With GalCiv III v1.4, we’ve removed the per planet production wheel. You can read more about that here.
This has sparked a lively debate on just how much control a player should have on their economy.
Planet Specialization
Planets in Galactic Civilizations III can be specialized much more than in previous versions. An industrial world, through adjacencies, can result in massive bonus manufacturing. However, on top of that, players can direct their citizens to work more in those factories via the global production wheel (and previously the local production wheel).
So let’s talk about what that actually means.
Command Economies
By default, your citizens work at whatever jobs are available on your planets.
If you live in the West (USA, Europe, Japan, etc.) you are free to choose the job you want.
By default, your citizens work the jobs they want.
Earth in 2251. M:23, R:15, W:9: Total of 47
So in this model, Earth is producing 23.7 quadrillion tons of manufactured goods, 15.1 units of research, and is generating taxable income of 8.7T credits (for GalCiv III we’ve gotten rid of the units of measurement).
However, new to GalCiv III is the concept of being able to FORCE people to work certain jobs. That is, I can draft people to go work in the factories or in the labs or raise their taxes:
Through the production wheel, I can make people to work in the factories, raise their taxes or help out in the labs.
In every previous GalCiv, if you raised taxes, there was a corresponding morale penalty. We don’t have that here because it was decided it was too convoluted to have it just for taxes. However, what we really should have considered is that it’s not that people hate taxes per se, they had COERCION. They don’t like their government controlling their activity. If my taxes are 50%, for instance, that means 50% of the time I’m working FOR the government.
When I move my wheel to 100% manufacturing I’m conscripting my citizens to work in the factory and I get a corresponding boost to manufacturing:
Now, I get 70.8, 0, –3.6. You’ll note that this number if much MUCH higher. Total: 67.
Note that in this example, my morale is still 78%. In GalCiv II, if you raised your taxes to 100%, your morale would plummet unless you invested heavily into things to keep them happy. But in GalCiv III, there’s no penalty at all for setting manufacturing to 100%.
I understand why people like the production wheel
Imagine if in GalCIv II we let people set their taxes to 100% and there was no downside to this. Now, imagine if we put out GalCiv II v1.4 and we made it so you couldn’t change taxes. People would have been ticked off. Understandably. But I hope also that people would understand that such a system is broken. There’s no such thing a a free lunch.
Ending the Free Lunch
I’ve had a lot of time to think about the production wheel. By reading the forums, at length, I’ve gotten a much better idea of what the issue really is. It’s the free lunch aspect of the production wheel I don’t like. In the real world, command economies don’t do well against free markets in the long-run. But in GalCiv III, they’re absolutely the way to go. The problem ISN’T the wheel on its own (I don’t like the micro management but I have no issue with people voluntarily choosing to play that way). The problem is that you get to coerce people without any downside.
How I’d like to solve this
First, the Terran Alliance won’t support the command economy. That is, you won’t be able to set tax policy on a per planet basis as the Terran Alliance. However, a new racial trait called “Command Economy” can be added that will be part of the Yor. The Yor aren’t mindless robots but unlike humans, they can be micro-managed in ways that humans can’t.
Second, we will introduce the concept of COERCION into the system.
How Coercion would work
Let’s say your planet is producing 11 units of goods and services (as seen in the screenshot below).
What coercion would do is that for every point above 33 your maximum focus is, you’d diminish those goods by a percent.
Example: Let’s say I set Manufacturing to 100%. That’s 67% above the 33% natural rate. Your goods and services would then be multiplied by (1 – 0.67). Thus, I would suddenly only get 4 goods and services and I would thus take an overall production penalty. In this example, instead of getting 70.8 manufacturing I’d only get around 50 and my planet’s population would grow slower. But it’s still massively above the 23 that is the default.
Right now, your approval is based on the goods you provide per citizen.
Random example explaining coercion.
How the UI would communicate this
Similarly, civilizations with a command economy could set it on a per planet basis but it would work the same, you could just micro it on a per planet basis if you wanted.
NOW, let’s talk about the future
Eventually, GalCiv III is going to have a bunch of different types of governments to choose from. The reason the Economy tab is done the way it is is because it’s been designed with the idea that eventually the type of government you have will determine what shows up in that tab. So one type of government might have a bunch of sliders, another might have almost no controls, another might have players choosing a series of subsidy policies and so on. For now, we just have the production wheel. But it’s never been intended to be the end-all be all.
So when?
I’d like to see this change put into 1.5 or sooner. It’ll take a little balancing to make sure pacing isn’t hosed. But ultimately, it will result in a much more balanced, less…arbitrary economy and allow us to justify more types of planetary improvements, super projects and other goodies that offset this.
