I like it, but something feels missing about it. To make it feel like a strategic part of the game and not just a unrelated element. Or so I think.
I haven't played enough to really form an opinion on it, but, so far, I like it.
The approval system seems bugged to me. I.E. I have a planet showing 73% approval with the following;
Total for the +'s and -'s is +2% so I end up with 73% approval?? Overall approval for my civ is 89% so i don't think that's a factor. I guess there could be some underlying base values that they modify up and down based on the approval rating instead of an aggregate, but if that's the case they should make it viewable. Just my two cents.
At mid game I was having trouble keeping everyone happy. Also if you are on limited planets for colonization you will not get enough points to get the 2nd tier of Ideology benefits. This means that some buildings exclusive to ideology may never be in reach.
Also there must be a way to mitigate population pressure at end game as you will run out of food and happiness bonuses and yet the pop will still increase.
Right now my main issue is that morale seems a bit obtuse. As Tigz mentions, the numbers don't seem to quite add up, making it hard to predict how different actions will effect it. Also, I'm not a fan of tying approval to wealth. This seems to put an undo emphasis on wealth, which limits my ability to specialize planets in the way I want to.
I don't mind wealth being a factor, but it feels like the current happiness improvements are not taking that into mind. With income per planet, it feels like swimming against the current to dump a bigger cash deficit on a production or research world trying to give them some relaxation using those valuable tiles up in the process.
Does the population now grow indefinitely? I haven't gotten that far to colonize everything yet, and can someone tell me does the penalty cap out at some point. Otherwise fine with it right now.
Ya, on high population industrial worlds there will be alot of problems now. I think something about the Planetary Wealth needs changing, maybe make it on a empire scale vs per planet?
I agree with with your Perigrine23 I play very economical and diplomatic and it's giving me the squeeze on my little industrial worlds! So as my previous paragraph says I think it should be global. IMHO.
oh, and what do I get for having good morale?
DARCA
Its likely a rounding error visually, but in the cumulative into the 2% error
That's fine if it's a rounding error visually, but we are talking about the game saying I have +2% total as my cumulative to approval for the planet. And that +2% means I go from 100% approval to 73% approval??? That's what I don't understand. I'm getting close to mid game about turn 161 with about 16 planets. It seems right now population growth continues to grow thorughout the game, so as the game progresses you find that you have to keep building food sources or you get buried by them wanting more food/population improvements. Same way for wealth as my second planet as an example looks like this right now.
With a total cumalative of +14% which gives me a colony approval of 81%. (once again the numbers make no sense here either). So if the approval stays as is, your planets will eventually become food/wealth specific or approval specific for that matter. Science or production planets will be hard to come by.
There are techs for lessening the penalties in the diplomacy branch. IIRC.
But yea, currently its a rabid empire killing beast and Mars with three research centers and 100% research is suffering dearly, but hey its the first beta. (BUT I EXPECT A CREATIVE FIX SD!)
DARCA.
Morale being broken was mentioned in the stream, I think it's getting fixed in the upcoming patch. Right now balance is definitely off.
The balance is off I agree, but I will say that I love it UI wise. It is extremely clear to use compared to GalCiv 2 imo. I can look at the drop down, know exactly what is affecting my morale, and what to do to effect it.
Your faction should have more a bearing on morale - i.e. playing Drengin and making benevolent choices should lower morale, not raise it.
I have avoided having the Drengin in my games let alone play as them, I want to see how other stuff works without too much war to start off with.
In my experience, you have to research more than just war techs; I think it's the Diplomacy branch where you get all the Economic techs and later those for Approval [i.e. Entertainment "Impartments"], although strangely you do achieve some specifically non-production improvements in the Production strand within the "Colonization" branch.
Thus it seems that the labeling and arrangement of the Tech tree is almost all malappropisms.
Basically I've found that unless you sacrifice at least one Hex/Tile per planet for an 'Entertainment' improvement, then your screwed with the money drying up from low approval choking every sort of improvement. This is also true for the Economic "Impartments". Whether this is just a feature of the "Terans" [us humans must have our entertaiment, "Bread and Circuses" as the Romans used to say] or not I don't know as they're all I've played as so far, this thread seems to prove that it affects all of the four races we have at present.
That's why I want a minimum of 10 tiles/hexes per planet, so that you can at least mitigate the Approval choke however you specialize [or not] your planets. Obviously this should only apply to Habitable planets. But it's no fun trying to colonize Mars and all other grade 4 planets to make them contribute to the game rather than be a drain on the fun through non-production of resources.
And it is utter confusion to try and understand how anything effects anything else; for example, there is no clear link between the amount of food produced and the population cap [in GC2 it was obviously a 1 for 1 correlation]. It also seemed odd to me that so much food production is apparently wasted when your population was below your current production. The techs that give upgrades to your food production don't give anything but niggardly increases in volume/capacity.
Schaefespeare, I feel like we are playing different games.
This has not been the opposite of my experience. Low morale penalties are not harsh at all, with the only penalties being to influence and growth. Sure, you don't get the bonus production, but my research and manufacturing planets are humming along great despite 0-20% approval ratings. I have planets putting out ~100 research or production a turn despite 0% approval. And you complain about money drying up due to low morale, but money leads to high morale. In fact, I've found that the current approval system is broken because of how easy it makes it to make money. Planetary wealth does much more to effect approval than the entertainment improvements do.
Still one to one. In the alpha population could exceed food production, but every single one of my planets across two games so far has been capped at exactly my food production. Of course, your planet has to grow to reach the cap. Maybe you think some of your planets are capped at below your food level but they are still growing? If you want to know if your planet is at its cap, check your approval. If the modifier for population pressure is below 50% you aren't capped.
