For example, the simple change of increasing research costs and adjusting LEP so that it is -0.2 MONEY per planet instead of -0.2 Morale per planet makes a HUGE difference in the expansion phase.
With 50 colonies, almost a third (or more) of my colonies have to be Money Generating Colonies to keep up with maintenance, meaning that only about 35 colonies are actually productive in terms of research and manufacturing. And this is with Thalan Tech and Hives on every planet. It also makes it pretty much impossible to expand for a while beyond that because new colonies will cost so much maintenance that they're a big net LOSS.
Naselus's adjustments work.
As a result, the game becomes MUCH more fun when it comes to managing economy. Finding the right balance becomes an art. The game is no longer linear and one-dimensional (spam as many colony ships, then spam constructors and starbases). The constraint of running out of money makes the game a lot more FUN.
Furthermore, this NEW LEP SYSTEM won't affect people who play on smaller maps. With fewer planets, the LEP is no big deal. It's only for the hard core fans, the ones that want to play with massive empires that it becomes a big deal.
Once again, I believe the developers should take a look at Naselus's mods and make some of his ideas OFFICIAL.
I didn't touch research costs. Techs simply seem more expensive because you've got about 30% less research.
Also, I believe the devs did mention that they intend to make money more relevant once the AI can handle it; it's present meaningless state is largely to avoid AI's bankrupting themselves.
Oh. Well then. That would explain a lot.
Research costs SHOULD be higher for larger maps, I think.
Agreed on this. Economic tweaks to make you have to actually work to maintain a large empire - rather than it being inherently superior by default - are simply better.
Also, I don't think research cost scales with map size but it definitely should.
Economy is not scaled, as tourism is in no way affected by approval on a per planet basis....which it obviously should be. Watch expansionist players' tourism income grind to a halt with 0% approval, or when at war, or both.
Many ways to skin this cat. But until they have numerous individual and separate LEP types of penalities, approval remains the best generic method to affect all facets (except tourism at this time). If they increased the LEP penalty, modified tourism to take approval into consideration , the effects would better IMO. Large empires are INEFFCIENT in all areas, as all are large entities.
But tourism is largely irrelevant tbh. Cash is too plentiful even without tourism income - as I say, when I started my first game of GC3, I was building what felt like the 'right' amount of cash planets - about a third of my empire. I quickly realized that actually, if you use adjacency bonuses and a decent-size population, you only need 1 or 2 cash planets for every 10-20 normal ones. You simply don't need money for much. This is probably why rush-buy and upgrade costs are so obscenely extortionate, too - because there's next to nothing else to spend all the money on. Paul did indicate in one of the webcasts that money was only easy atm because the AI couldn't handle it properly yet.
Approval doesn't remain the best method at all tbh. It's a very poor method indeed, for reasons I've outlined elsewhere on this forum in fairly exhaustive detail. Increasing LEP is a disastrous idea, since the central concept of the stacking additive modifier is incapable of scaling effectively (as well as being hopelessly arbitrary); making low approval hurt more would be a better approach but will always punish very populous planets more than it punishes very large empires, because the divide-by-pop effect will always be more painful than a stacking additive.
Moreover, approval-based LEP will ALWAYS eventually hit a softcap and become irrelevant, because no matter how big or small you make it, there is always a number of planets where it will become uneconomical to put any planet over 0 approval, and so you just may as well not bother at all. This is presently somewhere around 20 planets; beyond that point, you need to build so many approval buildings to break even that other buildings are better. If you increase LEP, that just makes the point where building any approval buildings becomes worthless come quicker. Making approval hit harder makes it come later - but also completely screws players with few planets who need to build up large populations to remain competitive. It thus does nothing to discourage expansion, since it's punishing the few-planet players more than the expansionists. This is a key feature of the mechanic; it is integral. The only way to break it is to change the way morale works on 'tall' planets completely... where upon, approval can be balanced around wide play.
Approval is great for one thing - limiting how much pop you can stuff onto a single planet. Just let it do that and find a different mechanic for limiting spam-colonization. I've used money, since it's not doing much else right now (aside from actively discouraging building up your planets) and it's a tried-and-proven method. Civ 4 used it, and 4X aficionados generally regarded as the best 4X title in terms of mechanics; it was by far the most effective way of balancing 'tall' and 'wide' play, to the point where One City Challenge was a genuinely fun game to play. Can you imagine 'One Planet Challenge' working in GC3?
