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Economic bugs in 1.0X.009

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Economic bugs in 1.0X.009

Reproducing the known issues

from GalCiv2 Forums

To date, the developers have not paid much attention to the outstanding bugs in the economic model. I'm using "economic" rather broadly, to incorporate all the issues around the player's taxing, spending, manufacturing, bonuses, etc. 1.0X.009 took a few steps forward (social prodution bonuses, starbase research bonuses) but left the other issues untouched. In the hopes of drawing some attention from the devs to this part of the game, I've tried to re-verify all the known problems in 1.0X.009 and provide exact steps on how to reproduce them.

For what it's worth, as a fellow software developer, my guess is that Stardock does not have a written spec of how the economic model is supposed to work, just an in-game implementation of it. They obviously do not have systematic testing to confirm that it's working as designed in every build. What I cannot understand is why the developers are not paying more attention to these issues - for the most part, they've ignored these problem reports on the forums. I encorage others to add their known economic bugs to this thread, in the hopes of getting enough critical mass to attract the devs attention.



Bug 1: Social spending is charged when no build item is selected

The manual states on p. 30 says

Social Production, represented by hammers, is spent on projects.If you have no projects queued, the number above the hammers will be in parenthesis. In this case, the hammers are not drawing bc from your treasury.

Military production behaves as described. Social production does not. If you do not select a social project, the social production does not appear in parenthesis and is charged as spending.

Reproduce: Start a new game. Set socal rate to 100% and spending to 100%. Select nothing to build on your homeworld. The F4 screen will report total expenses of 1 maintenance + 26 social. Your homeworld will report 26 social production, and total spending of 27.

Edit3: Nastavnik pointed out this thead where Frogboy says this was by design, and was changed after the manual was completed. Apparently there is no way to avoid wasting social production.

Edit5: Frogboy confirmed later in this thread that this behavior is by design and the manual is wrong.



Bug 2: Only half of displayed research bonus is applied

A research production bonus does not supply as many bonus beakers as the equivalent production bonus does shields. It appears that 50% of the indicated bonus is being applied.

Reproduce: Start a new game choosing a 10% military production bonus, and no other production or research bonuses. Pick the technologist party for +20% research. Set military rate to 100% and spending to 100%. Select a starship to build on your homeworld. Confirm that the game shows Military +10% on the F6 statistics screen, and another +10% production on the homeworld details screen, for a total of +20% military production. Your homeworld is now producing 28 shields. 28 = Floor(24 * 1.2) so that is the expected value.

Now set research rate to 100%. Confirm that the game shows Research +20% on the F6 statistics screen. Your homeworld is now producing 26 beakers. 26 = Floor(24 * 1.1). You are only getting credit for half of the research bonus indicated by the game.

Edit5: Frogboy stated later in this thread that this behavior is by design. The empire-wide research bonus is not supposed to be applied at the displayed value.



Bug 3: Government production bonuses are not applied

Advanced government types state that they give bonuses to Economy, Production, and Research. After switching to an advanced government type, the economic bonus is observed in-game but the research and production are not observed.

Reproduce: Start a new game and play until you have researched one or more new government technologies (Interstellar Republic, Star Democracy, Star Federation). With your government set to Imperial, write down the observed Taxes, Military, Social and Research values from the F4 screen and from your homeworld. Now switch to governments to Republic, which should provide +25% economy, +25% production, +25% research. Compare the F4 and homeworld values to the ones written down previously. Taxes has received a new bonus (the +25%) but the other numbers have not changed. Repeat with Democracy and Federation, and observe that each time the economic bonus is applied, but not the production and research bonus.

Edit5: Frogboy stated later in this thread that governments are only supposed to give economic bonuses. Apparently this is a text bug in the change government screen.



Bug 4: Virtual Reality Center gives lower morale bonus than Zero G Sports Arena

A Virtual Reality Center provides +40% morale, replacing the Zero G Sports Arena which provided +55% morale, despite the expensive upgrade cost. Moreover, once the player has researched the Virtual Reality Centers technology, they are no longer able to build any of the better Zero G Sports Arena buildings on any of their planets.

