And sorry to say that, but having to tweak the govern wheel between gold, prod and research is not. It is only time consuming. It is not even interesting from a "strategic" point of view. No need to be a genius to see that gold is useless at start, so you painfully need to adjust to research and prod. Then of course if you specialise a world with 6 research centers, it means that you want it set on research.... But when a building improvement arrive, you have to set it back to prod... then again to research when it is finish. There is no "strategic thinking" behind. It is just time-consuming useless micro gestion
Strategic thinking is making choices like "should I rush a colony ship to expand or build more defense because my neighbourgh just grunted at me, or quickly get that anti-matter far away....". That is what is making a 4x exciting.
I would therefore suggest to remove this wheel, or to simplify it and put it in the city screen
I agree, but this topic was discussed to death already. This isn't going to change, like many of the deep gameplay issues that have been discussed on these forums.
You have access to it, on a "per-planet" basis. In case you weren't aware. Meaning you can set your research planets to do only that.
But yeah, I agree that fiddling with the wheel can get tiresome.
I think that part that is tiresome about it is remembering when you need to make changes to planets. For example, you get access to some new terraforming tech, so on a research or wealth planet you go and change your slider around so you can terraform a tile, and then place down another building. This means you have to take it off of its focus, and then after X number of turns (dependent on your overall production capacity, which varies on damn near every planet) you have to *remember to change it back*. This means you are *constantly* checking on every planet, worrying that you forgot. This is the part that I find very tiresome and stressful.
Perhaps a solution would be to allow for the player to make a change to the wheel, but then have it conditionally change for you. If you could say "This focus for now, when this building is done change to this focus". Then you are still making the same overall decisions, you're just able to do them *at the same time*, removing the necessity of checking on every damn planet every damn turn to make sure they are balanced just right.
That sounds really complicated what i would like to have would be a new project that accrues manufacturing overflow this way you can set all specialized planets to something like 1-5 % manufacturing and then those points would stack until you need to upgrade buildings at which poiNt they would get used
I don't even know why this wheel exists in the first place. It doesn't add to the game's depth, and I'm even quite convinced it removes a lot...
"Remembering is tiresome".I think we just nutshelled a big part of the game's problems, here.remembering constructors is tiresome.Remembering to build stuff is tiresome.Remembering to update which ships are building at the shipyards is tiresome.Remembering to check diplomacy to ensure my treaties don't expire is tiresome.Remembering to check if I can trade yet is tiresome... no, really tiresome.Trying desperately to get my ally to take weapons and tech turn after turn is tiresome.Hmm.
I really dislike how when you use the commands interface to update ship production from an old version to a new version on shipyards that are building ships on repeat it will just queue a single ship of the new design and then continue creating the old design. I am specifically telling you that if you are building THIS ship, you should now build THIS ship. So if you are building ship A on repeat, it is only natural that if I tell you to stop building ship A and instead build ship B that I want you to build ship B on *repeat*.
Silly game.
Also, what's up with auto naming of ships and the 'update to newest design' button? When I start a new game and make a different constructor it names it the M3. If I build my own special ship and name it the "Test ship", or the "Test ship M1", it will never auto increment the name for me. Never. But if I put a single constructor module on a ship it will try making it the Constructor M4, or whatever the next number would be. If I build a ship, it should just call it the M1. If I 'use design' on an existing ship, it should call it the M2. Why is that hard?
And this 'update to newest design' button is just broken, it doesn't ever do what I expect it to do. If I manually create a ship and manually name it the M1 (as again in the previous paragraph I mentioned that it won't do it for me), and then I get new tech and click 'use design' on my existing M1 and create a new ship that I manually name the M2, I cannot use the 'use newest design' button. It will sometimes update it to a completely different ship, like a colony or constructor ship. Please! Go from the M1 to the M2!
There's no rule that says you have to use the wheel at all. Want a more challenging game? Don't touch the wheel.
and if they didn't put all that tinkering stuff in the game ....."WTF, I can't do this and I can't do that ..what a dumbed down game ..what's wrong with those people and they charged me x amount of dollars for this dumbed down piece of crap." People always complain no matter which way the developers decide to go.
I don't ever touch the planet wheels, it's just tiresome, and I don't think the AI does either. This also makes specialization less of a no-brainer.
Honestly you can get good results by setting one of these patterns once for each planet never touching the wheel
Global (Manu/Research)
50/50 Manu/Research - Research Planet - since you are setting your global to this you don't have to edit this.
50/50 Manu/Wealth - Wealth Planet
100 Manu - Production - Production Planet
Leave social/military at 50/50. (or 100 military and just disable the shipyard when you are building your planet)
Set a social project to expend your social points when nothing is in the queue.
