Spending Distribution - Is this a bug?

Spending split needs some updating

I've been enjoying the game for since Friday afternoon, great game, really like it. However, I'm trying to get a better understanding of the game mechanics and have gotten stumped at the spending distribution function. I haven’t been able to back into the numbers. I understand that the bonuses aren’t working as planned, but I think this is something different.

As I understand it you have Manufacturing Points (mp) and Technology Points (tp) to "spend". To spend them requires money, 1 BC for each mp or tp. Further, your spending is not constrained by your tax revenue. Provided you have sufficient reserves you can spend more BC to generate mp/tp than you take in. Theoretically, if I set my spend rate to 100% I should be generating all the potential mp and tp possible on a planet.

My problem is with the Spending Distribution sliders. mp is split between Military production and Social production. Traditional guns or butter economics. tp does not have a split. However, when you use the sliders you are taking your spend rate and portioning it out three ways – Military, Social, and Research. Consequently, even if I have a planet full of research stations and am flush with cash, I can’t make full use of that research potential unless I turn off the Military and Social production. Production spending is being split three ways, however resource potential is split two ways. I should be able to fully fund both research and manufacturing production but cannot.

Here are some numbers to illustrate. I set up Earth with just one basic lab (5 tp) and one basic factory (8 mp). The capital has 24 mp and 24 tp. So, fully funding everything I should be able to get a total of 32 shields/hammers AND 29 flasks. Lets say the capital’s resources are either/or, at a 50/50 split I should still be able to get 20 shields/hammers and 17 flasks. However, if you fully fund and evenly split your spending on the distribution sliders you get 1/3 potential of each – you get 10 of each. An additional problem – if you have unused military or social spending (say a planet with no shipyard or no land left to build on), it subtracts that amount from the total spend and then splits it according to the sliders, so you get short-changed again.

A follow-up question just to confirm: The capital has 24 mp and 24 tp. That’s either/or right? My testing leads me to believe it is. I have read on other posts that population doesn’t tie into planetary production, that they’re just tax revenue. I’ve started some test games, doing nothing but run up the population up to 10B with no change. I can never get both maxed, but can max either separately. In order for the game to work the way I’ve suggested it needs to be both, or you need a slider for dual use facilities.

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You can only max one of the three productions, military, social OR research. To change how much goes to which one, use the three sliders in the economic setting. So, putting 100% on research means maxing research and not doing any of the other two. If you want to additionally have military production, you have to make it e.g. 50/50, and so on...
The mps and tps of factories and the like are only *potential* production. Meaning that's what you would get if you maxed the production like mentioned above (i.e. having 24tp means that you will get 24 research when you put the sliders on 0/0/100 and only 8 if you put them on e.g. 33/33/34).
If you then put "spending" (the slider below "taxes") on less than 100%, you get even less... spending at 50% gives you 12 or 4 research in the cases above.
Basically, it boils down to: Production = (capacity of planet in mp/tp) * Percentage of Spending * Percentage of the sliders. Plus bonuses.

Population has no effect on production.

Note that military, social and research bonuses are applied, but they are bug-ridden right now (social bonus doesn't work at all, research bonus is about halved, military seems to work) and that a heavy amount or rounding is going on so that your values may be a little off (no one knows exactly the order of the bonuses and whether the value is rounded down in between etc.)

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The best would be if we could determine military, social and research production for each planet.

In my point of view , I would forget all these central "spending rates" things. It would be grateful if I could build ships in one planet with full production and researching on the other with the same throttle. I think that's a bit stupid that I can't build ships on one planet with full production (as far as my budget allows of course) because I need to build up a building on an other planet or I want to research fast on a third.

I would do the following:
Delete those spending rates from central budget and put them to the planet window. Each bar would represent what rate are the military/social/research production is working. Military and social are mutually exclusive.
Example:
I have 1 basic factory and 1 basic research facility: so my maximum capacities are 8 mp and 5 tp. If I set military bar to maxiumum, i produce 8 mp, that costs me 8 bc. If I set it 50%: 4 mp costs 4 bc. I can use up the remaining 4 mp to social if i want to by setting social bar to 50%. If I set it higher, the military bar will be lowered automatically.
But If I want to I can set research bar to maximum apart from production bars.

And what if I can do this on each planet? I can build ships fast on one planet with eg manufacturing capital, while I "research" plenty of 'tp's on another with eg technological capital. And meanwhile I can make new planets build their social buildings fast instead of producting 1or 2 tp or needless military mp.

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That's pretty much what I'm saying, except that I wonder if logically that's the intention. I've been scratching my head over the issue and have to say it doesn't seem to make much sense.

