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.
It seems to me the coercion system will penalize the player for adopting the correct strategy. That is to focus their production and specialize their planets. It's going to be a double whammy as well since it affects the bonus received from happiness.
I think this system will cause a lot of frustration for players, they won't know how to manage their economy. With the removal of the wheel that's the case already, I've had people message me asking me to create guide videos to help them out! (I make GC3 YouTube videos) I think the coercion change is much more drastic and possibly a major step in the wrong direction.
The aim of the economic system should not be to satisfy some believed philosophy or to satisfy realism. Faster than light speed, talking aliens... in a few hundred years c'mon.
It should be fun and engaging with the right amount of complexity and preferably something that doesn't throw out all the adjacency and specialization system that the game has been built around.
I don't understand the philosophy behind the change, why is the player being penalized and to what end? There was more to explain Ayn Randian philosophies in the opening post than there was to explain why this change is needed or beneficial to the game.
TBH I never like it when invisible things are at large contributing something to a game, esp. if it's a strategy game. Nevertheless, there is an understandable need to be able to do something with unused credits, as there is some need to boost up the speed of production or do ship-upgrades.
My idea for this would be that instead of a rushbuy completely finished next turn, you could buy an increase in production by 50% or 100%. The workers in the factories would simply work 24h instead of 12h/16h. Every extra production raised will cost a reasonable amount of credits. After a project is finished, the planet cannot quickbuy something (for the time of another project) because workers need to sleep, machines need off-maintenance etc.
In the same way, shipupgrades should need a shipyard and use up productivity that you'll have to pay for. More or less instant upgrades many lightyears away from the next facility is granted, handy, but doesn't require much strategic planning.
Are you sure? Guess your boys took out some of your code, then^^
***
Just wan't to say one thing: In GC2 there were alot of buildings that would run on 100% always, all
- econ, moral, popgrowth, shipsupport, tradegoods, wonders, GA
the split was merely between labs & facs. So if you played a balanced global mixed slider setting your labs & facs would run an average of 50% throughout the course of the game. Compared to other 4X games the global slider gave alot of flexibility on an empire wide level while still being able to specialize worlds in profitable manner, and it also allowed to homogenize worlds and be successfull with it. But alot of people coming from other games complained that it's illogical/unrealistic that you'd build a lab and only use 50% of its rooms/jobs on average. That's where all-lab or all-fac strat came into play.
Now in GC3 that's even a bit more aggravated because the split of capacity is between prod, res & wealth. And esp. in bigger maps where you have a lot of core/backland planets you're faced with the problem that the ships released there are too far away to be good for anything and will likely be outdated if you send them to the front, but do cost maint & also upgrade costs. Sure, you could do the obvious use all MP to build more & more starbases, but that will only delay & indeed aggravate matters in the long run.
Before, people could have backland money maker planets or strict research planets, both without any shipproduction, so there was no bother with "misplaced" fighters.
edit:
to bring the cost of buildings, ships etc in line with the overal productivity
edit2:
I like this very much because of the tradeoff distribution vs. morale that it implies. In order to specialize a planet you've got to sacrifice a few tiles to morale improvements in order to compensate the penalty. No depending on the strength of your morale improvements and the total count of available target improvements, that might proove fruitful or not. And some - or most - of these factors are not fix but can be changed via technological evolution, terraforming etc... that is, if you do it right it could mean that, as a game develops, planets can become more & more likely to become a profitable candidate for specialization.
Perhaps instead of calling it coercion a better word for it might be restriction because if you have set the production wheel(s) to 33/33/33% your population is still being coerced anyways by their government to do work in some way for it, but assuming that 33% of people would prefer to manufacture for their government rather than the other two, 33% desire to research for their government rather than the other two, and the last 33% desire to increase wealth for their government rather than the other two then everyone is happier than if all 100% of them have to, for example, manufacture for their government. The 66% who desire to do some other work for their government aren't very happy because they are being restricted to only manufacturing.
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.
I guess people are going to see what they want to see.