If LEP was based on percentage of colonisable planets in the entire galaxy controlled instead of number of planets controlled it would work much better. Of course negetive approval actually has to matter enough too. But neither of those is inherently difficult or hard. It's all about how you set it up.
It would scale much better. It wouldn't work much better though. You'd still be incentivised to expand as rapidly as possible, and then arbitrarily punished beyond a certain point - this just changes when the mechanical problem kicks in, rather than solving the mechanical problem itself.
While neither are hard to implement, they are inherently hard to balance. Approval cannot wear two hats.
Increasing the power of negative approval actually encourages expansion. The hardest reduction in approval comes from the point where it is divided by population. That will always be harder on 'tall' empires than 'wide' ones, because you get 'free' approval from the colony base - which means more total population without needing approval buildings, which means more free production. It's easier to keep 100% approval with any given population size over 3 on multiple worlds than on one world, even with LEP:
4 pop on 1 world = 70% approval
4 pop on 2 worlds = 100% approval.
4 pop on 3 worlds = 100% approval.
4 pop on 4 worlds = 100% approval.
5 pop on 1 world = 56% approval.
5 pop on 2 worlds = 100% approval.
5 pop on 3 worlds = 100% approval.
5 pop on 4 worlds = 100% approval.
6 pop on 1 world = 47% approval
6 pop on 2 worlds = 87% approval
6 pop on 3 worlds = 100% approval
6 pop on 4 worlds = 100% approval.
7 pop on 1 planet = 40% approval
7 pop on 2 planets = 74% approval
7 pop on 3 planets = 100% approval.
7 pop on 4 planets = 100% approval
I think you get the picture. THIS is why approval is a poor choice of mechanic for limiting big empires, as long as it is also being used as a brake on the development of individual planets. The problem with Gal Civ presently is that there's lots of limiters on upward development (maintenance, approval, the fact you actually have to wait around for it to grow), there's almost none on outwards-development, and the few that exist actually punish 'tall' empires more.
Civ IV got it right and used MONEY to limit expansions.
GCIII should follow in that path.
For perspective, economy was the big problem for the AI in GC2. It would spend itself into the ground and couldn't figure out how to lift itself back up. It would try to fill every available space with more buildings but it didn't have the income to support it. I suppose it's a similar issue with GC3's current AI. I'm sure it will get upgraded as the game continues to improve. It's already on the radar.
The steam thread replies from Brad (as posted by Rhonin, http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/617336568065171463/#p1) seem to suggest that he believes tourism is a bit OP, and its a bit too easy to have enough money in the game. Having not mentioned any change to LEP, I am assuming they will simply nerf economics as I suggested above. Adding economic penalties as done with Naselus' mod can achieve nearly the same thing with the exception that it only penalizes economy, however approval in principal affects nearly everything (except tourism currently), and therefore I continue to believe approval is the proper long term solution (that approval curve may need tweaking if it still doesnt have the intended effect).
One interesting comment on LEP, he did say that his vision was to have even more buffs down the road for resource use, including to have Promethean Pleasure park to completely eliminate LEP on a specific planet. I've been pretty much ignoring resources my last few games except for Elurium (I like beams), so it would be interesting to see what other uses they come up with. I'd like to see them have it such that its very necessary to take control and mine resources from enemy starbases, to help continue your campaign. As of now, it seems you just ignore enemy resources and blow through their empire. It would certainly make that mid game more challenging IMO.
@Naselus - Good description showing approval vs. planets vs. equal pop - but doesnt this prove that LEP should be larger, to further penalize your 4 planet scenario to make it more competitive with the 1 planet scenario? Changes in 1.1 IMO certainly break tall vs wide, 4x 1 pop worlds is exactly the same pop:prod efficiency as a single 4 pop world. If we went back to 1.03 rules, pop is most efficient at 10 pop, and if the tall empire grows beyond 10, wide empires win. Eventually, wide empires should win in the long run - that peak efficiency I think is used to help balance tall vs wide, as well as the current LEP system. Maybe the peak efficiency should be higher than 10, or just change it to a simple diminishing returns method, where the break point is more dependent on the buildings and techs you have.
Another space conquest game I play (Stardrive 2) has a penalty for reserch point production as ones empire gets bigger due to "complication in communication between planets" or some such thing.
It works well and also allows for the potentual to have techs/abilities/alignment perks etc. to offset the penalty.
Coloney developments or starbase moduals could help (Envisage a ghost world and its normal (but research specalised) companion LYs from your main empire with a string of research booster stations keeping that penalty down).