If you have a shipyard and it's running it will consume your allocation for manufacturing. You can disable the shipyard if you need to build improvements on your planets.
This will help cut down the micro for people that are bothered by it.
I just want to post so that both opinions are represented.
I greatly prefer planet by planet control as opposed to the forced inefficiency of the galciv2 single slider.
I don't think this is a huge burden for players of a 4x game.
If people don't like the micro capabilities they are fully able to set a 33/33/33 50/50 macro slider.
Please don't modify this aspect of the game and ruin it for us players who like detailed controls.
Just to chime in.
I am having LOADS of fun. I typically spend 2 to 5 hours weeknights and 16 or more weekends playing Excessive and Insane maps. I do play on Rare/Rare which dramatically limits the amount of planets you end up having. I personally love it this way. For me life is rare and and habitable planets should be a treat to find regardless of type. On insane maps with common planets but rare habitability, I will go through 5 or 7 systems before I get one I can settle.
The Micro is part of the game and always has been. Again, personally I like it as it gives me more control over my empire on a per planet basis. We will get governors soon which may help you so you can enjoy the game. The 'wheel' was a breakthrough in design from the old sliders we had in GCII. I love it as it represents your three choices and breakdowns better.
{Fun!}
Governors will hopefully resolve most of the planet micro issues. I don't know if that's a DLC or what, but they talk about it a lot on the dev stream and so it looks like it's a feature in the works.
Governors will be free and part of the patches coming up.
Oh, don't forget setting the wheel to 99% research 1% production on research worlds after you unlock the research project.
The AI does control the sliders as in my current game the 1st powered player went from being low on research and matching me or exceeding me on economy and production, to in one turn being high on research and much lower than me on both production and economy. The only way to change that in one turn would be to adjust sliders Good for the AI.
I'm right with Larsenex on this one, I'd rather have too much micro (that I can choose to use) then not enough. So I love that Stardock puts this amount of micro-management into the game so I have the option to adjust the sliders on a planet basis if I want.
On the other hand if you don't want to use those options then don't use the following options. The game is not dependent on them.
Once the govenors are in then you won't have to do the following either.
This one always puzzles me. If you don't like micro-managing, then don't micro-manage. Problem solved.
You most certainly do NOT need to micro-manage anything to play and win the game. I set my global slider at the start of the game to around 10% wealth, 45% research, 45% manufacturing. If I start getting excessive amounts of cash, or start running out of cash, I might adjust my slider a little. I might adjust once every 100 turns, if that. I have never touched an individual planet slider. And I haven't been steamrolled by any AI opponents on challenging difficulty, at least not yet.
Things are only as much of a PITA as you decide you want them to be.
I am using the planet wheel in an empire with >100 planets. I take each planet through three stages, beginning, mid-development, and possible specialization. I set up the beginning with max production and a short build list. When the planet gets back to me, I look more closely at its terrain and decide what should go where. The planet wheel gets set to follow the imperial wheel. It will stay there until late game when I will extreme specialize a several key worlds and set those planet wheels accordingly. This is working for me so far.
I expect more advanced multilevel management options and look forward to them. I will put to the devs that I have some high expectations that there will be some significant and creative work in this area. As I get braver about how big an empire I can work with, I want the tools to do it with. I expect the UI to be my friend and the AI to be my enemy, not the other way around.
I agree with you 100%, but based on recent discussions related to an issue that I will not specify, there are those who resent the presence of in game options that require them to choose not to use them.
Some players have to play as efficiently as they can, and when they learn of a new way to play they can't NOT play that way anymore. Saying "Just don't do that" doesn't work.
That's how I am. The more I discuss the games I play with other gamers, the more I find that there are many different approaches to any one game. I respect other playstyles, but obviously my interest lie in discussing what is relevant for me.
So far, I have found that the AI cannot keep up when I use adjacencies, and sliders to maximum efficiency. There is some aspect of fun in learning to how maximize these systems, but it is less rewarding over the long term when AI can not keep up in it's current state.
I think sliders do add depth to the game because they allow for short term specialization, as opposed to buildings, which provide longer term specialization. Either way, sliders are a core part of the game and are likely here to stay, but we can still hope for better automation. The game has much larger maps than GalCiv 2, but it doesn't have gameplay advances that would make them fun for me.
As long as whatever solution does not compromise my game experience of being able to micromanage then I have no issues. I just don't want the micro capability removed just because some find it a burden.
And Franco should know that from a "certain other topic".
My issue isn't with detailed controls, its that ultimately the detailed controls don't mean much. The gradual slider doesn't actually have a lot of benefit. The way optimizing works in GalCiv3 its almost always best to go with extremes.
Build a science world, go max prod to build your labs, then go max science. You are rarely really adjusting your planets or using the power of the slider, because its just not that useful to overall gameplay.
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