Oh, and we can get rid of the large empire penalty too since it won’t be needed under this system.
I really don't mind the changes overall. I get why they were made and I even support them.
However, I really don't like that even when I make a planet focus on production, and build up factories, I still can't make that planet focus its manufacturing more on Military rather than Social production. I can only set that globally, and honestly that doesn't make much sense to me. Once that planet has filled out its tiles, I can't make it focus its production efforts towards a shipyard. I have to pick an ongoing project instead like research or money.
At the very least, add another ongoing project that sends a portion of social manufacturing to military.
Thankyou for laying out the vision. You've sold me.
In a purely free-market economy, governments tax and spend, make regulations, and raise armies. That's generally about it. They don't build anything. They don't invent anything. They do not populate new territory.
Every race in Gal Civ is very very similar in that compared to real nations in the real world in real history, they are all on the extreme totalitarian end of the spectrum: communistic...or really, feudal. The Lord of the Manor decides how many of his peasants shall work the fields, and how many shall toil in the shipyards. The lord directs when large masses of peasants shall migrate, and where to. If the lord so commands, every man, woman and child from one planet shall be conscripted into the army one week, and deployed on the battlefront the next.
Oh, Gal Civ races have different model coefficients here and different ship doodads there. But really, every single one of them operates pretty much like the same extreme stereotype of a communist state or feudal manor or ant colony.
Which is fine. Its a game.
But clearly, Frogboy has ambitions to make a more "realistic" simulation with respect to free market economies. This is exciting!
In a society where individuals have free will, and collectively comprise a free market, people and Groups of People consume and produce.
They trade with each other and the governments according to the laws of supply and demand. The government's scrip is worth what the free market says it is. There are rates of exchange and rates of inflation for all currencies, and market prices for all goods and services. Where there are "official" rates and prices, there is also a black market.
There is debt, and there are rates of interest.
There are tax rates. Tax brackets. Tax regulations. etc.
When a government needs to wage a war, technology, production, and regiments can and must be provided by people and Groups of People.
Sometimes, government institutions can direct and conduct technological research. But in a society with a healthy economy, for every Manhattan Project, there is at least one Turbinia.
Twelve men walked on the moon. They got there in ships built by the lowest bidder.
People don't all work for the government. Even the ones that do work for the government generally don't live at the government factory or the government lab or the government farm. Some land is privately held and developed and occupied by homes and businesses large and small. There are civic institutions that, while governmental, are not directly managed by the sovereign.
People don't work for money. They work for (among other things) the things they buy with money. The government factories and farms generally suck at providing such things. That is where private enterprise comes in. Your ability to keep your population happy, to raise sufficient revenue through taxation, to maintain a favorable balance of trade with your competitors, depends heavily on the 50% - 99% of your economy over which you have no direct control.
Unless otherwise coerced, people and Groups of People migrate freely as they so choose, carried in star ships designed, built, and operated by people and Groups of People. Unless otherwise incentivized, they establish their homes, their civic institutions, and their private enterprises on planet surfaces (or in space colonies) as they see fit. If and when a sovereign government arrives on the scene, they can welcome it or resist. They can voluntarily cede space for the sovereign's installations, or they can have such space taken by eminent domain or some other manifestation of threat of violence.
So you are going to set forth the task of simulating all of this and more? In a game that is fun to play? Against an AI that puts up a good fight? Awesome! I can't wait to see how it turns out.
But please don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Please make all of the flavors of economic simulation race-specific. Please leave in communist/feudalist/insectoid races with production wheels for the micromanagers.
But...how do you balance a free-will race vs a collectivist race?
Maybe you don't have to?
If a player needs to have a game with perfectly-balanced races, they can choose to include all free-will races or all collectivist races when they launch their game. Only if they draw races of two different types will they have to accept the possibility of a major imbalance.
You're going at this from the wrong angle.
The production doesn't need to fit the cost.
The Cost must be based on the production.
What does this mean? Well, when it is possible to get 2'000 from a single research planet and you want master tech X to be researchable in no less than 10 turns, then tech X would have to cost 20'000 Research points.
There could also be a dynamical system that increases research cost for tech based on number of colonies, due to decentralization of research and increased need for communication.
For example, Tech X costs 20'000 base and another 1'000 for every Planet in the empire.
The same production.
Balance the cost against the possible production, not the production against the cost. Otherwise you are doing a futile effort that will only end in unreasonable results, as it already has.