But approval will always have hard-caps on the top and bottom. Once you reach a certain stage, these hard caps mean that any number of planets over X will always start with such a large negative penalty to morale that they cannot be brought to positive approval without an extreme cost in land. This makes all future planets 'free', i nthat you already cannot afford to build enough approval buildings for it to matter - so LEP ceases to matter at all. Furthermore, they cannot actually make approval turn production negative; it just causes a -% effect to base production (the other effects are largely meaningless, since resistance is useless anyway, growth is such a small number that penalties are ineffectual, and influence is handled entirely separately from the other stats). It's the combination of the soft-cap effect and the approval penalties ultimately being more restrictive to 'tall' rather than 'wide' empires (which it always will be) that makes approval fail.
The big advantages of using maintenance instead are that a) it effects wide more than tall - tall empires never pay maintenance per planet than wide in the mod, since buildings are free and per-planet cost is calculated based on total number of planets, and it can make taking a bad planet into a net loss for the empire. You have to pay to support it until it develops, when it becomes useful. Approval-based LEP means the planet is still a net increase in empire productivity from the get-go.
I agree completely - I want to see resources much more important. Currently the mod uses durantium for larger hull sizes; this means that acquiring durantium is pretty important; I did want to make the other resources do the same sort of thing (so elerium for all higher-level beams etc) but it's going to take a lot of AI blueprint edits to make this work properly.
You could just increase the stack on LEP... but this just pushes the limit up a bit, rather than solving the problem. Moreover, it just makes you reach the point where you may as well not bother sooner - if LEP is set to 0.5 per planet, then after 6 worlds my colony hub is cancelled out, and for every 12 worlds beyond that I need another stadium per planet to cancel it out again.
Paradoxically, this makes entertainment buildings less valuable the higher you make the negative effect, since the more of them you need to reach 0 approval, the less effective each one is compared to the other buildings you might go for instead. If we have LEP at 1, then by the time you have 20 planets each one need 3 stadiums just to get to 15% approval (before adding farms) - so 3 buildings to gain 5% production points. This is absolute garbage compared to other possible choices. That's the funny thing, really; 0.2 LEP is not a bad number for the mechanic; any lower would be too small to impact on most games, and any larger would make approval buildings worthless in larger maps. The problem is the mechanic itself, rather than the number it's set to.
Personally I'd get rid of the LEP altogether as I want to play insane maps with abundant like I did in GC2 but the LEP kills your morale to the point your not even gonna get anywhere near the empire size (planet wise) of GC2 and that is really starting to turn me off of GC3 and since I have GC2 on steam and disc if GC3 falls flat I'll go back to playing 2 and just designing ships for 3.
I'm not staying approval is working well in its current condition. Some fundamental changes I see needed:
.Approval needs to affect tourism income (fair and realistic)
.Approval curve needs to be designed to harshly affect the "I'll just always ignore approval" scenario. -50%, -75%, -200%? I think people would then care to stay out of the low end (sad). The opposite can be done for the high end, +50%?.
.The pop:prod curve needs to be logarithmic to greatly diminish returns at ridiculously high pop. The current 2*x^0.7 formula just doesnt flatten off well enough IMO. The current v1.1 "straight line" of 1 pop = 1 prod, I think is simply ludicrous.
More approval buildings per colony needed to counter LEP, means that each colony will have lower manf/research/econ/growth/influence/resistance ability, due to the loss of tile(s). Approval affects all of these attributes as well. Without redesigning the approval curve, yes I get it, there are plenty of scenarios where running 0% approval or no approval buildings would be better than addressing it. There will always be breakpoints to find the optimal config, but I dont think its the spirit of the game where that optimal config means zero approval buildings...ever (except up to a certain pop level which would consider a colony in an "infancy stage", giving it time to build a few buildings prior to its first approval building).
Tourism is what is keeping planets in the black economically for a VERY VERY LONG time. As stated by Brad, its OP and will be to be reworked, probably from scratch.
All of this is frankly moot until they decide to fix the approval calculation, which will multiply positive approval bonus to the positive flat bonuses, prior to subtracting the malus. This was confirmed by Paul to be a defect. Once done, LEP will have even less impact, so wider is even better. This in fact might be why they havent fixed it already, because its a trivial fix, but unfortunately exacerbates the current problem.
I certainly sympathize with that. The simple solution there is the per planet LEP needs to be scaled for map sizes AND number of races. They need to design it so you have the same types of approval adjustment decisions in all phases of a game, on different map sizes.