Is it political to describe some considerations for a hypothetical model for the behavior of virtual societies in a fictional universe such as a computer game?
Or is it political to insist that the chosen considerations can only be political?
All I was trying to illustrate is that Gal Civ's current set of races all "behave" in a very similar manner, and are not terribly complex or unique, in the grand scheme of things.
(Again...no disrespect to Frogboy. He started this all off from scratch how many years ago? How much computing power was he working with back then? And how much fun have we all had playing his games over all the years in between?)
Frogboy now aspires to implement changes such that one or more virtual races will exhibit behavior other than just involuntary mass responses to coercion.
This can be much more complex, obviously.
The current races are (or can be can be likened to) an array of coefficients for the same function.
The proposed races with more varied and complex behavior might be full-blown AIs in their own right--or possibly a constellation of multiple or even myriad AIs per race.
Under the concept I was trying to describe in my initial post, when a player plays as the sovereign of Race "A", the player is not only in competition with the AI sovereigns of races B, C, D, and so on. The player is also in coopetition with the subject AIs of his own race.
The AI sovereigns of the other races are likewise in coopetition with their own subject AIs.
Or, would the player and all AIs of all types and races all be in coopetition?
These subject AIs would not necessarily be rivals to the sovereign, capable of usurping power and managing the state--although some or all could be. They would just be Groups of People trying to get the best deal possible for themselves. (Citizenry of an entire planet, members of an organization or interest group, investors in an enterprise, industry groups, associations of people of a like mind, members of a cohort of a class in a locale, or however else you would want to break it down.)
Now this might not be the best direction to take Gal Civ. Frogboy would be able to guess or outright know better than any of us armchair quarterbacks, for sure. Maybe (probably) the smart move is to just increase the number of coefficients in that function, and call it a day.
Either way, I look forward to the outcome.
Now that we're all on the same page more or less and talking again about GC2 let me jolt your memories:
On free lunch:
Remember that in GC2 nothing was free in the sense that each point of research, production etc had a cost of 1bc. You could build planets with huge capacity for production, but you couldn't run them without the credits. That cost was extra on the running costs and building maintenance. So in GC2 pop fed taxes based on approval and taxes fed into all the rest. Buldings had no %values but hard production points. The sliders gave budget allocation: where the bc would go.
Most of the time you couldn't afford it.
In launching GC3 for the first time and taking a look around I realized that production was free! So there was no reason to worry about pop or approval, I could maximize factories and slider allocation and get huge numbers! Let's remember the early beta and the efforts to balance population production, growth and pop numbers and morale, cause back then ppl just skipped food buildings! Does this jog your memory? It is also powerful cause the bonuses from buldings accumulate and are applied over the entire population allocation. So if you have 10 factories they would affect the production of a single individual. In GC2 buildings were capacity converters: 1bc of tax would be allocated to a single point produced by the buildings. There were efficiency tech and bonuses for starbases that increased this if my menory serves me, but NOT THE ENTIRE set of production buildings on the surface like in GC3.
At the time I thought that frogboy was ok with this new design: "After all, he spent months doing the design for GC3 in his millionaire mansion" I kept saying to myself. I thought that his masterplan included this situation. Well as of 1.4 it turns out that he didn't: Too many band aids and big changes post release.
On empire expansion penalties:
With that old GC2 design, once you would colonize a planet you would start spending bc for its production based on the colony capital, but you didn't have any tax base over there so the money were coming from the other planets! So if you were colonizing like mad, you would quickly reduce spending to your other planets cause it would get you into debt very fast. Only once you had a tax base on your new planets you would resume colonization. Early openings consisted of spamming market builds with 1-2 manu worlds to make the early land grab colony ships. That was good!
Now in GC3 since all things are free, the only restriction is colony ships, hence the need for extra artificial rules. And thank you naselus for solving this with credits in your mod. In GC3 without the band aid rule for expansion penalty you expand exponentialy like a plague!
Please stop with the band aids! they don't work. Just take your time, work it out and roll a huge patch, or leave all the huge changes for the next expansion.