2/4/8/16 pop cap for farms is not stingy, especially considering that your population numbers are then multiplied by all your modifiers to drive your whole economy.
Random question: could it be that the Approval-affecting things you mentioned is actually the change of Approval?
Not sure if this is what you are asking about, but the quote from Paul comes at around 00:53 of this stream.
I'd watched that stream, and since it didn't come up... I'm guessing no.
My question was: Is it possible that the various Approval-related bonuses that Tigz mentioned and that come down to a "+2%" is actually the Approval change per turn? So, in Tigz example, he has a +2% and is sitting at 73% approval now, so next turn he would ahve 73+2= 75% approval? Is that how this works?
Not possible, its supposed to be the total. No reports have came in about this not being true.
Alright then. Was just an idea.
Personally, I feel that the current system whereby setting a planet to wealth production makes everyone happier is a silly penalization of high-production and high-research worlds and over-encourages high-wealth worlds. Plus, it doesn't even make that much sense. The government shut down all its factories (or converted them to compete with the private market) and labs and upped the tax rate, and I'm supposed to be happier because of this?
If you're going to create an approval modifier based on where your settings are on the wheel, make it so that the more out of balance the wheel is, the higher the approval penalty becomes, rather than creating a big glowing sign that says "specialize all planets in money and just rush all projects in the future." There's really no need to unduly encourage purse worlds; they were already my most common type of planet in GCII because you really only needed so many lab worlds or factory worlds, and more money was never really a problem. Beyond that, GCIII already has a mechanic to encourage specialization - the adjacency bonuses. Do we really need a mechanic that encourages a specific type of specialization? How about a mechanic to discourage specialization to counterbalance this, rather than saying "this type of specialization is good, but those two types of specialization are bad" the way the current high-wealth = approval bonus system does?
I mean, yes, it's decent that this setup discourages the factory planet and the lab world, but is it really better to replace the factory world and lab world with factory world and lab world, just with enough of the slider set to wealth to cover the planetary facility maintenance costs and perhaps a bit of what the approval structures and tax rate slider would have been covering in GCII? Is it really better to use a system that actively encourages purse worlds over factory worlds, lab worlds, and vaguely balanced worlds and that reduces the need to bother with morale structures?
It does not appear that that is the way in which approval works. I have a planet with a net -35% approval and a current approval of 65%. On the next turn, it's still sitting at 65% approval and a net -35% approval, and it's the same way the turn after that. As a result, I suspect that, when the approval system is working properly, approval is supposed to be (100 + bonuses - maluses)%; changing the wealth setting on the planet to change the planetary wealth approval modifier causes the approval to change in a manner consistent with the formula in the preceding sentence (although I did not look at how the approval changed after playing with the wealth slider if I had hit end turn). I have however seen some cases where the numbers do not add up correctly, though I haven't looked at them carefully enough to see if there was a consistent pattern.
Agreed.
Still, if wealth absolutely has to have an effect on approval, then it should be the empire-wide one, not the planetary one. I mean, why should the people care where the money is coming from, as long as the economy is healthy and they're getting paid?
After restarting a new game and planning for the approval problems discussed by everyone above you can make most of your planets happy. The problem is the continual growth the planet has and the eventually -50% population pressure modifier you get and can do nothing about other then research better farms/build more farms. However, I'm going to stop worrying about until they release the next patch though, as they did mention briefly that they inadvertently left some stuff out of the approval system in the stream on Friday. So I shall reserve further testing on it until then.
From a roleplay perspective, I see it that way : on a high-manufacture or high-research world, the economy is completely focused on a big project, and apart from that, only very basic commodities are produced. Increasing wealth production means developing a free-market economy, and allowing for the production of luxuries. 1 MP costs 15 BC to buy, so "producing" only 1 BC instead of 1 MP means taxes are indeed very low.
From a gameplay perspective, I felt specialized worlds were overpowered in alpha. Tying approval to wealth can be a way to reduce their advantage. I didn't have time to experiment here, but I think the devs overdid it : the most efficient solution to disapproval should be approval improvements and not wealth improvements.
I don't like two aspects of the current approval-system:
1.: The discontinuous effects, i.e. +50% Bonus for 100%, +40% for 95%-99% approval and so on. I would rather have the bonus be continuous, like approval-percantage minus 50%. You would get bonuses for influence and population growth between +50% to -50%.
The problem with the discontinuous, step-wise system is for me, that incentivizes heavy micromanagement (adjust wealth on every other turn to be just above the threshold (e.g. 50% approval), but not too much, as that would not benefit you, e.g. having 59%).
2.: The bonuses on influence and population-growth are fine with me, but on production? I don't like this aspect as it creates an ambiguity: I don't know if I have more total production if I have higher production with less happiness or with a higher wealth setting and lower production, because I get +50% production bonus. Which one is better? I would like it to be clear, for instance by eliminating the production-bouns in that system.
What I would like instead, is a system that is not tied to the production wheel (i.e. wealth-production) at all, but simply a consequence of population-density (dependent on absolute numbers and planet class), food supply (if population would be able to grow past current food production - like it is on earth...), and infrastructural buildings/ideology/events etc.
In that way I would not feel the urge to micromanage every colony to adjust its happiness every turn anew.
Combine that with continuous bonuses (see 1.) and it would be perfect - for me
I thought I liked Micro-management but I'm not doing anywhere near what Alfandtot must be doing, especially with the auto-upgrade feature for planetary improvements.
I can Philosophically see the reason to have Approval based on Economic success. It's why politicians are re-elected when there is an economic boom but of itself it doesn't create Happiness, it just removes "dissatisfiers" from life. However when it comes to making a game fun, unless it's just an economic simulator, then the economy should only be an equally contributing factor to the other game mechanics.
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