Unless otherwise coerced, people and Groups of People migrate freely as they so choose, carried in star ships designed, built, and operated by people and Groups of People. Unless otherwise incentivized, they establish their homes, their civic institutions, and their private enterprises on planet surfaces (or in space colonies) as they see fit. If and when a sovereign government arrives on the scene, they can welcome it or resist. They can voluntarily cede space for the sovereign's installations, or they can have such space taken by eminent domain or some other manifestation of threat of violence.So you are going to set forth the task of simulating all of this and more? In a game that is fun to play? Against an AI that puts up a good fight? Awesome! I can't wait to see how it turns out.But please don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Please make all of the flavors of economic simulation race-specific. Please leave in communist/feudalist/insectoid races with production wheels for the micromanagers.But...how do you balance a free-will race vs a collectivist race?Maybe you don't have to?If a player needs to have a game with perfectly-balanced races, they can choose to include all free-will races or all collectivist races when they launch their game. Only if they draw races of two different types will they have to accept the possibility of a major imbalance.
I have been saying the same thing before, but people seem to understand the customization options of this game less than anything else in the game.
Also, we should make a fundraiser, so that Frogboy can take a few classes... like economics 101, Philosophy 101, Gamedesign 101 etc. I am sure the series would benefit from it by the time GalCiv 5 is released.
Did I just read a post on game mechanics or a love letter to Ayn Rand?
Quoting Dracul_JOSHI,
Well, you don't need to chip in if you don't want Frogboy to be able to get some additional education to make his games even better.
...
In examining the discussion on this thread and the various ideas you've had Brad, I think perhaps the problem isn't the wheel or lack thereof, it's the concept of raw production controlled at an empire level. Based on the concepts that you were postulating with the ideas of coercion and governmental systems. I think an economic system that might fit your desires better would be to look at planets through an employment lens. Rather then population converting a raw production stat which then has the wheel or basic formula applied to it, what if population was just that, the amount of people that were willing/able to work? Rather then buildings providing a bonus to the production formula, they would provide a certain number of employment opportunities.
Ex: Factory (employs up to x population to produce 3x production units, etc.) Adjacency bonuses could be applied to the production output, along with racial, researched, starbase bonuses and the like. Advanced buildings could offer a better ratio, or higher employment capacity (or maybe have research specialty effect it... hmm... more choices This would make population a bit more tangible then it is currently, since your population would literally define the upper bounds of a given planet's productivity. Approval would determine how many of the total populace are employable workers (disgruntled folks have less incentive to get out there and help their fellow man/robot/evillizardthing). Underemployment could also be a thing in this setup.The concept of coercion could still be applied on a empire level but examining not how far you've pushed the wheel from center (33/33/33) but instead on the total employment opportunities available in the empire (penalty to kick in if you don't have y% employment opportunities in each of the various fields (industrial/research/finance/entertainment/health/culture)) The weighting of the various fields could definitely serve as flavor for the races as well, helping to reinforce their existing play patterns....
Makes sense to me. Everything boils down to three variables:
1. your structure's characteristics (max output and number of employees needed to function properly). Your factory produces 100 when employing 100 pop: you have 50 workers, the output is 50, but if you send 1000 in, it still produces 100 because that is how much it can pump out. Want to produce more? build a second factory or upgrade the existing
2. your workforce count
3. your choice ("the wheel"), as long as you can offer enough jobs for the available workforce (e.g. 2 factories and 1 lab can employ 300 total ppl; if you only have 200 pop available, you can set the wheel to 100% prod to have your factories at 100% output but have to shut down the lab)
Players can still specialize their worlds, use adjaciencies and micromanage as they like, while output is kept under control by the supply/demand balance. And those who dislike the wheel could just build the structures and set the wheel to "best fit"
Any flaws in this?
There already is one, it's unlocked after researching Orbital Manufacturing.
People who work in creative industries accidentally channel Ayn Rand pretty often when they talk about their work. I did see a little bit of Howard Roark when Frogboy made posts defending the decision to remove the wheel. However in the game's ideology feature greed is in the evil section. That isn't very Ayn Rand like.
It wasn't an accident. Brad is a strong and vocal supporter of Ayn Rand ideas.
Fair enough, I get the point your trying to get across Frogboy. From what you're saying it seems that there seem to be struggles with the scaling of big games - naturally my empire of 70ish planets will produce 10x as much as some civ on a smaller map. I'm just a little bit surprised to hear that these numbers are considered so game-breaking...
I'm by no means an expert or veteran player, and have easily reached the 1500 research per planet per turn level in my latest game. Total research output of my civilization was a tad shy of 30k/turn (and there is not really a point to up it much more after that).