This. I don't understand why 33/33/33 is normal, but something else is "forcing you populating into doing something it doesn't want to do". If we look, f.e., into our current society 33% of it being into some kind of research activity is just crazy. If anything, every race should have different basic values (or intervals for values) for M\E\R based on race backstory and/or race traits (it's obvious that race with + to manufacturing have higher possible % for pop in manufacturing sector) affected by new research though the game.
This way we can have, f.e., ultra-specialized manufacturing planets - as long as our total pop in manufacturing sector don't exceed % allowed for our race or empire-wide penalties will follow.
I really "liked" explanation for wheel removal. Like: "You know, we are supposed to remove wheel long time ago so we don't code AI to use it, but we kind of forgot to do it or something...". So, a game have a placeholder instead of one of the most critical gameplay mechanic for half a year after release (plus quite some time during EA, so people can adjust to it) and it had nothing to do with AI - especially it had nothing to do with sad fact about how AI was dumb as bread in managing his colonies in 1.0-1.2 - anyone who ever captured AI planets could enjoy its glorious planet-managing. The same planet-managing AI governors use - because no-one in right mind would code different AI for player and AI building. Now AI is somewhat adequate in managing planets and it suddenly start to play much better. And we got governors instead of planetary wheel. It's just a pure coincidence it happens in the same patch.
Sounds extremely interesting!
Finally, the decision making in GCIII wil get some intrigue and important decisions will have tangible downsides.
Do not hesitate to release it as soon as possible, Frogboy
I promised yesterday to introduce a morale penalty to my suggestions above and here it is (all numbers are examples and subject to balancing):
- When having selected one of the Transform projects give the planet a 20% morale penalty while it lasts. Think of environmentalists fighting against large scale pollution stemming from the transformation.
- When the transform project is finished the 20% penalty remains at the beginning, but decreases by 10% per turn (18% penalty left after one turn, 16,2% after two turns and so one). Slowly the environmenatlists are calming down and the population gets used to the changes. But this only applies if not another transform project is started right away. Then the decrease of the penalty stops and another 20% morale penalty is applied. This will effectively limit the ablility to transform a planet in one big crunch.
- Racial traits and technology could influence the numbers depending on race.
- Transformation could also cost money. But all penalties should not be so harsh as to make transformation impractical as such.
At some point, I would just like to see the development team pick an option and stick with it. My desire to play the game right now is completely diminished knowing that in few weeks/month the whole econ system is going out again to replaced by something new. This plays hell with the rest of the balance because everything can't be fine-tuned while major changes to the entire economy are taking place.
I wasn't a big a fan of the wheel but I used it like the no-brainer 'choice' that it was...100% to whatever was that planet's specialty. I liked the the compromise with the current 'focus' system. I'm less sold on the idea of going back to the wheel, but with a 'penalty'. So now I'll still have to micromanage the wheel and now find the 'sweet spot' where I get the maximum return from fidgeting with the wheel?
I dunno, I guess at this point I'll just wait and see but honestly there comes a time to make a decision and go with it. I thought the removal the wheel was that decision but apparently now we are back-tracking again (at first it was just going to be a 'put the wheel back with an .ini file and now it's the wheel is coming back and we are changing the econ again). So 'round and 'round she goes, where it stops, nobody know!
GalCiv III will continue to evolve over the next few years. That's the nature of these kinds of games. They aren't static.
I agree with everything Frogboy has said about game balance and how economies cranking out $20k/turn or 2000 science/turn really throw it off. I'm curious to see how the whole coercion thing plays out in game. I see a deeper issue with the game economy though. I think the problem you're running into is really fundamental to the model the game is using for the population dynamics. It seems to my untrained eye like you have a macroeconomic model whose behavior is perturbed by these microeconomic parameters.
The coercion thing strikes me as like the epicycles of the Aristotelian model of the solar system. You add them to get it close to what you want to see, but it really doesn't do much by way of representing reality. YES, I understand, GC3, space ships, aliens, video game: "reality" is subjective here. But similarly, I feel like the coercion solution and determining the penalty associated and so on will be successful because it's a good guess by an expert who's been designing these games for a long time. Imagine though: would it be better if the system you put in place is successfully balanced because of emergent behavior in response to whatever decisions the player is making, instead of some arbitrary set of rules, be that a cap or, as here, coercion?
