Hycanth

Join Date 12/2005

A Closer Look At the Economic Sliders

Introduction to the Economy Model

In GalCiv2, there are separate buildings to increase the capacity for industry and research. These buildings (factories and labs, respectively) do not increase industry and research by themselves, but instead allow for industry and research to be produced by spending credits (bc). The sliders to allocate this spending consist of a spending slider that sets the percentage of the capacity which will receive funding to operate, and sliders to distribute the money into three categories of spending (military, social, and research). Military production and social production are both produced using the same buildings, namely factories, and in the analysis are summed together and referred to merely as production. In GalCiv2, the production and research sliders are effectively coupled; any increase for one causes a decrease for the other. By using the four sliders above, one effectively has control to choose:

1. The percentages of research capacity and production capacity which are utilized. These percentages can be as low as desired by setting the spending slider. However, the sum of these two percentages cannot exceed 100%, due to the slider coupling mentioned above.
2. The distribution of utilized production capacity to military and social production.

It is also important to note that these slider settings are empire-wide. You cannot set these sliders individually for each planet. There is however, an optional "focus" selection for each planet to set military, social, or research as a priority. Although it will not be discussed here, the effects of properly using this focus may have an impact and would be a useful extension to this analysis.

Colonies have an initial site that has both production and research capacity. Because of the slider coupling, it is impossible to ever fully use all of both capacities – half will always be wasted. This perhaps represents facilities that can be used for one or the other, but not both at the same time. Whatever the reason, nothing can be done about this waste and so I will avoid further consideration of it. However, the construction of factories and labs also results in wasted capacity which can be mitigated to at least some degree, and this is where I will turn my attention.

Analysis of Wasted Factory and Lab Capacity

The sum of the percentage of factories used and percentage of labs used can not exceed 100%. What this means in short is that large amounts of factory and lab capacity will go unutilized. Building fewer or more factories and labs can not lower the amount of capacity wasted, nor will increasing population or available funding. The waste of factory and lab capacity is influenced only by the ratio of factories to labs and the ratio of the production to research on the sliders. This is somewhat counterintuitive, but it has the implication that constructing and utilizing a lab increases the capacity wasted in all factories, regardless of all other factors.

It is important to keep in mind that wasted capacity is different from wasted production. Wasted production directly results in the loss of bc’s. Wasted capacity, on the other hand, results in the following losses:

1. More social production is used to construct labs/factories.
2. More planet tiles are used for labs and factories.
3. More maintenance is paid for labs and facotories.

Avoiding wasted capacity therefore has the practical return of providing you with more buildings that can give you other benefits, and possibly lowering your maintenance costs. So, just how much waste is there and how can you minimize it?

First of all, setting the spending slider at anything below 100% represents unused capacity. While it may be necessary in the short term, in the long term it means that you are constructing capacity which you are ordinarily not using. Nevertheless, this may be part of an overall strategy where the goal is to intentionally build more factories than you can afford to run continuously, in order to run them fully at times of need (for example, the outbreak of a war). As such, this unused capacity will not be termed as "waste". To see the waste which I am talking about, assume the spending slider is at 100%. It should be at 100% at least some of the time (otherwise you have built too much capacity and are never using it!), and we want to avoid capacity waste at this level as much as possible.

Let:

P = slider % on production
C = total capacity of all labs and factories
F = % of C which comes from factories

Then:

1-P = slider % on research
1-F = % of C which comes from labs

And so:

Production Factor = FP
Research Factor = (1-F)(1-P)
Production/Research Ratio = FP/(1-F)(1-P)
Waste = F(1-P) + (1-F)P = F + P – 2FP

Now, strategically we can determine our desired Production to Research ratio and independently assign the values of F and P from 0 to 1. Our goal is to choose F and P to achieve our desired production/research ratio (which tells us what our Production Factor must be) while minimizing waste. To minimize waste, we should maximize the product FP. Thus, for minimum wasted capacity, we should choose:

F = P = sqrt(Production Factor)

Relatively small changes to the Production Factor result in large changes to the Production/Research Ratio. For a PF of 0.5, the P/R Ratio is 1 (equal amounts of production and research). For a PF of 0.6, the P/R Ratio is 2.25, and for a PR of 0.8, the P/R ratio is 16 (16 times more production output than research output).

