Er, I don't think it works exactly like that. I offer this opinion in the hopes that if somebody from Stardock reads it, they can either see that someone is getting close to understanding their economic system, or just one more example of someone who's wandered completely off the beam.

Factories and Research Facilities represent capacity. Example. Set your research slider to 0, set your spending rate to 100%. Now you are spending enough money to use every mp your factories can produce. Changing the Social and Military sliders simply allocates your factories out put to either guns or butter. You could have half your factories making spaceships, and the other half make extreme stadium parts. This is all well and good. The problem occurs when you move the research slider off of zero. You are now spending some money on your research facilites to generate tps. So, by definition you are no longer using 100% of your factories, you are only funding 100% - Research% of what your factories can do.

So, I think having just one spending slider is kinda gorfed. here is what I would do. Have two spending sliders. One for production, and one for research. This way, for the talented players out there who can generate big economies, they could fully fund both production and research. Then, below that, have a slider that has Social on the left, and Military on the right, and moving that slider simply changes what percentage of your production is used for spaceships, and what percentage is used for planetary improvements. As it stands now, I can see no way for a player with a lot of money to fully fund both research and production.

That single spending slider is creating all the confusion.

YMMV.

Yeah, I agree. They have clearly distinguished between tech points and manufacturing points, so they should be treated seperately in the sliders. Increased social spending should mean decreased military spending, and vice versa. But research spending should not be dependent on production spending. Two spending sliders I think would be nice and a bit less confusing. One for production and the other for research. Then have two percentage sliders for the production to divide it up into social and military. Just my thoughts.

I've played this game (and profusely read and re-read the manual) for about a week now, and, overall, like it a lot, though I too have seen some rather odd things with the economics. I am not sure if they're due to my continuing ineptitude in making an efficient econ for my civ (I'm usually 100% higher in econ capacity than any other civ in most games I've played - I have set econ skills somewhat for my race, but despite that I still can't seem to muster a decent fleet when the crunch comes) or due to a bonifide bug in the game's inner workings, but nonetheless I like the elegance of the economic model put into the game - it seems to minimize the MM (micromanagement) for me so far.

It is interesting to read this thread and see how so many people are trying to apply an economic model to this game from outside sources (other games, their own assumptions, etc.) and only end up (for the most part) just confusing the issue further. I suggest reading the manual (yes, you did take that out of the box with the CD, right? and focusing on pages 27-32 in particular.

Hycanth's tacit perspective is indeed refreshing, though, and very accurate, in my opinion.

And if any of you haven't bothered to do so yet: read page 28 of the fricking game manual. The whole first paragraph summarizes 90% of the econ system brilliantly; I'll quote the first sentance here just to make clear the over-arching point:

"The Manufacturing Points produced on a planet are divided between Military Production and Social Production, based on your settings in the Economy tab of the Domestic Policy screen." {grammar ed.}

Any colony's production capacity is based on two things: (1) The base colony tile (that nifty little domed thingy on all your planets), and (2) any completed factory tiles. Clicking on any of these will give you the production point base that each respective tile can produce.

Strangely enough, despite that explanation (and the manual's) I still can't seem to come to the same numbers as I see on the Colony Management (or Planetary Summary) screen. I was only able to figure out the research points on the Colony Management, in part, but there's still no real explanation on how to get to the numbers you're reading at the top of the screen.

If someone can figure this one out, that'd be cool.

--- Danek Jovax

One thing that I realized (between reading the manual yet again and testing some sliders on a particular planet I owned) is that the spending on a planet is also a factor on what is produced:

from the manual (pg. 27):
1bc will produce 1 mp (manufacturing point)
1bc will produce 1 tp (technology point)

You can correleate this with the details screen of your colony. Take the overall spending, subtract out the maintenance costs, then distribute the remainder according to the mil/soc/res slider settings. There is some rounding going on here, but you should be at least within a point of the number listed there.