I wonder if there's a way you could model the population of a planet as a group of 10 or 100 or whatever "people" and have them influenced by the various things that would influence them... population density (inversely proportional to morale), job desire (some want to be workers, farmers, scientists, whatever), government actions (scientists are getting paid more now via the wheel or similar, so farmers might try to change careers), some kind of general competence (a planet with a hospital, a university, and a recreation facility turns out competent, mentally healthy people). You only have as many traits as you need to get the behavior that you're looking for and that makes sense from a players perspective. Then all these "people" acting as little finite state machines figure out what they're going to do each turn, and the aggregate of those FSM decisions winds up being what happens on each planet.
Or something like that. Obviously, that describes a much more complex system conceptually and computationally than the whole raw production + bonuses thing, and maybe it's not feasible to implement at this point, but maybe there's a way to model something roughly equivalent with just a set of formulas and functions.
The thing is, I think if you don't somehow address the limits of the underlying model, you're going to refight this balance issue with every new government type you add. Cf. Deferents and epicycles.
I don't buy Frogboy's ideological justification for this latest tweak to the economy of GCIII, but I think it sounds very exciting from a game-play perspective. One minor tweak that I think might make it more interesting: Give different races different default resting points and/or have the default point be effected by tech i.e.:
-Terrans default is 33/33/33, but the Drengin default is 40% man/35% research/25% econ and the Iridium default is 25% man/25% research/50% econ. This way the personality of the factions would be expressed by the interests of their population.
and/or
-Each research tech you discover moves your default point toward research, same with manufacturing and economy. Maybe influence and diplomacy allow you to move it in a direction of your choice or move a few points away from the default point without incurring a penalty. This way, your research path would help define your culture which would in turn shape the occupational interests of your population. If you race up the manufacturing tree, not only do you have better factories, but more of your people want to be engineers and manufacturers.
Here is what happened: they created an economic system that has exponential potential because adjacency is fun. But it worked too good, and now they are considering adding diminishing returns to combat that. But all they really want is to limit production. I'm going to propose something radical, but hear me out:
Let them put on a cap!
Not a rigid cap like 500 points per planet, something like a cap of 30 points per planet class (I'll call it a cap multiplier from here on). A class 10 planet cannot output more than 300 of one particular resource per turn (though cumulatively amongst the 3 resources you could get past 300). But if you get a super class 25 planet it can output 750 points of a particular resource per turn. And the reason: chalk it up to logistics / efficiency.
You still get the fun of building up your planet to maximum potential, and you still get the benefit of exponential growth up until the very late game. It's a simple system, very easy to understand.
When they develop new economic systems, the cap still applies, so ultimately the different economic systems become balanced in the late game. It's the early and middle game where the different economic systems will show their distinctiveness.
If a planet reaches the cap and there are still some tiles to build on, with the cap you are not obligated to build pure production buildings, you can play around with the other ones that you normally would just ignore. People and governors can rebuild planets that would otherwise go beyond the cap, freeing tiles for other things.
With planet caps is the large empire penalty still needed? Would love to get rid of that thing.
Make the cap multiplier moddable.
Consider allowing research to increase the cap multiplier slightly (e.g. starts at 20, upgradeable to 25 and eventually 30).
Consider race traits that provide a small bump to the cap multiplier.
Consider planet traits, galactic events, UP resolutions, and ideology bonuses that provide a small bump to the cap multiplier.
Consider a civilization unique building that bumps one planet's cap multiplier.
Dang, I'm smart!
I hate caps.
I dont either but there is a lot of good in what eviator is proposing i think
Fair enough. Whether it's a simple, easy to understand hard cap like I said above or a convoluted soft cap like the coercion idea, caps are coming.
Depends on the cap.
I'm not in favour of a cap on output. But I am in favour of a cap on population. Being able to build up planets with 150 population is game-breaking regardless of the wheel.