Reproduce: Open \GalCiv2\Data\English\PlanetImprovements.xml. Compare lines 882 and 906.



Bug 5: Stock Market gives lower economic bonus than Banking Center

A Stock Market provides +15% economic bonus (and +10% morale, +5% influence), replacing the Banking Center which provided +24% economic bonus (and no morale or influence bonuses), despite an expensive upgrade cost. Moreover, one the player has researched the Galactic Stock Exchanges technology, they are no longer able to build the superior Banking Center buildings on any of their planets.

Although the player gets additional morale and influence bonuses from a stock market, these are much smaller than the bonuses provided from the dedicated buildings of those types. The player is better served by combining Banking Centers with morale and influence buildings, than by "upgrading" to Stock Markets.

Reproduce: Open \GalCiv2\Data\English\PlanetImprovements.xml. Compare lines 956 and 979.



Bug 6: Text description of morale improvments is incorrect

Morale bonuses, resources, buildings and trade good all state that they provide an x% morale boost (15%, 40%, etc.). Any given planet will not, in fact, improve by x% after building/acquiring the indicated bonus. If fBaseMorale = (100% - unhappiness due to population), then a planetary improvement will improve a planet's morale by fBaseMorale * x%. An empire-wide improvement will improve it by (fBaseMorale * x%) ^ 0.75.

Morale improvement text descriptions should accurately describe the amount of bonus given to the player for building the improvement. If the developers find it difficult to succinctly explain this in in-game text, perhaps they can ponder what benefits such a complicated formula for morale is providing to players.

Edit5: Frogboy stated later in this thread that this behavior is by design. There is supposed to be no straightforward relationship between the displayed +x% morale value and the actual morale improvement it will yield.



(Edit: Added the problem reported by marioflag)

Bug 7: Population Growth bonus has no effect

The population growth racial ability, trade good and bonuses have no effect in the game. Population appears to grow at a constant rate whether these bonuses are present or not.

Reproduce: Start a new game with no population bonus. Confirm that none appears on the F6 statistics screen. Leave everything else at the default settings and hit the turn button 10 times, writing down the population of your homeworld on each turn. Start a second game with a 70% racial population growth bonus. Confirm that it's shown as 70% on the F6 statistics screen. Again, click the turn button 10 times and write down the population of your homeworld on each turn. Here are the observed values in game:

Turn 1Turn 2Turn 3 Turn 4Turn 5Turn 6Turn 7Turn 8Turn 9Turn 10
0% bonus5.0B5.13B5.25B5.38B5.48B5.58B5.68B5.78B5.88B5.98B
70% bonus5.0B5.13B5.25B5.38B5.48B5.58B5.68B5.78B5.88B5.98B

The Population Growth bonus has no observable effect.



(Edit2: Added the problem reported by defimus below)

Bug 8: Text description of starbase research bonus is missing

On the planet detail screen, the research bonus supplied by starbases is missing. Only the prodution bonus is displayed. The research bonus from starbases appears to be calculated correctly, it is just not displayed to the player.

Reproduce: Start a new game with no research bonus. Confirm that none appears on the F6 statistics screen. Set research rate to 100% and spending to 100%. Set the research target to Basic Logistics - you do NOT want to research anything that will give you an empire-wide research bonus. Complete the following build plan:

  • Turn 1: Buy Basic Lab. Buy constructor. Homeworld research = 29.
  • Turn 2: Buy Basic Lab. Use constructor for economic starbase adjacent to homeworld. Buy another constructor. Homeword research = 34.
  • Turn 3: Use constructor to add Starbase Factory (+3% miltary, social, research). Homeworld research = 35.

Note that research is, correctly calculated as floor((24+5+5) * 1.03) = 35. On the planet details screen, the starbase bonus reads "Production +3%". It should also say "Research +3%" to reflect the bonus being applied.



(Edit4: Added the following problems reported by skam240 below)

Bug 9: Debt is capped at -2000BC

If you buy a large ticket item or a mass upgrade, and the resultant cost would take you below -2000BC, it will be capped at -2000BC. This thread discusses the problem. It also contains a post by Frogboy stating that this behavior is by design. So it's noted here mostly as an unintuitive way to save yourself tens of thousands of BCs late in the game.

