This was a topic in today's dev stream. Some devs want to remove the per-planet production wheel, others want to make improvements. I think we can all agree that in the current game you must manage the production wheel on a per-planet basis to get the maximum production and benefit from specializing. I think everyone can also agree that micromanaging the per-planet wheel gets unwieldy after a dozen or so planets, and ridiculously time consuming, repetitive, and annoying as you get into the mid and late game. As a person who likes to specialize, I would not like to see this feature go away. I won't throw a fit if it does, but I will be a little bummed out because I consider it a great new feature for this third installment in the series. But I also don't want it to stay in its micromanagement-intensive state.
If you're going to take it away, be sure to have some way to convert between production types on a per-planet basis. This probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway for the benefit of those just walking into this discussion with no prior experience in the series. In GalCiv2 you could select a focus (social, military, or research) which did conversions with a penalty. In GalCiv3 we have projects that convert from social manufacturing to research or wealth. It's a similar function, but not quite the same. There is no military project that allows you to tell a planet to put more of its manufacturing into ships, just the slider. And there is no way to convert research or wealth into increased manufacturing (to be fair, I'm not sure this happend in GalCiv2 either). If you do go the projects route, please be sure to revisit how they work. A percentage increase based upon the amount of social manufacturing you have may not be the right answer. In GalCiv2 it was a flat percentage of manufacturing points that got converted, similar to how it worked in earlier betas.
If you do keep per-planet production settings, some in the community have already come up with some ideas that may guide you. My own ideas are here and here. Osbot essentially suggested the same concept here. Xsifilid introduced the terrific idea of "triggers" here. Our ideas basically allow the user to create production wheel templates or profiles to which he can set multiple similarly specialized planets. With some governors and/or triggers to manage automatic profile switching, it could be a very powerful tool for specializing planet production, reducing micromanagement, still requires users to make the planet management decisions, and it could also make the AI more clever with its production management.
I wish the best of luck to the devs. This is not going to be an easy battle to win, but something needs to change one way or the other.
A Suicidal difficulty Let's Players proposal...
The game needs an economy system that has little micromanagement without dumbing down or sacrificing control over your empire too much.
Suicidal players tend to devote a 100% of production in one area until that job is done. This is the best strategy, this system would enable you to do that and reduce micro.
I would use an individual planet focus system to separate production (Manufacturing*/Research/Wealth Generation) each planet has to select one but you can select two possibly three. With one selected 100 percent two 50/50 three is 33/33/33 of production is split though why you would want to select three in a system where specializing planets is the best idea I don't know. You can change the focus of a planet whenever you like. I focus my planets 100% in one area almost always currently though sometimes two e.g. I want to finish a building/ship that turn and with leftover production do research (this is an area where a good player is forced into very time consuming micro to achieve the best results**). Losing a small amount of flexibility in regards of selecting exact percentage amounts wouldn't bother me, the micromanagement currently needed per turn for lots of planets is shocking due in great part to the horrendous percentage wheel system.
**Frankly I might prefer that only one production focus be allowed per planet that would be the best way to reduce micro!!!
*Manufacturing should still be split between social and military and I'd like the per planet slider for this to stay, since not every planet makes ships the micro isn't so pronounced and ship production is a vital part of the game that a player should be giving attention to.
I actually NEVER use the global wheel in my suicidal games I think there's more reason to scrap that than a per planet system. Doing the opposite would dumb the game down too much even if it would reduce micro management... all management in fact... MOO3 and gaming hell comes to mind.
A focus system would have to be represented well in the UI. On the tactical map I would use colored icons adjacent to each planet to denote production focus (e.g. red hammer/blue flask/yellow or green dollar sign) perhaps also a colored haze/fog around the planets. The player should NOT have to enter the planet screen to set focus it should be able to be done elsewhere including the main screen right hand side planet list in addition to the planet screen. A one focus only allowed system would stand out more in regards of UI, 2 or 3 options would be harder to implement satisfactorily.
Overall I think this system shouldn't be too hard to to implement, be intuitive and familiar to players, it would reduce the micro considerably without dumbing down the game and might even be fun to play as well
If you want to see how I currently manage my economy and wreck the games AI in a very quick time check my Let's Play out below.
Macsen.
Not just the production wheel, but the entire economic system of GCII needs to be reworked to account for wealth in circulation ("maintenance"), wealth not in circulation ("savings" or "profit"), and taxes, which would come out of the latter. I've detailed this idea in another thread:
True indeed, something like GCII's economy should be implemented. But some of the changes they have made now (indexing Total Production to population, for example) are rather beneficial. I envision the system working something like this:
It may seem complex, but for the player it won't be all that difficult. It will, however, be far more interesting than the current system, especially when political parties are added that can affect the budget.
I vote for a Global Wheel over the Per Planet.
The Global Wheel would not stop planet specialization overall, because of the adjacency system. It is still best to clump buildings of the same type together.
But what it would do is make special tiles more special (I might consider putting a wealth building on a "lab planet" if the wealth bonus on the tile is good enough). But most importantly is it curbs the impact of specialization.
I couldn't make 1 wealth world that could cover all of my planets, unless I made a lot of them or dedicate enough of the global wheel to wealth....which would be a massive opportunity cost.
It would force players that focus on tech to lose on production, and vice versa. You could specialize planets, but you couldn't specialize your economy to have your cake and eat it too.
It may seem simpler...but ultimately I think its more strategic. With the current wheel, to make a lab planet, I build the labs, set the slider to 100% research...and I'm done forever. With the global wheel, I would constantly think of where to put it for my greatest need at the moment....knowing that the decision effects my entire empire.
And of course, much less fiddly bits, which I am a big fan of.
Now that i think of it, i like this idea better.
No sliders for anyone!
Every decent player would roughly split their planets buildings into a third each of manufacturing/research/wealth and often end up ignoring a lot of bonus tiles on planets and planetary bonuses rendering that part of the game near pointless.
I think the 100% percent per planet focus system I outlined in my previous post would be much more interesting and still cut down on a huge amount of micromanagement, without ripping out the soul of the adjacency specialization system. You do actually want some micromanagement, the global system only method removes most strategic choices that a player would otherwise have to make making it just a game rather than a strategy game.
i think the planetary wheel is a really redundant design element. it's an improvement over GC2 since it allows us to specialize planets, but it's also redundant because we already specialize planets by building the appropriate tile improvements - do we really need to tell the planet that is nothing but factories that it needs to shove the "raw production" (or whatever it's currently called) into manufacturing? feels really redundant. it's obviously tied to the whole raw production + percentage yield modifier buildings design and without the slider, that system doesn't really work. so the realy question is - why don't the factories, labs and markets directly produce the manufacturing/research/money output? population should be used as a penalty/bonus to the building output, not the other way round. one less layer of micromanagement with no real loss in complexity - you still decide what the planet is specialized in by building it up accordingly, but you skip the pointless micromanagement of assiging abstract base/raw production to the buildings.
I vote for CONTROL GROUPS of planets, and the current wheel as it is, but that can be adjusted for different control groups instead of for all planets or one.
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