But frankly, the AI plays by the same rules as you, so I dont see where the problem is. As it is now, yes, approval behaves VERY differently based on map size. Your planets may have to operate at less than ideal efficiency, but so does the AI.
Just needs a slight redesign.
Remove LEP. Heavily increase maintenance, and maybe add some sort of tech penalty or even production penalty.
Sharpen the approval stick and re balance the values. Keep prod - population 1:1, and then use a smooth approval curve to regulate.
ie, if you want to have a 80 pop planet, you better have a ton of both food, and approval.
to regulate overpopulated planets (pop > food cap), just add a severe approval penalty.
Also they realllly need to nerf the ancient trait. The raw research points provided by crystals is downright insane. My current game has 50ish planets, each pumping 100 research while having research set to 0 on each! just player-wide techs and crystals and relics.
On the last two streams Paul said that Research was going to scale with number of planets with the type of maps. HE also mentioned that he was gong to look and see if LEP would benefit from this as well.
All of this has come ful circle. GCII limited the early game by stunting your growth via economy. I had hundreds of games where I ran into a wall, NO research, NO colony ships no colony pop growth all because the treasury was empty. I had to literally click the turn button 20+ times just to get the game moving again. To say it was a pain in the ass is being nice.
@naselus: Been busy in the other thread obviously so not had time to get back to you here.
Your examples are a great example of exactly what the kind of affect i talked about would prevent, assuming it was implemented correctly. Spread it across twice as many planet and you get the same approval as if you where on one because of the swing in LEP modifier. I didn't go into too many details in the first post because i'd really need to sit down with a couple of spreadsheets for a couple of weeks to work out the specifics.
Ah, but simply increasing the approval penalty hurts tall empires more again (as does the flattening off of food, btw). Both of these effects further incentivise wide play. As I say, you cannot increase the approval penalty without hurting tall empires more (and this will go double once the LEP is 'fixed'); and you cannot increase the LEP stacking without making approval buildings become obsolete sooner. The mechanic is not fit for purpose.
Note that this entirely goes away if you remove the effect of big populations on approval. Then 'tall' empires can grow big without being punished by the approval penalty, so approval can be made more punitive, so LEP can be increased further before it obsoletes all approval. You can use food to limit talls (though since it converts directly into production points, it's not really a limit so much as the best thing in the universe), though it would seem a bit weird that people don't mind living in densely-packed squalor, but hate the idea of being in a large dominant imperial power. The issue is entirely in the attempt to use approval to do two mutually-contradictory jobs.
This is much the same as making research cost more per planet; it's ultimately an admission that using one mechanic for limiting both wide and tall doesn't really work.
EDIT: And I do agree on the linking tourism to approval thing - anything to make tourism an actual part of the game rather than a free cash bonus from having reached 3 spaces up the tech tree...
I don't know about your Tall and Wide Empires but on my last Insane game I had only 17 planets and all their pops were under 10 except for my HW which was 11 and the 18th planet I colonised approval started at 0% which made me a unhappy bunny and I had a LEP of -3.4
well, then research morale techs FFS. There is an early +4 which will solve your problems.
The general consensus appears to be that, with the exception of dansiegel, LEP with morale is fundamentally a bad idea.
There are other better ways of balancing the game. LEP with MONEY is a serious damper on massive early game expansion. I've tested it. It does it perfectly:
It provides a hard upper limit to how many planets you can colonize WITHOUT developing your worlds.
But it encourages further colonization and expansion AFTER building up some of your worlds.
Besides changing LEP to MONEY, I believe there should be inflation in the game where the LEP increases WITH TIME. The reason is your economic worlds are going build up over time and they're going to significantly increase their income to the point where maintenance becomes pointless again.
Add in increased research costs with more worlds and I believe we have a functioning multi dimensional GC 3 Economy system.
Almost NO ONE likes the LEP system with morale.
Plenty of people in other threads have stated they dont have a problem with approval, so you arent speaking for the entire GC3 community, by any means. You have your opinion, as I have mine. But I've seen the dev opinions as well, and morale based LEP is simply not going away. It was introduced to GC3, and they want to make it work. Does it need tweaking, HELL YES. Just wait to see their plan.
Until then II will use Naselus's changes because they are significantly better than the current system.
Test it out, on insane abundant/abundant with 20+ races. Try Naselus's mod. I've tried both systems so I can tell you his system is much better. Don't dismiss the other idea without testing it out first.
One of the primary advantages of Naselus's change is that it's a very simple fix that happens to have DEEP implications for the game.
I'm sure the AI changes he made have a DEEP implications as well.
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