Reproduce: Play the game until you are low on cash. Purchase an item that would take your treasury below -2000BC, such as a Trade Good. After the purchase, you will have the Trade Good, but your treasury will remain at -2000BC. You will have been credited the difference between the purchase price and -2000BC for free.



Bug 10: Secret Police Center project gives lower morale improvement than Entertainment Network

The Secret Police Center super project has a cost of 600 and provides a morale boost of +20% on the planet where it is built. The Entertainment Network is available at the start of the game, and provides a bonus of +25% at a cost of 55. The Secret Police Center is also more expensive and less powerful than the Multimedia Center (+30%/100), Extreme Stadium (+45%/250), Zero G Sports Arena (+55%/400) and Virtual Reality Center (+40%/500).

The player would be better off building any standard morale improvemnt building in the game rather than Secret Police Center project.

Reproduce: Open \GalCiv2\Data\English\PlanetImprovements.xml. Compare lines 710 and 812.
32,468 views 63 replies
Reply #51 from Stardock Forums Top
The reason for taking it out, IIRC from your other posts, were the big changes in income when social upgrades happened automatically from tech breakthoughs. I'm assuming this is a problem because one moment you think you are rich, and the next you are running a big deficit, and this really screws with planning.

it isn't in income. It is on expense and on the results movements for the treasury.
Reply #52 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The reason for taking it out, IIRC from your other posts, were the big changes in income when social upgrades happened automatically from tech breakthoughs. I'm assuming this is a problem because one moment you think you are rich, and the next you are running a big deficit, and this really screws with planning.


Probably the solution can be found adding some micromanagement like upgrading your building will not be automated so you shouldn't waste your social production, you won't see your budget sucking money suddenly but u have to give a lot more attention to your planets. Personally i would prefer a lot don't to waste my money and have to micromanage a bit more my planets.It could also add some differentiation in your planetary improvements because for every technology discovered u don't have more all banking center upgraded to stock market but u can have both but it's only my humble opinion
Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #54 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I second the above request. It would be extremely nice if there was a detailed document explaining all game mechanics, that is continously updated from patch to patch in the Galactic Databank portion of the GalCivII site.
Reply #55 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
second the above request. It would be extremely nice if there was a detailed document explaining all game mechanics, that is continously updated from patch to patch in the Galactic Databank portion of the GalCivII site.


Paritcularly explain how the PQ bonuses.

I would like to see a lift of the bonuses ( which could be around 20-30% per terraforming tech) somewhat lifted to unlock more tiles for my planets.

Also, I appreiciate Frogboy effort to get rid of ingame bugs. Bring on the patches !
Reply #56 from Stardock Forums Top

My recommendation would be the Wiki site.  That's where this stuff is getting compiled.

There will be on-going tweaks to all kinds of things in order to make the game more fun for the most people. This will drive the spread sheet people (i'm one of those people mind you) nuts I'm sure but at the end of the day, fun trumps well documented game mechanic (even though for some people, shakey documented game mechanics detract from the fun).

Let me give you an example:

Since release we nerfed the morale ability because it was simply too powerful.  Now, your morale ability is taken to the .85 power before being factored into your planet's approval rate.  It plays a lot better.

Arguably, we'd probably be better off jetisoning numbers and having a + scale or something or some other less precise system so that people know that "doing X is good and having more of X is better."

But keep an eye on the wiki site. That's where your best bet for all this stuff is going to be. Because it's going to be fluid for quite a long time as people put in their suggestions and ideas.

 

Reply #57 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Great post!

I totally agree that social spending should not be charged if construction is idle. This is not a bug as it was a design change after the manual was written but I think it should be changed back to match military spending. Currently, I'm forced to switch my focus to military or research spending on planets with idle social construction to minimize the waste. This means more micro-management that takes away from the fun of the game!

Stardock has made a great game but there is a lot of unnessary fog that is taking away from it. Clearly the manual and in game text do a poor job of explaining how the calculations are done and how combat works.