Conclusions

So, what does this mean? First, if you want a balance between production and research at maximum spending, you should build roughly an equal number of factories and labs (assuming they have equal production rates). You should also divide spending equally between the two activities. This results in 50% wasted capacity.

If you desire to have more production, then build more factories and increase spending on production by the same ratio. The more you do this, the less wasted capacity you will have. However, your research ability will decline very rapidly – faster than the decrease of waste. If you have 2.25 times as much production as research, and set F = P = 60%, then wasted capacity will still be 48%. Not much improvement! At the extreme, you can build no labs and only spend on production. The result is ZERO wasted capacity but also ZERO research!

Therefore, in practical terms, a large amount of capacity waste (~50%) is unavoidable if you desire any kind of balance between production and research. This is unfortunate because it can be confusing and frustrating for anyone new to the game. However, anyone else following a reasonably balanced strategy will suffer from similar waste and so it will have little effect. There is a possibility, however, for a strategy which eliminates this waste (specifically, a no research strategy in which technology is acquired in other ways). Attempting this strategy would be an interesting experiment (sorry I don’t have the time right now

) and it is unclear if it is worthwhile.

It is my position that the slider bars as they currently exist in GalCiv2 are convoluted. They do not allow the user to perform the desired actions in a simple manner. From the analysis above, one can derive a simpler model for these bars and the changes which would be needed to maintain game balance.

Not having truely played the game, I wonder what are desirable Production-to-Research ratios? Obviously this could be vastly different in tech-trading vs. no tech-trading games...

economics

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That's pretty much how I see it too. It's been beaten to death but . Maybe after the 1.1 bugs get fixed this will be looked at.

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I sincerely hope they change the sliders sometime to be independent of each other. With all the economic bonuses my empire has I end up with huge ammounts of money in the bank even at 100% production funding. I would love to be able to run my facories, research and social production all at 100% if I can afford to without taking away from other areas while doing so.

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Now I understand why I could not understand the sliding bars when I started playing the game. The copuling between labs and factories via the sliding bars is very obscure.

One comment on the main text; Waste is not minimized by setting P = F. You minize it by setting P = 1 if F > 1 - F and P = 0 if F < 1-F. If F = 1-F = 0.5, then waste is constant at 0.5 independently of where the P slider bar is. Also, for a given plate's F ratio, the minimum and maximun waste values obtained by adjusteing the P slidebar value to 0 or 1 is,

Mimimum Waste = minimum (F, 1-F)
Maximum Waste = maximum (F, 1-F) = 1 - (Minumum Waste)

For all other P vaules, waste varies linearly between the Minimum Waste and the Maximum Waste.

Of course, P and F are symmetric and interchangable in the above argument (one can consider the slidebar fixed and think of F as variable by destroing/building facotries and research centers).

Finally, if I can add my vote to the crowd, I wish the research spending where de-coupled from the social+military spending.

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To minimize waste, we should maximize the product FP. Thus, for minimum wasted capacity, we should choose:

F = P = sqrt(Production Factor)

FP is maximized when F = 1 and P = 1, like Ajosin says above.

If x + y = constant, then x * y is maximized at x = y = sqrt(x*y)... but we don't have a constraint like F + P = c, which seems to be where your analysis goes wrong.

I guess Ajosin covered this pretty well, now that I'm reading his reply.
Overall, your analysis is spot on up until the end. There's another level of waste that isn't discussed, though, and that's the production wasted (in the strongest sense) when a planet produces in excess of what is required to build a ship or building, or when a player researches in excess of what is required and the tech researched is at the end of a branch in the tree. This effect is quite significant in practice: often, the only incentive I have not to pump military or social to 100% is because this micro-level waste increases as more capacity is shifted to a single category.

Interesting post...

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Veblen,

You seem to be a pro at this game. I have been trying to read all the posts on this subject, but for some reason this forum loads very slowly on my PC. I would greatly apreciate it if you could answer a couple questions on the relative spending sliders. I apoloize if all these questions have been previously answered elsewere may times before.

Let's call the percentage of factory capacity funded P (as above) and the percentage of research capacity funded E.

1) Is there a reason why the constraint P + E = 1 is built into the game? If yes, what is this reason?

