It wouldn't be hard to drop the necessary starbases down by a third.

Reply #9 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

It is funny though - the original design brief for shipyards said they were supposed to reduce micro by funneling the production of several worlds to a single production center.  But since we're limited by 1 ship/shipyard/turn, we end up making 1 shipyard for each planet anyway.

Reply #10 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Larsenex, reply 2

The one building/ship per turn is here to stay. I would suggest building bigger ships or dial in a project to use those hammers. Also your hammers are not wasted, they do roll over to the next build. 

It is a problem once you get the hang of the production stuff. I think it's not really balanced for us that micromanages at all, we just end up with crazy values. Oh, and I made a ship with 20k manu costs, I still built it in one turn. How do I make a bigger ship? ;) 

If not more builds per turn, perhaps clusters of ships? Massive project upgrading all buildings of one type? I think buildings is the main issue to be honest. 

 

Reply #11 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

As far as research is concerned, they have said they are going to implement a cost scaling factor for every world you colonize, similar to CiV and its tech cost increases for each city founded. Time will tell whether that approach fully solves any issues or if additional tweaking will be required of course.

Reply #12 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Massive project

Hmm... maybe it would be good to have some kind of production sink that you'd actually want to use. What if terraforming was not by buildings but by a project? Once you have poured enough production into the Terraforming Project a choice for a new hex appears. If the cost, say, doubled for each new hex the first few hexes would be at a "reasonable" level allowing practical early game use but it would quickly grow to a level where you really do need that 300 production powerhouse to get it done before the game ends.