Here are the things that bother me most and how I'd fix them...if not for GC2, then when the economic model for GC3 is forged:
PROBLEM: Ongoing research and ongoing industry shouldn't be straight monetary tradeoffs.
If I have 20 factories and 2 labs, I shouldn't have to shut down 10 factories galaxywide to run 1 lab on one world.
SOLUTION: Decouple research entirely. Rather than splitting 100% of all capacity between s/m/t, make the tech slider independent. If I have 2 labs, the slider should run from 0 to 16 bcs without affecting social or military.
If this provides too much of a balance issue (too easy to max research funding), make research more expensive. One tp could cost 2 or 3 or 10 bcs. Doesn't matter. Use that exchange rate to balance. You're already making a space tradeoff (number of tiles) and already having to spend social and time to build the labs. It's unrealistic and unintuitive to make the -use- of the labs cost a proportionate amount of industry.
This does redefine the role of tech spending and the lab. Tech spending becomes a relatively straightforward bill per month--set and forget. Labs merely define how much you can spend. I think it's a definition for the better.
SIDE EFFECT: The balance sliders now only balance between social and military.
They become industrial budget balancers, essentially.
SIDE EFFECT: Spend rate should become industrial spend rate.
By doing the above, the tech slider becomes research spend rate. The existing spend rate slider should only refer to industry.
PROBLEM: The balance/rate sliders don't have an obvious relationship to money spent.
I can hear the objections already. "You move the slider, the money changes!"
Theoretically , if you have 120 total industrial capacity, and you put the social slider to 100%, you intend to spend 120bc on social. If spend rate (or industrial spend rate, if you adopt the above model) is at 37%, you intend to spend 37% of 120bc on social.
Why isn't this obvious? Because you might not be spending that much on social.
You're not -really- cutting the money, you're cutting capacity. Since you can't buy a partial manufacturing point, most percentages will end up with a discrepancy between intention and reality...i.e. if you select 37%, and you have 24 industrial capacity on a particular colony, you're really going to be buying 8 sp on that colony (rounding down). Multiply that by a few colonies, and you end up a few bcs off.
For a specific example, 5 of those 24mp colonies at 100% would cost 120bc. 37% of 120bc is 44bc, rounded. But you'll actually only get 40 mp, and will spend 40 bc, not the 44 bc you'd expect, because you had to throw away 4 bcs worth of partial shields.
ONE SOLUTION: Document! This is one of those areas that needs some math in the manual. You're given just enough information in the slider screen to watch that number jump around erratically as rounding accumulates. It's a little difficult to work out exactly what's going on.
PREFERRED SOLUTION: Don't make the sliders adjust capacity. Make the sliders adjust money. 100% allocation and spend rate means spend all possible budget in this area...i.e. 1bc per point, just like they do now. In the above example, that 37% will really mean that you're spending 44bc on social.
But if you do this, GC can't just knock down production by the percentage...you end up with partial mps. You need to buy 40bc worth of mps (spreading it evenly), then go back and apply the other 4 bc among the colonies (presumably 1 more mp in 4 of the colonies...the choice of which ones is unimportant).
To summarize, you're spending money and buying use of capacity, not specifying how much capacity and then paying money. This is an important distinction. Capacity is colony-centric, money is galaxy-wide. Excess budget can carry over between colonies, capacity can't.
PROBLEM: High-capacity colonies starve low-capacity colonies for points when the budget needs to be shrunk.
If you have a mega-factory colony with 240 industrial capacity and three colonies with the default 24 capacity, that's a total of 312 bcs if they're running full-tilt. If you can only afford 78 bcs, you need to set the spend rate to 25%. This takes the large colony down to 60 mp and the smaller colonies down to 6mp. Production on the small colonies pretty much grinds to a complete halt. If you have a bunch of colonies (large map), you can actually get to point where you're at a fraction of an mp allocated for each non-manufacturing colony--suddenly, nobody can build social improvements at all.
SOLUTION 1: Allow a choice of two methods of allocation.
I'm going to talk about this as if we're allocating money per my suggestion above. If you're allocating capacity, like we are currently, the same ideas apply, but the numbers look different because rounding gets thrown away per colony.
Method 1 is the current method. Each colony gets a chunk of the budget proportionate to their total capacity. 240/24/24/24 at 25% becomes 60/6/6/6.
Method 2 works a little differently. Method 2 says everyone gets a crack at 1/num_colonies of the budget. If they use it all, great. If not, it goes to the ones who were shorted. Taking the above example, the total budget is 312bc. Cranking it down to 25% makes it 78bc. Each colony gets a shot at 1/4 of that (because there are 4 colonies), for 19.5 bc. They become 20/20/19/19.
Had you only needed to crank down to 50%, it would look better for the large colony--each colony gets a 39 bc allocation. The three small colonies are fully funded, and their excess goes to the large colony, which is not. You end up with 84/24/24/24.
Would you always want to use this? No. But if you do have a megalith colony that's uselessly eating up the budget, it starts looking pretty good. And it's a realistic option from a managerial point of view...it's essentially a progressive budget hit instead of a regressive budget hit, and accounts for the fact that a colony needs a certain minimum number of resources to progress.
Point is, you can't individually set allocations per colony--it's too complicated for Stardock's vision of the game. So at least let us choose between two different methods that are optimized in diametrically opposed ways.
SOLUTION 2: Allow us to shut down factories without destroying them. Bringup should cost something small.
You can get around the above situation by decommissioning factories. But then you have to spend the full cost and build time to get them back. Allow an immediate shutdown, with a reduced cost for bringup. The big tradeoff is that you can't reuse the tile in the meantime, and you have to waste some amount of time and production bringing them back up. I'm thinking a fraction of the total cost in mps here...enough to interrupt social production by a couple of turns.
PROBLEM: I have no clue what focus really does!
Is this documented anywhere? I mean, yeah, I know what it conceptually does, but the numbers don't make a lot of sense to me. Focusing Earth on research in turn 1 with default sliders hits social and military for a total of 3 mps, with a 0(!) bump in research production.
Please document the math, or at least a high-level summary of the math.
PROBLEM: Not a huge problem, but the one factory serving simultaneous military and social needs seems...simplistic to me. You shouldn't be able to make all your factories crank out buildings one week and spaceships the next week. They aren't tooled for it.
SUGGESTION: Two types of factories, one optimized for military, one optimized for social.
You could optimize a couple of different ways--one is that a military factory gives you 1mp:1bc when used for military, and 1mp:2bc when used for social. Alternately, you can make the maximum capacity smaller for social--it's good for 8mp total when used for military, and 4mp total when used for social, but retains the 1mp:1bc ratio. Social factories work in the reverse way, of course.
I'm not completely sold on this myself--it might make the colony cost calculations too abstruse. But it strikes me as a really neat idea from a resource management perspective, without needing much modification to the economic model as a whole. Basically, you'd have planets tooled for military or tooled for social (or balanced). You could allow factories to be retooled for a reduced mp cost...some fraction of what it would cost to build a new factory from scratch. I'm imagining all the nylon factories gearing up to make parachutes here
Anyway, hope these at least foster some thought. Heck, by post 64ish in the thread, I'm just hoping they get seen at all.
Geo
