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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Forge worlds are FTW though
Still hoping that APPROVAL will make it back. Even more after Brad´s pdf
Definitely. It might look more "accessible" for fat teenagers eating their hamburgers while waiting for CoD servers to get back on, but hardcore strategy gamer needs to KNOW and SEE he produces credits, tons, people etc.
BTW Tax slider is GONE AS WELL?? Stardock, Stardock...really courageous changes, but how will that fare with the immersion? Dumping two "realistic" features like taxes and approval... I don´t think that is a good move, but shall see in Alpha, how it plays and feels.
I'm somewhat concerned that billions of people isn't a sufficiently finite unit to use as the base input for all production. Just how populated can planets get now?
(Can we have a nice sound effect when clicking on one of the... hives square (that's what I would call it). Maybe something like a magnet clicking onto metal?)
Thanks for posting this.
I can't wait to see how this works.
we really need a better name for it
I see it as functionally a joystick control. "Production" is too long a prefix. I want to call it a "prodstick". It's a stick I use to prod my population in different directions.
Empire prodstick and local prodstick. Works for me.
Circle o' Doom
Moneyball
Eco-sphere
That screenshot is just beautiful.
Well it is still three sliders, now you just have three sliders in three different directions.
BC slider goes Down to UP
Research slider Goes from left to Right
Production slider goes from Right to left.
Just a more complex way to do the same thing.
Arguably yes, but in actual practice I think the production wheel might be a faster and more intuitive way to achieve what you want.
In no way is setting one thing that controls them all at once "more complex" than a collection of several sliders. It's far more elegant than it used to be.
The only advantage I can give to the sliders in galciv 2 is that they made comparing the relative importance of each very obvious. It`s kind of like looking at 3 glasses with different quantity of liquid in them. Its pretty instinctive to know which one was the fullest, emptiest, or when they were equal.
The production wheel is more abstract, but I think it will allow for much more efficient control once you get used to it, which should not really be a problem, its hardly very complicated.
The problem with the 3 sliders is they are interrelated so you need to adjust all 3 to get the exact values you want. They were pretty good at doing a rough job but if you wanted to set very precise percentages it was finicky to do and time consuming.
maybe more complex in coding but much simpler in use
i hated the three sliders because whenever i changed one it would always add or remove the points from the wrong additional slider
and i couldn't use the lock to keep the other slider from moving because then the lock became glitched and wouldn't unlock
Oooo what an elegant graphic solution to the 3 sliders! Very nice!
Some terminology that comes to my mind: Economy Orb, Economy Disc (or Discus), Production Disc, Production Planner, Economy Planning Disc -- one could go on forever with suggestions I suppose. I'd avoid using Wheel because it doesn't seem like anything is being rotated, it's just a red pointer moved over the surface of a circle.
I'm very keen to learn more about those planet specials! As an avid modder I hope to be able to tinker with the XML for that, and maybe create new ones! I'm not greedy for power
"The Ring?" It just doesn't "Ring" true for me. It is disk shaped, however, so how about "The Disk", or perhaps "The EconoDisk" or "The ED".
Sorry, just couldn't resist that last one.
call it the WHIP
What's Here is Produced. be it research, money or industry.
really want to crank out one of them, well. break out the other type of whip.
How about tax slider? Do we suppose to enter some kind of stellar communism era in the near future? (joking)
Nice Idee, but... please, please redesign this globe - the colours hurt my eyes. It is a big psychodelic dot that does not fit-in... an overdone eye-catcher. (No designer here, so sorry for clumsy description)
I'm very much liking this concept. As opposed to some others, I always found the sliders to be a bit artificial (?). Personal opinion, but I do agree with others in this post that the wheel probably allow for more refined changes to the system
Production Matrix?
I do not find it too bad here on my monitor but I agree that colors could be made a bit darker, less flashy, and it probably would be for the better.
I have yet to read something I like more than simply production wheel Maybe that wheel does not turn but neither does a cheeze wheel.
I cannot say that I'm sorry to see the three interdependent sliders go. I am a bit sorry to see the tax slider go, because I rather like the ability to increase my empire's income without directly reducing manufacturing and research, although since I feel that your actual approval rating had probably too little impact on you I cannot say that I'm extremely disappointed to see that approval and variable taxes are gone.
The issue with approval and the tax slider was more that it was fairly easy to maintain control of the senate, and as long as you had control of the senate there were no penalties for having less than perfect approval, unless you had a planet or two with such poor approval that they're on the verge of rebellion. This could have been corrected by making it so that tax changes had to be approved by the senate, that the penalties caused by losing control of the senate started to kick in before you completely lost control of the senate (but not at full force - so perhaps if Populists controlled 20% and War Party controlled 10% while your Federalists controlled 60%, with the other parties sharing the remainder, you might have 90% of your Federalist bonuses, a third of the Populist penalties, and an eighth of the War Party penalties), or things like that. I also think that the approval rating should have had some degree of memory associated with it - if I've just spent ten turns at 100% taxes and then I reduce them to 30%, my approval should probably jump a bit. But it shouldn't instantly jump all the way up to wherever I would have been had I spent the past 10 turns at 30% taxes instead of 100% taxes; I could also see having the approval dive to a point lower than its long-term expected point immediately when there's a tax increase, and then slowly go to its 'stable' value as turns go on, and for minor tax changes (be they increases or decreases) to have significant immediate impact on the approval rating. Having the forgetting factor for this be something that could be adjusted in the faction customization, or even just be dependent on the base faction, could also be an interesting way to differentiate factions. But this is all purely academic, since it seems that approval and adjustable tax rates are a thing of the past.
Well, a cheese wheel could turn, if you wanted it to.
When I was a wee lad in Italy in my little town in the ass-end of nowhere, I stole small wheels of cheese from my nono and rolled them down a sideroad to try and hit Coca-Cola bottles (And occasionally those lizards that swarm everywhere).
It was really fun.
Don't be silly. You know what I mean. Here, from the dictionary:
So basically anything that is round and evoke a wheel for a reason or another can be called a wheel without any penalty in life. It is STATED by the dictionary. IT is a widely accepted metaphorical usage.
1 : in a sense or manner : actually<took the remark literally> <wasliterally insane>
2 : : virtually <willliterally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice — Norman Cousins>
I'm sorry but when the meaning of the word litirally has 2 meanings that directly contradict each other it causes me to lose faith in the dictionarys authority.
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