Building a powerful economy is more intuitive in Galactic Civilizations III than in previous titles while still letting players customize their empire’s productivity to the level that hands-on space emperors expect. However, we’ve refined how the basic population input is transformed into manufacturing, research, and wealth outputs. Read on for a detailed breakdown.
(click the pic for the full-size version)
One Slider to Rule Them All
Ever at the forefront of production-slider technology, Stardock has blown up every assumption and leveraged every synergy to bring an unbelievable game-changing innovation to the table:
A second dimension. To the Galactic Civilizations III production control. Minds: blown.
I joke, but changing the mess of sliders for overall/research/manufacturing into the unified production wheel (we really need a better name for it. The Production Palette?) is a huge improvement over the individual sliders of the past.
My favorite part of the production wheel is dragging the nexus around and seeing my empire’s (or colony’s, if I’m managing a single colony’s allocation) production numbers change in real time. I personally tend to start with an idea of what kind of credit surplus/deficit I’m aiming for and a general balance between research and manufacturing, and finding that sweet spot takes only a few seconds with the wheel.
Population = Production
Like most 4X strategy games, Galactic Civilizations III models empires around the production unit. Rather than mere settlements and outposts, we look at entire planets. Each colony has its own population, special attributes, and improvements that determine its output every turn. The way it breaks down in our game is all based on population first and foremost.
Each unit of population (a billion individuals -- ancient fanatics, semi-autonomous calculation nodes, bloodthirsty reavers, or something else depending on which race you’re ruling) produces one production point per turn. This point is then split according to your allocation strategy (see One Slider to Rule Them All, below), and modified by improvements like factories or research labs, planet specials like Ghost World or Bountiful, racial traits, and any other bonuses you might have.
Numbers, Numbers Everywhere
The formula works like this:
(Population * AllocationPercentage) * (1 + ImprovementMod + PlanetMod + StarbaseMod + RacialMod) = Output
Let’s say we have a Drengin (no production bonuses) colony on a world with an Active Core (50% increased manufacturing), in range of a starbase with an Economic Ring (10% increased manufacturing/research/wealth), with population 10, with two basic factories and three labs (10% bonus manufacturing each) and an allocation of 30% manufacturing, 40% research, and 30% wealth.
(10 * .30) * (1 + .20 + .50 + .10 + .00) = 5.4 Manufacturing(10 * .40) * (1 + .30 + .00 + .10 + .00) = 5.6 Research(10 * .30) * (1 + .00 + .00 + .10 + .00) = 3.1 Wealth
Aside from this general concept, you can also dump your manufacturing output into research, wealth, culture, or growth at a reduced rate via planetary projects that boost those numbers rather than producing an improvement or starship directly.
Strategic Applications
Specializing planets is obviously a huge part of building an efficient and deadly empire with this economy model, but bear in mind that while research and wealth are abstracted to a global level (you just have the one research project at a time, and a single treasury), manufacturing is local.
Being able to crank out transports from multiple planets means you can keep your population growing faster during wars of conquest. Decentralized production of warships can be a huge benefit, depending on the map. New improvements you’ll want to build come up regularly as you progress down the tech tree, and those come with non-trivial construction costs as well.
The reduction in flexibility in an over-specialized empire can be a disadvantage as well. An empire of three planets where one is full of markets, another labs, and the last factories has little headroom to switch over to an emergency wartime economy – the industrial world is presumably already tasked with 100% manufacturing, and without factories the other colonies’ output will be stunted.
Coming Soon: Econ 102?
You now have the basic idea of how the economy works in Galactic Civilizations III. We haven’t even touched culture yet, or population growth, or the whole concept of improvement levels and adjacency bonuses. Frogboy is kicking around an idea that hasn’t been implemented yet and may come with some changes to the core economy equation too, so don’t be shocked if things change a bit before release.
We can’t wait to see what our Elite Founders think of the alpha when we open the doors to them on March 27.
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Hello,
The concept looks nice, but the one manufacturing stat makes me wonder: Will we still be able to produce ships and planetary improvements at the same time on a planet?
Adding Wealth to be handled this way sounds intriguing.
no, but improvements should be cheaper.
Currently, no, there will be only one queue. But Brad said that eventually MAYBE a separate Shipyard could be controlled directly from the main map. This is a feature I am personally looking forward to but there has been no promise about this. Let`s see how the alpha plays first.
The three sliders have always been my least favorite part of GalCiv. The color wheel is an improvement, but it still seems somewhat silly to me to micromanage this and to imagine your civ moving from full on research to full on production... but then where does that production go? oh... maybe the queue is empty and it gets shifted back.
It just seems overly complicated.
So, let's complicate it more shall we?
What if each race had a sweet spot on the color wheel? Move it out of the sweet spot, and you get a small penalty? Government techs could increase the sweet spot size.
The idea is very basic, you know we got hundreds of planets to manage, I believe that a single ring would be empire wide, but it would be nice if you had individual planetary overrides for more specialized sectors of your empire. This actually looks like something Microsoft did to make paint programs more easy to use instead of having the good old fashion RGB system with color.
And I agree it is a great system, I think this is for the betterment of a series that already has a name rather then insane changes I have created in the past. (However I do agree they don't belong to GCIII and that they are better for entirely brand new series that desperately need ideas.
Is it an insane coincidence that the layout is exactly the same as this old shot down idea?