Now the real confusion starts when you go back to the colony management screen and compare the mil/soc/res numbers at the top of the screen. You got it - they don't match up with the tp/mp's listed in the detail screen!

And I think this part may be a bug, and I'll demonstrate why:

Example:
I have the planet "Locke", 5 billion people, with the following structures:
- 1 Base Colony (16 mp / 10 tp - 16 bc maint)
- 1 Factory (9mp)
- 3 Xeno Labs (9 tp - 1 bc maint)
- 1 Starport (1 bc maint)
- 3 Adv. Market Centers

With 100% manufacturing, and the distribution set to 0/0/100 (mil/soc/res), I get the following (reading in the details screen):

spending = 83 bc
maintenance = 16 bc
military production = 0 mp
social production = 0 mp
research production = 67 tp

I'm getting 67 tp's because one of the Xeno Labs sits on a 300% bonus, giving 36 tp's for one of my research squares. The econ starbase bonus, I thought at first, wasn't factoring into this, but upon later review, I realized that the bonus is applied to the base tp's being generated, so then this is how I figured the 67; see below.

3 Xeno Labs = 9 + 9 + 9 = 27
1 x 300% bonus (with Xeno Lab built on it) = 9 x 300% = 27
1 Base Colony = 10
Subtotal = 27 + 27 + 10 = 64
Add econ starbase modifier = 8% of 37 = 2.96
Total = 64 + 2.96 = 66.96, rounded up to 67

Strangely enough, 82 test tubes are displayed on the planet management screen. I think this is due to 15 of the 16 bc's in maintenance are research-related (the last maint bc went to the starport) and are incorrectly listed here as research points. This I think may be a bug, especially if others here have seen this anomaly, or can reproduce it on their systems. It's possible this is already addressed in the 1.1 beta.

Now, I went back to my distribution screen and set my spending to 25/25/50 (mil/soc/res), leaving my manufacturing capacity alone to stay at 100%, then went back to Locke to see how things were being spent/produced:

spending = 66 bc
maintenance = 16 bc
military production = 8 mp
social production = 9 mp
research production = 33 tp

50% of total research production (which I calculate unrounded to being 66.96) is 33.48, which the game rounds down to 33.

Now for social/military production, I wish this calculation was as easy to do, since I'm not getting the same numbers using the same method for research production/spending - my figures are coming up consistenly lower than what I'm reading in the details screen - but as I'm still running version 1.0x.1 of GalCiv2, I think this may be related to a bug I've heard that was already addressed in the 1.1 beta (I think another thread may be about this bug but as of yet I haven't fully read though all the bug threads).

Spending allocations to planets seem to be automatically determined by the spending distribution settings along with the potential production maximums on each planet, taking starbase modifiers into consideration.

Anyways, that's what I've seen thus far. If any of you can report on the same or on something different, please mention it here. Later!

--- Danek Jovax

Let me start off by saying that if the economic model is so complicated that we have 20 people each of whom has their own theory on how it works (and none of whom can make the numbers add up correctly), then there's a problem with the game. TBS games with a management emphasis like this require complete transparency in how thing like this work (even if you're not in 100% control of each factor). I think the suggestion to add tooltips to the social/military/research area on the planet screen to show how those numbers are arrived at is a start (but a very small one).

That said, I completely agree with dac's post regarding how the enconmy is stated to work in the manual and his proposed 3-slider solution (one for research funding, one for manufacturing funding and one to allocate manufacturing between social and military spending). However, I would take it one step farther for us micromanagers. In addition to the sliders dac proposes on a global basis, we should be allowed to override the settings on a planet-by-planet basis and set the same set of sliders. The current ability to set a planet's "focus" on one area is too imprecise. Sometimes the boost seems to be large, other times it does nothing. Very frustrating and very non-transparent.

Let's hope that 1.1/1.2 fixes this problem since, for someone like me who likes to win games economically, this makes the game virtually unplayable.

