And for the record, I have tried both systems. Focusing on Research in the beginning game and flipping to Industry halfway through is much much easier than trying to build a balanced planet from the get go in my experience.

Lol really? And by "logical" you mean cookie cutter strategy ? - in all games most advanced strategies are alwasy exploiting some nontrivial hole in the system in creative way .That what is fun about it - finding new ways to play by old rules

I'm sorry for the late reply and if I wasn't being clear. There are two issues here.

One, the OP, which is a continuation of a prior thread bemoaning the realism of an all factory or all labs strategy. The question was if the strats should remain. I answered "yes".

As it is, there are essentially three basic strategies. From easy to hard, they are...

1. A semi-balanced approach that focuses a little on either research, influence or military. The economics aren't pressed too hard and the game is slow.

2. Ignore labs and build mostly economic buildings with some factories. The game goes quicker and is well suited for an early military victory or economic collapse. Research is limited to no more than 25% of your factory potential.

3. Ignore factories and build mostly economic buildings and some labs. Social and military combined are limited to 25% of your lab potential. If you stay with it, you can get a quick tech victory. Switching to a balanced or "all factory" strat midgame can gain a decisive and high scoring military victory. This strat can crash your economy even quicker and more thoroughly than #2 above.

Taking two of the three basic strategies away will just limit the game.

The second issue was about putting both strategies back in simultaneously, via a succession of sliders. I am against that idea. The AI plays to an economic balance. That would be its downfall if the live player could simply apply both strategies independently in the same game. The live player can adapt quickly and gain the upper hand on research and social at the same time simply by moving the global sliders to refocus when it's appropriate. The economics would be almost automated by a simple slider. Sounds more like a recipe than a game.



Then you have the experience to speak to this issue. I only tried that once and agree that it was easier to win with the midgame flip. I had a research bonus on my homeworld though and that's when I chose that strat. The balanced approach is still simpler though. The economy was a challenge, don't you think?

Re: Research then Flip

The economy was a nightmare, but then again my game economies usually are. Actually, for me it was easier than doing a standard build type because I'd drawn a scenario with quite a few races and I was able to keep afloat by selling things like Fertility Enhancement to the minor races. Eventually, though, I wound up having to flip when I was down to selling things I didn't want to get rid of, like Advanced Logistics or my best weapon techs.

My point is, though, that you're not describing three strategies: you're describing six. Think of it as a three-by-two matrix: on one axis, my choices between building all labs, all factories, or a balance of the two. On the other axis, my choice to utilize all my production and kill my economy (fast), or utilize some of my production and keep financially solvent (slow). Because I can't utilize 100% of my production when I choose a balance, I'm denied one of the six:

Res Bal Ind
Fast x x
Slow x x x

I can't pursue a crash economy and burn all my cash into a 50/50 split of Resources and Industry. The current system takes away an option instead of adding two as you describe. A new slider system would still let me choose between a crash economy or a more stable one. It's just that now I'll be able to see much more clearly which one I'm doing, and I'll be able to crash myself in many more different ways than a 75/25 split.

In other words: if I say I want 100% production, I want 100% of all my buildings being used, not 100% of some nebulous number based on a weird average based on three other sliders. If I take an all research option, the penalty should be to my industry, not to my economy. The thing that should penalize my economy should be my tax rate and my production rate, not whether I want to send more money to Chevy or Honeywell.

As for the implication that this would create a cookie-cutter strategy, that's only if you play cookie-cutter games. Super Hivers would still want to take the factory-and-focus method because factories are much cheaper and faster for them than labs, etc. etc.

Wyndstar,

Hey, we wouldn't be gamers if we didn't have something silly to argue about. And I respect your opinion, but I still think you're wrong, not because all labs or all factories are overpowered, but because the slider doesn't do what it seems it's supposed to do. Admittedly, though, it's something that's middle priority. . . it's nowhere near as game-breaking as, say, the infamous "Nothing but Fusion Beams because you can miniaturize them down to having massive banks of 99 that totally pwn any of the higher-level weapons" exploit from MoO2. . .