For example, lets take a very simple example where each ship has attack strength 1 and defense 1. If the rolls go from 1-n and not 0-n then this battle would never end since we would always have an attack 1 countered by a defense 1 resulting in no damage. So for the battles to work it must go from 0-n.

Things get more complicated when we have multiple weapons and defenses present. An optimal defense is taken at face value and for non-optimal defenses we take the sqrt and round down (I think rounding off to the nearest would be better). However, what if a ship is attacking with multiple weapon types? One of the gamma testers stated that each weapon type is applied separately to the combined defenses. I don't know the source of his information, it would be nice to have this confimed by one of the developers! If this is true then it does not make sense to have more than one weapon type on a combat ship but multiple defenses do make sense.

The scoring also seems to be buggy. Wednesday night I won the 4th Dread Lords campaign on level Tough. In the end mission summary my military score was lower than the Drengin! I destroyed 75 enemy ships(including many Dread Lords frigates), lost only 1(a constructor), and lost 1 Billion troops invading the Drengin planet giving me a score of 502. They only destroyed 1 enemy ship, lost 24 ships, and lost 10 Billion troops due to my invasion of their planet giving them a score of 599! What gives!!! I created various screenshots of the mission including this report but I don't have an URL I can post them to. I know there are sites that give out free web space (e.g., Geocities, later bought by Yahoo) and I think my ISP does to so maybe I'll add them later.

The manual needs to better explain the design and it needs to be updated with every update that changes that design. Adding a GalCivPedia with links between related items is also a must, as is keeping it up to date to reflect changes in the design. Even my old copy of Alpha Centauri did this right.
Reply #58 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I really don't understand Stardock's response to #1... It seems to me that it completely breaks the game and makes it majorly UNfun.

How can we possibly manage a large empire, given that most of the social production will be wasted every turn?

It makes sense in game like these (asit would in real life BTW) to specialize each colony so it does one task and do it well. This way, project that give bonuses, say, to starship, can be built on one colony and you then use that colony to build starship. Makes sense.

In this game however, having a colony with, for instance, 150 hammers that is specialized in building ships is a big no-no. Indeed, every time the social production slider is >0% (which will happen fairly regurlarly and for long periods of time in any game) 100+ bc are *wasted* (even if the focus is set on something else).

So, what to do instead? Have each colony build a fairly small number of factories (just one or two) and have your ships be created all over the galaxy. Forget about bonus project (not just for starships, for other things as well).

A corrollary is that colonies should always have social projects, even when the intuitive/sane thing to do would be to build nothing. In fact, when I realized this I started building market centers all over the place. Most colonies ended up with 6-7 market centers. It doesn't matter if you need the place later, just demolish the building. The key things here is: you DON'T waste resources building these extraneous market centers. *The cash would have been spent anyway.* After a while, I got tired and thought I was doing something wrong (hence my presence here on the forum).

I have played only a week so far, so I may be missing something. Am I? 'Cause I honestly don't see how this DOESN'T break the game and render it an exercise in micro-management/pleasing the game engine.

I'm pained to say it, but the solution for me is 2 words: Space Empires. (And I just lost $40.)

So, if anyone can show me how it's not so bad, please do so...

P.S. BTW I have version 1.0X.2
P.P.S. If it's at all possible to hack the game so that social production is NOT spent, I would really appreciate pointers. I don't care about not being able to submit my score in metaverse, etc., I just want an enjoyable game... I'm more than ready to dive in and hack my way to it...
Reply #59 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Yeah I'm still waiting for Frogboy to comment on REAL PROBLEMS with the social spending problem instead of justing ignoring us.

What Frogboy says is that wasted social production is in the game for two reasons:

1) Because anything else would encourage micromanagement.

This is plain wrong, because of wasted social production I have to use the priority buttons and setting those for each colony ***is micromanagement***. Once I get a new social project I also micro my social sepnding slider as well, to say there is no micromanaging in the current system is just wrong.

2) Because the player will notice large swings in their economy, going from a healthy positive income BC a turn to a large deficit BC a turn once they develop a new project.