Oh right, it is a completely different concept with different rules, and it seems that hexagons inspired us to make hexagon based ideas, how original is that?
The real question is, was my idea really shot down or was it used elsewhere, I may never know.
wait are you asking if the hexes on the production wheel are inspired by your idea which was inspired (at least in by the looks of it) by the hexes on the map
im sorry but it appears like the only connection between your "shot down idea" and the production wheel is hexes and hexes have been around for quite some time in strategy games
I am fairly confident that bees invented hexes before man invented the pencil crayon.
Those crafty bees have been working hexes behind the scenes for millions of years, never mind pencils!
We do have them:
I look at it and think "sphere" more then "wheel" or "slider".
I like that you can override it on a planet-level basis, but I still believe there is need for an intermediate level where you can adjust multiple planets all at once. I believe the best way to do this would be to allow us to categorize our planets into user-defined categories. So we could create categories like "farm world", "military ship construction", "transports", "research", "economic" or whatever other categories that we want. I could then manage 5-15 planets all at once by locking them all to the same "sphere of exfluence".
And if you could automatically shove new planets into existing player categories (bayesian filter?) where newly conquered/settled planets try to find a best-fit in the existing categories, I think you would truly be on to something special in terms of reducing the player's load of managing a large empire.
I'd prefer a pop up or something instead, personally. Any automated system is likely to screw you over at some point if it picks a category that makes sense with what's built on the planet when you capture it rather than what you intend to do with it. Example: conquered capitol worlds tend to be set up heavily into manufacturing, but I generally turn them into money planets to take advantage of the higher population. An automated system would likely group them as ship-building rather than money planet.
I like all of the presented changes VERY much!
Population as the basic factor for colony output, the "center of gravity" aka production wheel with population either generating production, research or money, the ability to control this setting for individual colonies if one likes, the one building queue for infrastructure and ships, getting rid of some units where necessary etc.
All of this is straight forward and will make the game more intuitive for new players and less baffling for them, I think. I can remember my first couple of games of GalcivII (having played MoOII a lot, among other 4X-games), trying to figure out why high population does not increase production but decrease morale, why churning out factories and labs would just force me to reduce spending because you hadn't produced economic buildings, the difficulties to figure out what adverse or positive effects morale had etc. Add to that the nonlinear and therefore difficult-to-grasp nature of most of the background mechanics (again: influence of happiness buildings), it took a couple of sessions to learn to shepherd the game first, before I could really start playing it.
So again, I really really like all the changes and am looking forward to playing the game.
If you could now make the ships look less like jet-fighters and more like "real" starships (like in Sins of a solar Empire or Babylon 5), and take out the humor (for me, it breaks the immersion) I would be completely satisfied
Keep up the good work!
There's now much more incentive to get population now other than just wealth and culture it would seem.
As for the auto-categorization into your own planet categories, I would definitely want a pop-up, but I would like the computer to suggest a category for me based on the statistics of the planet. So if new planet is rather similar to planet X in category Y, that would be the category that it suggests.
I tend to group my planets mentally by function based on their "raw" attributes, not based on what happens to be built in the planet when I take it over. For instance, in Civ4, if I had a city with lots of +food resources in the fat-cross and very little minerals, that would become a farm city, producing lots and lots of food. Or if it was near a bunch of mines, it would become a production city. I would also rename the cities with some sort of mnemonic at the front so that similar types were all grouped together. That made it easier to manage, but was a poor substitute for proper management.
So if I can sort my captured/settled worlds into custom categories, and manage them at a category level, it would reduce a lot of the tedium of managing an empire with 100+ planets.
I'm really not sold on the Production Wheel thing.
Part of the problem is that it's one of those "infinitely tunable" knobs that actually gives the user far more control, with less real understanding than they should have, when compared to a well-though-out set of options.
I'll keep trying it, but I'd actually prefer right now if we went back to the 3-slider options, marked in 10% increments. It's easier to grasp for most people (the "wheel" concept is hard for many people, particularly those not graphic artists who aren't used to a color spectrum wheel).
And, yeah, it would be *really* nice if we could have user-defined groups that come with pre-set wheel settings, so we can just pick one and go.
(10 * .30) * (1 + .00 + .00 + .10 + .00) = 3.1 Wealth
3.0*1.10 = 3.3 Wealth Not 3.1...
The alternative might be to put (3) sliders on the screen, but in a inverse triangle shape with the zero point being at the center and the 3 sliders radiating outwards at angles of 120 degrees between sliders? Might make it more obvious that you are trying to balance 3 competing needs.
In GalCiv 2 we could transport 250 million (0.25 billion) colonists to a new planet. In your system that would only be a population of 0.25. What will be the starting population of newly colonized planets in GalCiv 3?
Depends on how many people are on the colony ship. However, a single colony module can now transport up to 2.5 billion people.
am I right in thinking there's no tax income or approval in GC3? Or will they be implemented later? (I hope)
Very helpful. Thank you!
Yes to both. Taxes have been replaced with Wealth. Approval isn't in the game at the moment. However, both Frogboy and Mormegil hinted that it might return. Although in a different form and more clearer as to what it does.
Is Econ 102 coming soon?
A dictionary compiles a consensus of meanings, based on current usage and language drift. It doesn't define it. Not even OED2 is authoritative.
Off the top of my head:
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