I'd rather see food being reworked into a proper resource (like in most space 4Xes) that is produced and needed to feed the population, and pop cap being determined by a combination of planet class and development. That way, we'd not only get proper agri-worlds, but would also be able to just determine what the maximum base production is and set maximum population possible to sit there.
Depends on the cap. I'm not in favour of a cap on output. But I am in favour of a cap on population. Being able to build up planets with 150 population is game-breaking regardless of the wheel. I'd rather see food being reworked into a proper resource (like in most space 4Xes) that is produced and needed to feed the population, and pop cap being determined by a combination of planet class and development. That way, we'd not only get proper agri-worlds, but would also be able to just determine what the maximum base production is and set maximum population possible to sit there.
Despite my hate of caps that would be a good idea
Yup. No-one actually hates caps. Everyone hates ARBITRARY caps. Just saying 'you can only ever produce 500 and anything over that is lost' would be another massive kerfuffle in the player base; just ensuring that achieving 500 production is nearly impossible will just be a balance change and no-one will mind (in fact, most people who appreciate it). The player doesn't mind getting less in return for investing more resources; he does mind getting nothing for increasing investment. This is why coercion is actually quite a good idea - a diminishing return is still a return.
Morale penalties? Can I just make that moot with my awesome Virtual World surrounded by improvements that provide at least +2 to Approval and a bunch of approval relics?
I see a flaw in the research production though. There are plenty of real world ideas basically suggesting that the more tech you have, the faster your tech will grow, such as Moore's law for semiconductors or the law of accelerating returns. This implies that research growth should not be linear, but curved, and ever so steeply toward the end of the graph. Therefore, if we are trying to achieve realism here, your research points should naturally be through the roof by late game.
This further brings up another issue that I have not seen addressed despite all this talk about "citizens choosing their jobs." What happens when you run out of things to research? Why should I get a penalty for dedicating all of my planet's resources to making money or cranking out ships when there is literally nothing left to research? Who would need to bother with choosing research as their job when my civilization has already unlocked the key to ascension? Would people really complain if I made them build stuff instead of researching ways to find more to research?
On that same line, what about when I have all the ships and star bases that I want, and all of my improvements are done? What do I need manufacturing for? Should I take a hit in morale or have my planet go up in anarchy because all the people working in manufacturing and research are suddenly out of a job and lazing around? The world does not work when you have 33% of your population working to support the 66% that have nothing to do.
I do not know about everyone else, but unless my aim is war and I need to build a ton of transports, I always come to a point where I no longer need to build or research anything. Even if I decide to go to war, not all of my planets are building ships or improvements. This usually happens around turn 250-300. The way I see, the game would not be as fun to continue once you unlock all of the techs.
I see these things addressing issues in early to mid game, but there is nothing being spoken for late game. As a matter of fact, these implementations would probably hurt late game.
I totally agree. What I meant is indeed that I hate hard caps that are only there out of game mechanics reasons. There are more elegant ways to achieve this, e. g. coercion (or my own proposal to address the same problem (see reply #45 to this topic)).
I always play with the slowest possible tech advancement and I never reached the point were I hadn't anything to research anymore, even after 500-600 turns. If you enable tech victory then you have won by then.
Apart from that I agree that the later techs should be more expensive in relation to the possible tech output in late game.
I'd rather the population caps. Coercion is putting diminishing returns on an exponential mechanic. That's two opposing forces and seems like a lame and overly convoluted solution, mathematically.
I always play with tech victory disabled after the first time because it is too easy to win with that method, and I also want to actually put those precursor components to use. I have not played on very slow research, but for those who play on normal or slow research (like I do), then it is pretty easy to have everything researched in half of that time.
This is just going to make it harder for me to buy up my opponents, sell them all of my techs to recoup losses, and then invade their home and final worlds for the lols.
I have to say I agree with this and think the idea of Coercion is a great one, I also love the idea that the form of government you have will impact what controls you have over your empire that's a master stroke for making the different races play differently but will be hard to balance I imagine.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