I didn't read this entire post, mainly because I'm lazy, so I apologize if this has been brought up somewhere higher than mine, but for the sake of argument.....

If a planet with all factories is set to all research, couldn't those factories (in theory) be producing research goods, thus improving the race's research ability? If you were researching, lets say, the doom ray, couldn't (again, in theory) all of those factories be producing the parts needed for such a technology to be produced galaxy wide by every planet that race owns? Perhaps when you "finish" the technology it simply means that's when the new building, weapon, good, etc can be massed produced on a ridiculously large scale...... In reality, a factory can aid in research (even if it's indirect), and a research facility can have limited production value.

I'd be disappointed and a little sad if we lost the feature. Just because something can be abused doesn't mean everyone should use the feature, this isn't a pvp game. Don't click on it if you don't like it. It could be improved, by many ways including some listed here, but loosing the feature totally is just a silly idea, mainly because it actually does make some since.

developers could always try to lower the research output for factories and industry output for labs to make the all-lab and all factories strategy even tougher to implement and thus harder to abuse by most of the players. A compromise perhaps?

I don't like all factory/all lab approaches on principle, but I recognize that they are difficult strategies that allow you to win in certain situations that would otherwise be impossible, but they are certainly not sure fire paths to victory. Whether it's an exploit or not is a subjective question.
There are several issues at stake.
On one hand, there is the issue of the connection between research and production, i.e. you cannot fund your factories and labs both at 100%. Yes, it's at the heart of the all factory/ all lab debate, but from a game design perspective, it's another issue.

Second there is the question of whether focus should allow you to change production from one type to another with no penalty to efficiency. This is another game design issue, and other solutions, i.e. focus changes production with a penalty or focus increases the production of a given type rather than moving production from one type to another would all have their own advantages and disadvantages.

But let's get to the heart of the matter. What advantage does the all lab/all factory strategy offer? And why is it not always the best strategy?

First, we have to remember that the goal of GalCiv game is to win the game and (if you're into the metaverse) get the most metaverse points possible.

Generally, being able to produce more points (research and industrial) allows you to win, but obviously those points have to be spent intelligently (getting the techs in the right order, building ships that can fight and win) and the whole "positioning" part of the game has to be played intelligently (moving ships, taking certain planets) as well as the diplomatic portion - avoiding fights you don't want, starting fights between other players, getting allies, etc.

The all labs/ all factories debate focuses on the production of research and industrial points.
There are two limiting factors to the production of points - the "point production potential" of your empire and the amount of money you have to spend.

In theory, the "point production potential" of your empire would be all the factories and labs you have times the output of each one. But this is where the sliders come in. As is well understood, you cannot fund factories and labs to 100% at the same time, so the theoretical "point production potential" can never be reached.

But since you need a money to turn "point production potential" into real research and industrial points, this limit may not be an issue. If your economy cannot produce enough money to fund all that production, that higher potential does you no good.
This is clearly seen in the fact that, no matter the strategy, you always need to put stock markets down on planets. A "no stock market" strategy would give you a higher production potential, but the economic cost would be so high all that potential would be unusable.
The all lab/all factory strategy allows players who are so good at developing their economies that they get tons and tons of excess income to use turn that income into production points at a greater level at the expense of flexibility.

So an all lab/ all factory strategy does give you a much higher production potential by "circumventing" in a sense the slider limitations. That potential would be useless in terms of winning the game, of course, if you could not focus to get some production or research. But focus does work, so the strategies are viable.

But they require a few things - you have to sacrifice flexibility, and you have to be able to generate tons of money, often (as Wyndstar's AAR shows) selling techs to the AI.

The long and short of it is that I don't like the idea of focus working the way it does, but if it allows certain players a different way to play the game certain situations I think it should stay in.

I hope they leave it alone. On thing I like about them is even though the all-factory strat gets along well with my style of play, the all-lab strat falls on it's face for me. Which is good, I like the challenge it presents to make it work.

Until they do make changes to the overall slider system(probably not before GCIII) I like what they have and discovering the many nuances contained within it.