Well, this is just ridiculous. I can get swings like this all the time in my game. When I change governements, for example I can get a hefty 25% economy boost. And once your mini-freighter gets going, you notice a huge increase in cash and then when it comes back home, you don't have so much cash flow. And can't people handle having to lower taxes or spending once you get new projects? I fiddle with my taxes slider all the freaking time, doing it a few more times in the game is not really a "micromanagement nightmare" like Frogboy would have you believe. Most of my planets are constantly spending on social projects for a long, long time, I doubt most people would even notice the financial swings for a very long time. Also, wouldn't the swings not be so bad since if you've saved a lot of cash from not spending on social projects, then a new social project came up, wouldn't you have a good bank to cover yourself at least until you noticed you were losing money?

What happens is that you are forced to micromanage and you only have a few options:
-Cut social spending altogether once you are mainly done with your social projects. This is terrible as new colonies or lesser developed colonies will never get better.
-Prioritize on Military and have godawful science.
-Prioritize on Tech and have a decent miliary but a little bit more wasted cash.
-No priority and have a lot more wasted cash.

It's a lose, lose, lose, lose situation. There are plenty of ways to fix this, it really doesn't take much, many people have stated great ideas and it really wouldn't upset game balance at all or be very hard to code. I remember once game where I got a +700% production square in my capital. Sweet! Yes, but that city finished it's social project so much faster than my other planets that it had so much social production it was literally bankrupting my empire so I had to rip the factory down and keep putting it back up until I could take the huge financial hit.

Citizen Max3000: I wouldn't over-react though, I mean since we and the AI both have to deal with this is isn't such a big deal. I wouldn't say that wasted social spending breaks the game by any stretch of the imagination. It IS a very strange and bad system which needs to be tweaked, but I wouldn't say you wasted $40, especially when SE:V doesn't even have a release date yet.
Reply #60 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I write this piece with the avowed goal that Stardock realizes that wasting social production breaks the economy. I will go at some length to try and do that. So far the official response from Stardock has been: we can’t do it, otherwise the income and expense report is wrong as new upgrades come along. I propose a (IMO better) solution to this problem: TURN OFF AUTO-UPGRADE BY DEFAULT. That’s it. No more no less. People who activate it manually will know what it does and “suffer” the consequences.

If Stardock you won’t fix it in the main release stream, then please, please, please, I’m begging on both knees for you to at least let out a patch that will change the behaviour so that non-used hammers are not wasted. If it’s at all possible to mod some data file somewhere that will do this, please let us know (I don’t think so it since it’s behaviour were talking about, not data). You may think I’m crazy to beg like this, I hope my explanation later on makes sense to you. I specifically don’t care if the modded game can’t submit score in Metaverse, etc.

xFlukex: I don’t think I’m over-reacting and I’ll try to explain why here. When I say the game is broken, I don’t mean that it can’t be played or that you can’t have fun for a while. On the contrary, I’ve been doing so for the past few days. What I mean is that a large part of the strategic element of the game is broken (i.e. the economy) - and that basically means the game itself is broken when you’re talking about a strategy game. Obviously, whether I’m over-reacting or not is largely a matter of opinion… (That part about Space Empires was bitterness talking.) After a few days getting comfortable with the various aspect of the game I delved a little deeper to optimise my strategy and found this monstrosity of wasted resources. That killed my fun then and there. Note that “optimising” here doesn’t mean: “knowing all the formulas in detail”; it means “understanding the relationship between concepts (money, production, morale, etc.) to plan accordingly”. So please don’t dismiss this as “another min-maxer going overboard”.

Don’t get me wrong: I WANT to love this game. I really do. The fact that I’m writing this now is proof enough. If I didn’t care, I would have moved to something else already. I love many things about the game (in fact nearly everything) and I think developers have put a lot of really nice touches. People have complained about the UI, the exploits, etc., but I honestly think that’s not that big of a deal. (The fact that I don’t care about Metaverse scores is the reason behind this; other players wanting to rank themselves will obviously have a different opinion.)

