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
There is an easy solution. Do not use it. Let the game use the default economy settings from the start.
Was already said, was already replied to.
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.
I think sliders provide a useful tool in theory. They allow you to go against the planet's specialization for a short time when in desperation. For example, you are being attacked and suddenly realize that you need more production. However, this rarely comes up because the AI simply isn't difficult enough to push the player to that point. For this purpose, I doubt one could lose much gameplay wise by substituting the sliders with a simple switch that would reroute as much production to a given type as possible.
The second time when it is useful is to eliminate production waste. For example, if you have a planet with high production, you can limit military/social output so that the extra production isn't wasted. Of course, this use would be eliminated if multiple ships/buildings could be constructed in a single turn. I don't think this type of micromanagement adds to the strategy aspect of the game at all, and I've advocated for multiple ships per turn in other threads.
I see this area as one where GalCiv 3 could have innovated and reduced micromanagement (especially considering the large scale that the game boasts) without sacrificing strategy. There are definitely improvements over GalCiv 2, such as shipyards, but IMO Stardock has not gone far enough here.
No game can be everything to everybody. For me, the micro IS the game. My goal isn't really to win, its to run the best empire I can. The ability to take a little extra time to know my colonies are operating exactly as I want them is awesome. I think this game has hit an excellent balance of allowing players who want to optimize to do so, but not making it so critical that you can't succeed without optimizing. I sympathize with the players who don't want to spend the time to optimize, but who can't stand the thought that they are not optimizing; but ultimately that's going to be a pretty narrow subset. Casual players won't touch the wheel at all, and the hard core will enjoy the level of control they are afforded.
I cannot wait until governors are added. Not that I don't like the wheel, but for my planets, I would rather have governors do their thing and I'll tweak the global settings as needed.
If they just added a checkbox for "Reroute 100% social manufacture when not producing a project" (with an easier and/or fancier name), I would be satisfied. Put your planets on 100% manu/research/wealth the moment you decide how to specialize them, and don't touch the wheel again unless in emergencies (or in the case of micro'ing production overflow).
Right now, there is way too much useless micro that could easily be avoided by a solution as simple as the one above.
And anyone arguing "just don't specialize" are out of their minds. The way the game is set up, specialization is a no brainer.. if I have 10 raw production, 800% bonuses from my massive network of adjacencies to research and only 20% to manufacture/wealth.. I can either set my slider on 100% research and get 0/80/0 research, or 33/33/33 and get 4/26/4
80 vs 34. It's simple math. And the game allows far, far higher multipliers than 800% in a proper specialized planet.
Edit: Call it "Maximize planet developement", would be my humble suggestion
I agree, no game can be everything to everybody. Some things may be mutually exclusive, others might not be. Right now, I would argue that the game is not at catered towards players that want to optimize since there is no way for the AI to keep up. They do not utilize planet specialization anywhere near it's full potential. What is the point of an immense galaxy if you are orders of magnitude more powerful than your opponents by the time they are revealed on the map? There are easier difficulties for those that just want to steamroll. Many types of optimizations can be streamlined or managed in a less microintensive way. For example, through governors with simple conditional behavior. If the AI can use them, all the better. As things stand, I wouldn't mind seeing the removal of planetary level sliders completely. From my point of view, placing all the current buildings types plus considering adjacency bonuses would provide a reasonable level of micromanagement and specalization, but I suspect such a major change is unlikely and will probably offend as about the same number of people as removing it would please. Therefore, I hope that the governor system will be able to cater towards both types of players.
Keep in mind production is never wasted, it is stored. You can find it in the completely idiotically (argument A) hidden tooltip by hovering over the production area. Note that if the production area has a full queue you can't see the tooltip. See argument A for how smart this is. Also keep in mind that if you have stored production, and enough production per turn to finish a project in 1 turn, but without the stored production it takes more than 1 turn, it will incorrectly show that it will take more than one turn. Because: Argument A.
It does. It's in the XML ai files. It shows the AI plans for each faction in different phases of the game and shows how the econ sliders are adjusted. Unless I am totally imagining this, but I am pretty sure I saw that when I poked around fixing the AI not researching logistics.
I had this thought as well (EG. leave production at 10 or 15% even on science/wealth planets, then when you research an upgrade they will be built instantly from leftover production. The problem with this approach is that the projects seem to soak up as much production as you have available (rate seems to be about 10 manufacture = 10% bonus), which makes it not work since the planet queue cannot be empty....
Even if it did work, you are giving up a lot of science by not putting the slider on 100%. Even if you get the upgrades quicker, the upgraded buildings are not so strong that its worth losing.
In fact, many of the science buildings can take 100 turns of more to pay for themselves due to the lost science.
Yes, the AI use the slider but only the EMPIRE wide slider, not for individual planet...at least not as of the last beta when I investigated the matter. If you looked at the AI at any particular point in time every world was using the same distribution of its production.
This might eventually change but so far it is not using individual planet focusing strategies.
This is the reason why I don't use individual planet focus in my current games either. First of all it is really tedious and it just make the game too easy and for me that becomes boring fast.
If they implement some useful feature that relieve the player from the horrible micro and the AI start using it as well, then I will use it also.
Does anyone if this a bug or WAD? The turn-production overflow problem has been mentioned in the dev stream multiple times but the issue never gets repaired.
It would be nice to easily see exactly what your manufacturing, research, and ship construction overflow was, as well as the exact numbers for completed/total (22.6/30 or whatever).
The AI certainly does use the sliders, in fact it's always fiddling with the sliders based on what it needs right this second.
Another feature that was supposed to be in Beta, but didn't make release. Likely will be a patch.
I also am anxious to see the governors. I certainly expect to use them but I don't have high expectations and they will probably be a source of great controversy on this forum.
In other games I have played with governors they govern quite differently from what I would do and in those games there was no adjacency bonuses. The governor I remember most was in SMAC. I used them a lot but with major restrictions that only allowed certain things and no military at all.
As for the micro, it's fine with me for the first couple of hours I am playing. When I get sick of building improvements and using the slider, I know it is time to stop playing for a while.
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