Example: A PQ10 research planet, 9 basic labs and the capital - potential 69 research or 24 manufacturing. 1/3 split (other things going on in the galaxy I suppose), with nothing left to build and no spaceport yields 8, 7, and 22 (shields, hammers, and flasks). There's some rounding going on in there, but essentially 1/3 of the capital goes to military (unused), another 1/3 of the capital goes to social (unused), 1/3 of the sum of the labs potential and the last 1/3 of the capital goes to research. I understand mechanically what is happening, I question whether it should be this way.

In some games building a research center (or equivalent) might yield research bonuses. In GalCiv2 they're research factories, requiring funding. Mechanically you have buildings that convert resources & money to A or B, and other buildings that convert resources & money to C. Then you have another mechanism that divides the input into those functions into three paths instead of two. Design-wise I don't have an issue with the guns vs butter concept. I'm not argueing for planet by planet control over funding, but I would suggest that it makes more sense to allow me to decide how much I can afford to fund "research factories" on a galactic level, and "manufacturing factories" on a galactic level, and then say of manufacturing, how should the military and social split be. The research slider would be its own spending capacity bar. The existing industrial capacity bar would be the amount going to the military/social bars, which together would make 100%. There's a certain logic in tieing the spending decisions when the mfg comes from the same improvement and keeping it separate when it does not. You are still constrained by income and expense, there is no free lunch.

I wonder how the AI allocates its spending, whether mechanically it has that same constraint. There could certainly be some play balance issues with the AI if the game played as I suggest. It might not be a simple change. The AI might not have rules to play the game adequately under those rules.

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The best would be if we could determine military, social and research production for each planet.

Then, you will have the AI crushing you and you will end in a micromanagement nightmare. Don't forget that the computer will be better than you to make an optimal use of its planetary sliders.

And given the current rules in GC II, it make sense to have only the military and social production tied (after all factories produce only manufacturing points). In GC 1 where buildings give only percentage, it made sense to have the 3 sliders linked.

If there was an employment factor in GC 2, it could also make sense to have the 3 sliders tieds. But it has been left out.

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You can actually tweak each planet's spending, sorta. If you go the colony management screen for that planet, at the top under the name & class are boxes for military, social, and research. They have a circle thing which can be clicked on which will then emphasize that by borrowing from the other categories.

I missed it on my first read of the manual, just a small paragraph on page 29 (the bottom)

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I sincerely doubt it's a bug.

However, I agree it would be nice to specify balances for individual planets. At the moment specialisng planets is useless and counter-productive. As you say, a 100% military planet and a 100% research planet can at best both run at 50% efficiency if you want both of them doing something useful.

Picked up a new planet and want to build it up? Sorry, you'll have to decimate research & military spending across your entire empire to do so. If I have 1 planet out of 10 needing social spending, it sucks to have to force everyone else to drop down to allow that.

Having to waste money on research on a stolen planet in the middle of the Drengin empire because I want my ersearch safe haven tucked away at the back of my empire researching stuff is a pain.

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As far as the fact that the 3 way distribution slider effects all planets equally I think was done on purpose. The developers WANTED it done this way.

I disagree though that the computer would be worse if every planet could locally control their 3 way slider independantly of all the other planets. If done locally, it would make it a far simpler and easier for me the Human to keep up, ESPECIALLY once we could just minimize or maximize spending in one particular field (say research) on one or two planets. Then we wouldnt have to do the math and guestimate our spending with every building.

As I said in my other post (which didnt make it into this bugs forum), Social spending continues to be spent even if you do not have a building in production, exactly the OPOSITE of how the military spending occurs. Military spending is put in parenthesise and is actually NOT spent if no ship is in production. If there are no buildings being built, Social spending is still spent (AKA WASTED). Someone pointed out that this is how it is supposed to be and that the manual is wrong. Without a dev making that statement (and I dont think it was a Dev who said it..I could be wrong though) I highly doubt that is the case. It would be a little more difficult for that to make it INTO the manual rather than NOT making it in if that were so. (but it could possibly be "Working as Intended (TM)".. ) I'll wait for an official response.

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I'm not sure that adjusting your distribution on a per planet basis would be workable. Keep in mind that your planet's potential requires money to activate. So if you adjust it on a per planet basis, how would you allocate funds across your civ? Working planet by planet sliders, and then going to the civ level and setting master spending levels would be vexxing. The new planet frustration may not have a good work-around given the current game mechanics. However, I have to stick with my original thought of allowing us to fund the mp and tp independently, and allocate the mp into into military and social production as you see fit.

I have tried the planet focus button, thanks. Unfortunately in the example I cited above, it only added two to the research bucket. Big whoop. So now I have 24 research credits when I should have 69?

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