To explain why wasting hammers is bad, consider the following example. It’s a bit contrived, but you’ll get the idea.
-You have 6 planets.
-Five of them are in a corner/behind/sharing a border with allies and each have an initial colony module (whatever it’s called) producing 12 mp. You want to produce defense ships on these planets.
-One of them is at an enemy’s border. You want to produce attack ships there, lots of them.
-So, you build (there) many factories to crank the ships as fast as possible. You end up with 140 mp on that planet and the rest of your planets have a total of 60 mp.
-Suppose you have 200 bc available to spend.
-You want to allocate social/military production 50-50. You do so with the slider and set the manufacturing output to have a 0 net profit.

How is the money allocated?
-The factory planet ends up with 140 bc/mp: 70 shields and 70 hammers.
-The other planets share the remaining 60 bc/mp. Each one of them gets 6 hammers and 6 shields.

What happens if the factory planet has no more social projects to build (this will happen quite fast given the speed at which it builds them in the first place)? The hammers are wasted. This means that 70 bc are wasted. A little less given that you can set the focus to military, but given the conversion loss and the fact that not all the hammers can be converted, a lot is still wasted. Say, 50 bc.

Let this sink in: with a total budget of 200 bc, 50 bc are wasted. 25% of your empire income goes to waste (less if you consider maintenance, but you get the gist). This is particularly painful considering that each one of your factory-less planets only get 12 shields and hammers in total. Would they get the wasted bc, they would have almost 100% more resources and finish projects in half the time.

Ok, but it makes sense, no? I mean, the workers and mortgages must still be paid while the factory floor is empty, right? Not so, given that the extra production capacity could be fully used to build ships. In fact, that’s precisely what would happen if the social production slider were set to 0%.

This in itself is bad, but not game-breaking bad. What is game breaking is the combined hammer wasting and the way the sliders work. Building factories doesn’t strictly mean: “produce more here”. It means that, yes, but it also, more subtly (and more importantly) means: “allocate a larger % of the money spent on production here.” I may not be a good player, but I’ve found that having enough production capacity to eat through your income is not hard. It’s actually very easy to have excess production capacity. Building a few factories in a row on a few planets will usually change the situation from excess income to excess production. So, the latter meaning is actually more important in games than the former.

So what if in our example above we actually wanted to crank up social production on the factory-less planets? We could build factories there too. One disadvantage is that additional slots are now taken on the planet. Moreover, this wouldn’t bring more production capacity (mp) per se (since we wouldn’t get more cash), but the allocation percentages would change so that less mp would be wasted and more would be put to actual use. Another way to accomplish the same would be to demolish some factories on the factory planet, thus rendering it less apt at building ships. If you had built ship-improving projects there (like hyperion shipyard), and thus wanted most of your fleets to come from that planet, though luck.

So, factories are not a way to increase production, but a way to change the % of allocated resources.

When you realize that, you have two choices:
1. You don’t bother about vast inefficiencies in your empire and take on far less of a challenge than would otherwise be possible because of the waste.
2. You micro-manage you factories and the focus of your planets to minimize the waste (it’s not possible to completely eliminate it, but you can minimize it).

Most people playing TBS games will not naturally fall in category #1, IMNSHO. This is so simply by virtue of the fact that a strategy game is, by definition, a kind of puzzle where you try to optimize/maximize something. How far you go in that maximizing is obviously a matter of personal taste, but if there is nothing to optimize, it’s simply not a strategy game (this holds from chess to warcraft). People looking for a game not involving thinking/planning/optimizing will typically not play a 4x game.

But once you understand these concepts about factories and waste, you can optimize it right? Ah! So there’s your strategy after all, no?

No. Some optimizing is simply too tedious/boring/unbelievable to be fun. And that is really the heart of the matter and what I’ve been aiming to all those lines. When I play GalCiv (or any 4x games), I want to be a galactic emperor mustering forces against other emperors. I want to believe it. Building and scrapping factories in order to change various production percentages is unbelievable: I have to suspend belief. I’m not an emperor building a great civilization anymore: I’m a gamer in front of his PC working around serious design issues. I’m so obtuse that I find a game requiring such belief suspension is just not fun for me. The fact that the AI works under the same conditions doesn’t alleviate the issue for me, sorry.

…

This is pretty much all I can say to make my case. If this is not enough, nothing I say will be and I’ll give up on the game. However, I still hope Stardock will fix it. They can’t NOT do it! It would be such a shame to let a simple matter like that ruin an otherwise great game.