Personally I don't see this as much of a problem - my game is in latest stages and I essentially control 50% of a huge galaxy. To be honest I really had expected to actually max out the tech tree a lot sooner - if I were pushing toward a quick victory I'd have finished the game long ago while most of my tech branches hadn't even reached the Age of Ascension levels.
No, it's not. Increasing the tax rate increases income but does not necessarily impact spending (and increasing income certainly doesn't necessarily result in reducing expenditures), whereas increasing the wealth setting on the wheel directly cuts spending. If Planet X has 12 rubber ducks worth of income and I set the sliders to the default positions, I build 4 rubber ducks worth of stuff, develop 4 rubber ducks worth of stuff, and put 4 rubber ducks worth of money into the treasury (or spend it on maintenance, etc). If I change the wealth setting to 100%, then I get 12 rubber ducks worth of money going to the treasury, but not one rubber duck worth of manufacturing or research. Nor, for that matter, has the total potential income changed; I had 12 rubber ducks worth of income when the wheel was set to the default position, and I have 12 rubber ducks worth of income when the wheel is set to 100% wealth. What the wealth setting on the wheel represents is how much income goes to the treasury, not what the tax rate is.
It's true that the total output of the planet varies depending on what the slider settings are, but this is easily understood as a function of a variable production cost; it costs more to generate 10 units of manufacturing on a planet that has no factories than it does to generate 10 units of manufacturing on a planet that has nothing but factories. Planets which generate more income per capita have higher production costs because the planet's citizens, being on average wealthier than normal, expect to be paid enough to maintain their standard of living; thus, it's more expensive to generate 10 units of manufacturing on a market world than it is to generate the same 10 units of manufacturing on a research world.
Furthermore, it should not be assumed, as your view of the production wheel would imply, that increasing tax rates will necessarily directly reduce output in the very simple manner shown on the wheel. The wheel models spending allocation reasonably well, and it might perhaps contain an abstracted-out tax rate, but if the wheel does model a tax rate at all, said tax rate does not map cleanly to the wealth fraction set on the wheel.
Also, regarding the command vs free market economy thing, I don't really see it as being applicable. The only planet improvements in the game which are not paid for, owned, operated, and maintained by the state are the trade goods and the colony or civilization capitals (and these only fail the "paid for" criterion). If planetary improvements represent the sum total of infrastructure, public and private, on a given world, then there is no room for a truly free market economy within the game. The fact that you can rush production and the mechanics used for that process, however, imply the existence of a private sector economy which is invisible to the player and whose production costs are largely unaffected by the state-owned and -operated infrastructure built upon a planet. Rushing production costs exactly the same amount per unit of manufacturing generated regardless of whether you require merely 10% more manufacturing output from your infrastructure or 10,000% more output from your infrastructure; this implies that whatever infrastructure is used for generating the rushed manufacturing points, it's not the same infrastructure that is used to generate manufacturing points normally. Furthermore, the manufacturing points generated basically appear out of thin air; a location which can produce only ~10 manufacturing point normally can generate orders of magnitude more manufacturing if I rush production, and while stopping work on private projects and working overtime on the state project might help explain it, it also has the issue of why exactly the state-owned, state-operated factories are being used to manufacture goods for the supposedly-free market, and also why the output that is going towards, say, lipstick can so easily be diverted into, say, a new superdreadnought.
I am not opposed to changing the production mechanics so that wheel settings negatively impact output the more skewed they are, but I feel that your interpretation of the wheel, which is most of what you're using to justify adding a new mechanic despite the real reason for the change being game balance, does not make sense.
This, really.
Are we also supposed to believe that a futuristic planet with umpteen billion people can only produce one thing a week, too? Big portions of the game only really make sense if there's an abstracted, thriving private sector, and the wheel is just representative of discretionary government spending. Production represents the tax income, not the work of every living being on the planet.
This is why approval impacts on production; at low approval levels, I get less production not because people are refusing to work, but because the amount of tax I can extract from a restive population is reduced. At high approval I get extra production, not because people all suddenly decide they're happy and want to work 25% harder, but because I can get away with raising taxes further before people get discontent. It's just happening behind the scenes. The % dedicated to research or manufacturing is money spent by the government on those things. The % dedicated to wealth is tax surplus.
Otherwise, it doesn't matter at all if you use focuses or the wheel or whatever, because the government is STILL directing all economic activity. You can talk of Ayn Rand, or coercion, or whatever you like, but regardless it's still absolutely a command economy; the government is still directing everyone's jobs, and is just doing so less efficiently.
Farewell, Joshi.
Please, I have nothing but respect for Frogboy. If my post sounded like an invitation for ad hominem attacks against Frogboy, then I apologize. That was not what was intended.
