Absolute specialization?

from GalCiv2 Forums
When I plan to make an Economic Capital on a given planet, should I try to put as many Finanical buildings as possible on it, or should I sprinkle in 1 farm, 1 embassy, 1 mine, etc? (And no, ETC does not count the specialized buildings... the Omegas for example)

I realize that it would probably be a good idea to make factories on the planet (though I wonder about the wisdom of later dismantling them to make room for more Financial buildings), but what about a shipyard?

Part of my problem with figuring this out is that I still have no idea where the "maximum population" value for any given planet is listed, and thus I have no idea if I should be building farms.

Another part is that I am not sure if Galciv2 works the same way Galciv1 did, in that the cash doled out by the "social" and "military" sliders in the domestic stats window was doled out in equal portions to all colonies, thereby causing waste if any of your planets did not have any social/military projects going.

Hell, come to think of it, should I have a research facility on every planet? Is the cash doled out by the "research" slider also divvied up in the above mentioned manner?

See, if they use the old system of resource allocation, then maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to have a shipyard on most, if not all, of my worlds, and simply shift the slider to the left when not cranking out ships. If the funds are allocated as they are being used, staying with one high quality factory planet (with manufacturing capital) would be the better choice.

Also, it was my understanding that in Galciv1, racial bonuses to social and military production achieved faster production by simply increasing the rate of cash consumption, rather than increasing efficiency- is this still the case?

And about the tile bonuses on planets: What happens if I put a Manufacturing Capital building on top of a tile with a bonus to manufacturing?
9,979 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Your maximum pop for any world is their food production. If you make 5 mt of food, your cap at 5 billion. More farms, more food, more people. You can get the data off the colony manager screen as well as other places.

I am not exactly sure on the economic distribution, but I don't thing credits get wasted on idle production. Not positive though. You can specialize planets tough. ie even if your economy is geared towards research, a production planet can "specialize" its economy to production ad increase its production at the cost of the other two areas.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Idle military production is not wasted (hence the paranthesis around a planet's military production number when not building a ship), but social production not being used IS wasted. Thus if you love to micromanage it's best to make sure that all of your planets are always upgrading something - which will usually be the case if your research isn't terrible anyway.

As for the first question... I wish I knew. About the only time I have a totally specialized planet is with Mars... on which I put three research labs and forget about it for the rest of the game.

I try to let tile bonuses dictate which planets get which capitals.. my current game has a production capital with one 700% manufacturing bonus and another 100%. It has a starport and a bunch of factories, which sometimes get upgraded to a Wonder or trade good.

But as for general specialization I am still just trying random things.
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Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
Economic Capital After you have built basic improvements and the game is settled in look at the planet screen and find the planet that is producing the most revenue. That should be your Econ Capital and it will usually be your homeworld.

An observation: I see lots of production bonus squares, research squares, influence squares and approval squares but to my knowledge there are no econ bonus squares.

Has anyone ever seen an Econ bonus square?
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Specializing has it's up side in super-fast production and uber-cashflow, but be careful - if you specialize too tightly and then loose a "super specialist" planet, it's going to HURT. So if you use the super-specialist planet approach, I recommend putting like 3 or 4 times the fleet over it. This fleet (which is often called Home Fleet, or something like it in books) has one job - stay home and guard the gun store.

The other approach is having a very spread out empire with less planetary specialization, so you can take some losses and keep on rolling without pausing (kinda like the Borg). The way I did this in GalCiv1 was to pick the racial abilities and governments that gave me the most population bonus, and planet quality bonus, and if I had the points, a little extra shipbuilding efficiency. This allows you, especially on lower difficulties, to out-breed the computer and spread like cockroaches across the galaxy. Once you're up to like 5 or 6 worlds you have your newer ones build warships so your core worlds can just keep makin' babies. Before long you'll discover you own like 3/4 of the galaxy... But at higher difficulties you can get overextended and wiped out by aggressive opposite-alignment races if you're not careful. At higher difficulties I do that and have all good enemies and the way of the goody-goody, to avoid wars - go for the non-military win
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
As far as I know there are no econ bonus squares, however if you see any morale bonuses you can consider those economy bonuses, as those will allow you to build more farms and have more population without running into morale problems (a farming bonus AND a morale bonus is even better)
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
Aside from Morale concerns, isn't farming the best way to go, in theory, since more people would boost production, research, etc?
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
*Aside* from Morale concerns? Low morale leads to lower taxes, leads to less social/military/produciton. At some points I've been forced to destroy farms and let billions of people *die* just so I could raise my taxes enough to get out of the red.

That said, I have done a few test games where I overexpanded (5 colonies within 30 turns or so), and this led to major problems due to lack of population vs colony maintenance costs. I ended up going to -2000bc in the treasury, with tax rates as high as possible and zero spending. I found that raising tax rates too high would cause my population to decrease (this is supposed to be people not paying their taxes). In the end, to get out of debt, I lowered taxes until my approval rating was huge (you can't go lower than -2000, so feel free to have no taxes). Once I had grown from 500 million people to around 34 billion, I was able to raise my taxes a bit and actually make money. As soon as you get out of debt, you get rid of the huge morale penalty for being in debt (this appears around -500 bc, and disappears when you're back above zero), and you'll be able to raise taxes even more. I stabilized around 42 billion, and was making a small profit with 100% spending and 50ish % taxes.


Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
I was thinking of just taking all the + morale modifiers when creating a custom race, thats why I asked "aside from morale concerns" .