Again, the solution is extremely simple:
-Don’t waste bc on non-used hammers.
-Optional: Disable auto-upgrade by default (allowing players to set it back on)

Again, at least please offer a patch even if it’s not in the main release development stream.

*** If there is anything wrong in the above example and if my understanding of the game is wrong, by all means let me know. I would like nothing more than be proved wrong and be shown that my example is not possible / not as bad as I think.

(I will also, given the length, create a separate post for this).
Reply #61 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Hello there, i started playing Galciv2 1 week ago and ended up with serious understanding problems concerning the game mechanics, especially the eco model.
This is the first game i need to plunge into forums and try to find help or answers to my questions.
Bonuses not showing up correctly in summary screen, production/research output numbers not relating to anything reproducable.

This game, as is, was very promising for me at first glance when i didn't look closer trying to find my way through the new game.

But the longer i play the more confused i get? How is that? The economic model is VERY CRYPTIC.
And the fact, that i cannot decide directly on a per-planet base how i split up my production/research is very tedious.
I followed several threads about the "unused social production goes down the drain" and maybe 85% of the gamers posting here are unhappy with this "wanted game feature".

Here is a simple suggestion by me: Why not get rid of the general spending slider and incoperate a individual spending slider on a per-planet base? Of course this means more micromanaging but it also gives control about where the BC's go exactly. This way i could slide my research planet to 100% reserach and 0/0 military social, assuming every tile is used properly and no constructions have to be made and its having no starport.
As soon as research upgrades become available i could then adjust the individual planet spending slider and maybe adjust the spending to 50% social for the upgrades and 50% research for example.
If slider stays untouched the upgrades then would show up as "never being finshed" or "infinite construction time" which could be shown in the colony screen catching my attention.

If this issue is solved i will continue gameplay and enjoy GalCiv2 to its fullest potential. But for now i will leave the box closed; if nothing is done to resolve this issue i will sell GalCiv2 on ebay. It is ridiculous that if so many gamers are stumbling over such a "works as intended" feature and nothing is beeing changed it is a lost chance for one of the most promising XXX turn based Sci-Fi games i have ever gotten my hands on.
Reply #62 from Stardock Forums Top
When I play, I crank these up. So I guess it depends on how you define a penalty. A good player will usually have trouble keeping the industry producing as fast as their economy.


That is true to certain extant. It all depends on your planet templates. I play differently at times. In games where I do 2 factories per planet I usually can't spend my money fast enough, but in those 4 factories per planet (With few with up to 8) it's way into year 6 before I make enough money to keep em goign nonstop

Still I liek the system but it's a huge learnign curve. Took me a while to figure out how to best use it. I told you the new guys wouldn't get it in beta. Still I hope you don't change it too much because I like it how it is now.
Reply #63 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Frogboy, if I may be so bold, I believe your code is erroneous and inconsistent. Here is my revision:

*** BEGIN CODE
if(lPopulationChange > 100)
lPopulationChange = 100;
if(lMorale >= 100)
// bonus will apply even if some unexpected circumstance pushes Morale over 100%
lPopulationChange *=2;
elseif(lMorale >= 75)
// bonus applies starting with Morale of 75%
lPopulationChange *=1.25;

fPopulationBonus = 1.0 + ((float) pCiv->GetAbility(ABILITY_POPULATIONGROWTH)/ 100.0f);

lPopulationChange *= fPopulationBonus;
// no reason to stop using the accumulation shortcut operator here...
*** END CODE


By beginning the Morale check at 100 and working down, you can use open-ended interval checking without using compound expressions to check the interval at intermediate stages (e.g. 75 <= x <= 99, which is a bit more involved as a c++ expression). Also, by using open-ended intervals, you can be sure you'll catch the circumstance even if some other logic inadvertently pushed a value past what you _thought_ was an upper limit (in this case, 100).

I'll grant you that, under most circumstances, a planet's approval may not even be 75%, so this code does two checks instead of one, but the trade-off of more self-obvious logic and a guarantee of catching possible wild values may be worthwhile.