As for the Ayn Rand comment...there is no need to inject politics into this discussion. (Unless we are talking about modeling a simulated political system as a game mechanic, which would be kinda cool.)
I made no statement of a personal preference for real-world economic systems. I made no insinuation of Frogboy's preferences.
And in discussing the issue of balancing two different in-game societies with different virtual economic systems...I did not make an assumption about which system would need to be buffed, and which would need to be nerfed.
We are just sharing ideas about what would be cool to see in video games with Frogboy. Mainly because its a hell of a lot easier for us to try and get Frogboy to make the game, that it would be for us to try and make it ourselves. And much, much more likely to actually happen than if left to our own devices.
Respect to Frogboy.
Can we at least solve the problem of the focus buttons not working in saved games? I suspect many people had games in progress during the update they can't continue except on 33/33/33, and are probably not willing to do so (like me).
The prefs.ini option would be much appreciated if possible.
Save game compatibility with updates has been and i suspect always will be a problem due primarily to great modding support. Workings of these buttons is defined in xml which are read at startup and become part of your saves
I have no problem with Frogboy's proposals and strongly agree to the "no free lunch" paradigm.
That said, the coercion concept seems a little complicated to me.
I have another suggestion that is likewise game changing, but if a coercion mechanic can be programmed in relatively fast, why not another system as well?
So:
Give every tile on a planet a property that says what can be built on it:
- a manufacturing building
- a research building
- a wealth building
- a population building
- an approval building
- an influence building
- a trade building
- a combination of two of the above (e. g. resarch or manufacturing, wealth or approval)
- anything (should be a quite rare tile)
- did I forget something?
Buildings that boost several areas can be built on any tile corresponding to one of those areas (making them automatically more powerful in this system).
Then add (researchable) projects like "transform tile to manufacturing tile" or "transform tile ro research tile" etc., even "transform tile to universal tile" what should be very expensive. Transforming a tile should also permanently destroy special tile bonuses that are no longer applicable after the transformation (e. g. +2 influence makes no sense anymore if the tile is a manufacturing tile after transformation).
That takes away some options from players because they cannot freely decide how to place buildings anymore and makes it much more difficult to use adjacency bonuses. But no free lunch, remember? Perhaps the average number of tiles per planet can be increased to counter that effect a bit, but then I think the building bonuses have to be decreased to keep the balance.
So players still have the possibility to specialize planets but it takes a lot of time and has some possible drawbacks (destroying tile bonuses).
And as far as "realism" is concerned: a game should not be forced to be "realistic". it should be forced to be fun Any game rules are abstractions, in the best case they are made in a way so that every player can interpret them to match his or her own inner picture of the game world. But I think that will not be possible all the time. But who thinks about "realism" when playing tic tac toe?
What do you think, Frogboy? Would something like this be possible?
Yes. I expect them to have a patch for that up this next week.
That's a very interesting idea. I think it would take a lot of work to implement that though.
For all of GalCiv's history (until GalCiv III) there was a morale price to be paid for moving "the sliders". That is, players were encouraged to monkey with their economy but also understood that they'd meet resisteance and (previously) have to face voters. GalCiv III is the first GalCiv where we didn't tie moving the sliders (or in this case, the wheel) t o morale.
Even in GalCiv II, if you moved the social slider, it had an impact on morale.
I take it you mean by that, more work than implementing the coercion system. But too much work to be done?
For all of GalCiv's history (until GalCiv III) there was a morale price to be paid for moving "the sliders". That is, players were encouraged to monkey with their economy but also understood that they'd meet resisteance and (previously) have to face voters. GalCiv III is the first GalCiv where we didn't tie moving the sliders (or in this case, the wheel) t o morale. Even in GalCiv II, if you moved the social slider, it had an impact on morale.
I know that, having played the game from it's beginning.
If you want to say you are missing a morale impact in my proposal then I think about one, but not today anymore, must go to bed now
I don't see how anyone who has the faintest knowledge of e.g. Ayn Rand, American Libertarianism, Laissez-Faire or Neoliberalism philosophies or economic systems along those lines can not fail to see the first post is dripping in politics it's so saturated.
I do intend to actually comment on the game mechanics mentioned in their somewhere but I felt I had to point out the obvious since I hadn't read anyone mention it.
What I'd say is that I'd like to see a lot of different economic systems put in place based on the government type players end up picking.
The coercion system is very simple.
I literally do a max() of whatever the wheel is and then multiply the goods and services of a planet by it.
The more you change it from the default, the more you pay a morale price. But players can adapt that by building things on planets (and eventually adopting forms of government) that affect that.
In the old days, when I had fewer engineers, I'd just have capped production on the planet and called it a day.
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