Ken

Ok, I look at it this way:

Your Income:
Your population earns a certain amount of money (potential collected taxes).
The first slider lets you decide how much of the potential tax money available you are collecting.

The rest of the sliders are independent of how much money you are collecting.

Your Spending:
Your population then has a certain amount of people available to fill jobs and work in any industry to which they are assigned. These people of course need to be paid.
The second slider lets you determine how much money you want to spend paying the workers, thus how much of your potential workforce you employ. Each worker can only fill one job at a time, which is only in one industry at a time.

The 3 sliders under that let you decide how many of the jobs are put to use in that industry.

If you put them all on one, you can't put any on another. If you are spending 50% of them on your military production, then will receive not half of your total potential military production, but the output of half of the total paid workers.

This basically means that when all sliders are set to the same level (33%) that you are simply employing all of your paid workforce, spread evenly between each industry. By moving the funding over to one from another, you are giving that industry more people at the expense of the other. Therefore, you can only ever produce as much as your paid workforce will allow.

hmm. lot to think about there. in alot of the formulas your guys arent taking into account the populations of the planets involved. if you only have 10 billion people on a planet with 7 research buildings and each research building would 'normaly' (i say that because im guessing) need 2 billion people to work at full production then your 4 billion worker's short right out of the gate no matter how your budget is allocated.

is there any hard information that population matters to over all production? it seems like it should, after all i KNOW that i get a hell a lot more income from plunking down bank buildings on high population planets than i do on the out of the way bogholes. ive had ultra (20+) planets with 30+ billion people getting over 1K per turn income alone, when its just full of banks, farms and moral buildings.

Some advice:

BC's are the only real resource in the game and drive your economy. Therefore I suggest Economics as the preferred Racial and Political bonus. It adds exactly the percentage shown to your tax income and therefore frees up spaces on your planet for other buildings. Research is an excellent secondary choice because although it only provides half the bonus it says it provides, the bonus costs NO BC at all. Don't get Military or Social bonuses because to use those bonuses you have to spend more BC and so what happens is you end up with too little BC and can't have your production slider at 100% and so those bonuses actually get entirely wasted.

Make sure your total number of Factories and Research centers is always exactly the same on all planets size 4 or above (taking into account resource bonuses, so if you have a 300% manufacturing bonus then build 1 factory there and 4 total research centers). Doing so keeps your research and manufacturing capacities pretty close to the same number and so when you slide your Research bar up a lot of points you gain almost exactly as much Research as you lose Manufacturing on all planets instead of losing a lot more manufacturing on some than you gain in research. (The even applies to planets with Manufacturing or Research Capitals).

Never build a farm on a PQ6 or below planet because it will provide no benefit. Always build a farm on PQ7 or above planets because farms = population = influence and BC. Don't build more than 2 farms on a planet, though if you have a +300 bonus build one on it unless you also have a +100 to exploit instead. Watch the planet though, because it will be unhappy.

Only build one entertainment center on a planet because the effects of more is negligible and the spaces could be used for Cultural or Market centers instead.

Build a Port on every planet so your military doesn't go to waste.

Build a Market on every PQ 5 or above planet. Build another Market for every 3 total Research Centers and Factories you have beyond the 1st set (usually around PQ14 to 17 depending on resource bonuses). You do this so you can fund the extra BC costs of large production planets.

Don't build miltary things like fleet managers unless absolutely necessary given the military situation.

Here is my general build order for planets. I modify it based on resources and available wonders, but basically I hold fairly true to these choices:

Colony (default)
Factory
Starport
Research
Market
Factory
Farm
Research
Entertainment
Farm
Influence
Wonder if available, or reserve for future use.
Factory
Research
Factory
Research
Market
Factory
Research
Influence or Wonder
Factory
Research
Factory
Research
Market
Etc...

This seems to work very well, allowing me to almost always make extra BC's while running at 100% Industrial Capacity. There are some lean years at the start when I have lots of colonies, but thats easily dealt with by selling tech to minor races.