Production vs Research.

PirateRob

Join Date 03/2003

Production vs Research.

Or how the sliders work.

I know that the Production slider issue has been beat to death but in every thread I see, its mainly focused on wasted social spending.. here I want to discuss how the economic sliders work in relation to planetary production.

The Tax Rate Slider
Simple and straight forward... this slider is not linked to any of the others in any way. The higher the taxes, the more money generated.

The Industrial Capacity Slider
This one is not so straight forward. It doesnt do exactly what it says it does. It does not control how much of your industrial capacity is used in a direct manner. What it actualy does is act as a modifier to the Spending Distribution sliders.

The Spending Distribution Sliders
These three sliders are linked together. They are relative to each other. What they DONT do is determine your spending distribution.. what they DO do is determine your Industrial utilization which indirectly determines your spending. Thus, these three sliders actualy do what the Industrial Capacity slider implies it does. The industrial capacity slider effects these sliders directly by being a multiplication factor.

Example of how things work
Im going to ignore the tax slider since it is intuitive and needs no explanation. I will focus on the Industrial capacity slider and the Spending Distribution sliders. I am going to use the a human starting homeworld as my example.. it has only the Civ capitol built.

Manufacturing Points: 24 (from the capitol)
Research Points: 24 (also from the capitol)

at the default settings, your industrial capacity slider is set to 50%, and your spending distribution is set to 33 Military / 33 Social / 34 Research.

Now, lets start building a new Lab and a new Colony ship so that all aspects of our economy are being utilized. You will see the following numbers for the shields in each catagory for the planet.

Military Production: 3
Social Production: 4 (because humans get a 10% bonus to social production from somewhere)
Research: 4

Here are how the numbers are calculated.
Military Production = 24 x 50% x 33% = 3.96 (rounded down to 3)
Social Production = 24 x 50% x 33% x 110% = 4.356 (rounded down to 4) 110% modifier is for the human bonus
Research = 24 x 50% x 34% = 4.08 (rounded down to 4)

Now, if we run up the "Industrial Capacity" slider to 100%, we get the expected results.
Military: 7 (24 x 100% x 33%)
Social: 8 (24 x 100% x 33%)
Research: 8 (24 x 100% x 34%)

Now lets finish off that Lab and look at our numbers. The lab adds 5 more research points so our new planetary stats are as follows.

Manufacturing Points: 24 (from the capitol)
Research Points: 29 (capitol + lab)

NOW what do our numbers look like?
Military: 7 (24 x 100% x 33%)
Social: 8 (24 x 100% x 33% x 110%)
Research: 9 (29 x 100% x 34%)

Yes, our +5 lab only increased our research by 1 point because our so called "Research Spending Slider" is set to 34% (5 x 34% = 1.7)

How I though things worked (but was wrong)
How I originaly though things worked was that your Industrial Capacity slider adjusted industrial capacity directly.. that is, at 100% I was expecting my planet to use 100% of its manufacturing and research capacities. So for a the starting human capitol, I was expecting there to be 24 manufacturing points AND 24 research points available, costing 48bc to run. Then the "Spending Distribution" sliders split up the 48bc between the 3 areas.

The reality is that the Spending Distribution sliders are your true "Capacity" sliders and the "Industrial Capacity" slider is a macro control mechanism that modifies the percentages of the distribution sliders.

One of the ramifications of the current model is that you can never drive your planets economy to its maximum extent. There will always be unused capacity somewhere even if you have budget surpluses. At the default slider settings (50% industrial capacity and 33 M / 33 S / 34 R distribution) you are only using 33% of your manufacturing capacity and 17% of your Research capacity. (for a total of 23% of your total capacity)

At your maximum Industrial capacity setting, you can only realy get about 50% of your TOTAL potential output. This model works fine as long as you don't try and rationalize it in any way

since there is no LOGICAL reason why you cant utilize your full potential if you have the cash. Everyone is laboring under the same system and it doesn't seem to be prone to exploitation in any way. Its only major drawback is that it is non intuitive and difficult to understand how adding labs and factories alters the balances.

Rob

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The problem is not wasting money.. but rather wasting capacity.

If I have money in hand, and I look out over my planet and only half of the factories are working, I want to be able to spend my money to get the other half working. It makes no sense to limit me arbitrarily when I have capacity AND money available. (barring a third resource like workforce.. but its not intuitive how this third, mysterious resource is at work in GalCiv2)

I agree that the game is balanced AS IS.. it just doesnt make much intuitive sense, and takes a bit to figure out. If we are given the ability to drive our economy to its maximum ability based on capacity and money, there may need to be some rebalancing done... perhaps just reduce all capacity numbers by 50%

Rob

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If we are given the ability to drive our economy to its maximum ability based on capacity and money, there may need to be some rebalancing done... perhaps just reduce all capacity numbers by 50%

You seem mathematically competent enough to understand that doing that would result in no difference to your final production. It would change the way in which you could construct planets, and it would be more intuitive to some people. I find the current system intuitive enough, and find the need to balance my planets to not wind up with as much waste when pushing sliders to max to be intersting enough.

I wonder if it would be easier for the AI to work under which system? That should be a consideration as well methinks, is it beneficial to implement a system which weakens the AIs economically? I think no, but others may think yes.

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Why is planet specialization inefficient? I agree that some planets can be general-use without hurting anything, and it may even offer flexibility. However, since the Capital improvements are a flat 100% bonus, you will get more bonus, the more capacity you have on a single planet. I try to make my tech, productiion, and economic capitals from large, specialized planets with as many of the same type of building as possible. I get research capitals that produce a third to a half of my entire research capacity in the early stages of the game. Even if not all that capacity is used at any one time, it's still 33% - 50% of my entire research production at that point in the game.

As for the non-capital planets, I don't worry about specializing them, except to have a few secondary production planets to provide extra ships.

Thanks for the great rundown, PirateRob. Would you care to throw the individual planet production into the mix and give us examples of the impact of those? I'm referring to the focus buttons on the planet screen to switch a single planet between emphasizing research, production, etc.

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