2) The constraint P + E = 1 seems totally disjointed with how the real worl works, where, for example, a society can fully fund both its factories and research centers simultaneously if it has enough money (in shuch a case P + E = 2). Nevertheless, the constraint is in place for the game. Is there a counter argument to the first phrase of this paragraph?

Also, I found an intuitive way to sumarize the original post using less math.

Assume you have a lawn mower and a grass trimmer in your garage situated in universe MetaV. To use the mower and trimmer you want to fill them up with gas (which you have plenty of). However, the physics laws in MetaV only allow you to fill the gas tanks in such a way that when you add the relative fulness of each tank you get 1 tank. For example, if you fill the mower 3/4 full you must leave the trimmer at 1/4 tank full (3/4+1/4 = 1). Because of this you allways have wasted gas tank volume capacity (unless you only have one machine in your garage).

Suppose the lawn mower gas tank is bigger than the trimmer's. To minimize the total gas tank volume you are not using you would fill up the lawn mower and leave the trimmer empty (1+0=1). If on the ther hand you filled up the trimmer you would have to leave the mower empty and maximize the waste.

If the mower and trimmer tanks have the same capacity, you will allways waste half of your combined tank volume regardless of how you distribute the gas.

Thanks in advance.

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The constraint P + E = 1 seems totally disjointed with how the real worl works, where, for example, a society can fully fund both its factories and research centers simultaneously if it has enough money (in shuch a case P + E = 2).

I believe the term "waste" is not quite accurate, when applied to unused capacity in the real world. Often times there are a series of steps to production, each step with some variance in output speed. What results is stockpiles of incomplete product at some places, waiting for a step that is already running at 100% capacity, and unused capacity standing idle behind it, because there is no more room for incomplete product. The solution is to run with a buffer of unused capacity that can absorb variance that occurs at any given step, and to spend time and money minimizing variance.

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the way the sliders are coupled really makes no sense

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Why do you people insist on making something so simple seem so complicated. Hell your probably intimidating the hell out of those new to this game, if I would have read a post like this when I first bought the game, my brain would have caved in on itself and I would be in the fetal postistion in a dark corner for the rest of my days.

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Yes it seems pretty simple to me also. You set your sliders to what you need to prioritize at the moment, and unless you are at 33% with all 3 you are selecting one to be higher than the other 2. If you set Research for instance to 90%, and 5% to the others, then you are prioritizing Research with funding at the expense of the other 2. If you drop your Overall Spending via the slider above the big 3 then you are simply doing this to perhaps balance your account or negate the need to raise taxes too high. Running that slider at 100% is usually a good bet if you can afford it, and means that the Research, Social & Military are recieving 100% of their alloted percentages be they 33% accross the board or any mix in between. I don't see any "waste" going on as each is contributing to your overall effort in the proportions you select.

Seems pretty simple to me really.

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Seems simple to me, one main slider for total spending and 3 to distribute it. Would like 100% spending to be 100% though. Toward the end of a game, I often have too much cash left over. You can just use that cash to buy ships instead of wait for production, but that's too tedious so I don't do it. Would be nice if the total spending slider was aware of how much money you're making.

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Are you gents saying that if you put your Overall Spending slider at 100% that you are not recieving the full benefits of that spending? If that is what the OP and posters after him were carrying on about then I'd have to say that they are correct to snipe about it and something needs to be fixed.

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That's like saying someone's career potential is wasted if they aren't a full-time engineer and a full-time scientist and a regular military officer. A planet's industrial capacity is its very peak potential - hey, you! Put that test-tube down and report to production line B! - at the expense of all other activity. Likewise research or military - I don't care how good an engineer you were, you're in the Navy now! - capacity. There are only so many people and so many resources in an economy and they have to be divided up somehow.

You guys who want all they factories/labs/shipyards to always run at 100%, all you're really saying is that you don't want to be able to transfer resources from one to the other.
Or do you just want to see something like Research 50% Social 50% Military 200%? Well sheesh, just normalise the numbers and it's exactly the same as running at 20/20/60%!

IMO, the sliders are correct as they are, and it's a very clever, well-thought out system. All I'm seeing in this thread is an emotional, irrational reaction by people feeling that they're somehow "losing" production to which they're entitled.

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Has anyone noticed that setting capital spending to 99% will disproportionately increase your income? For example, 100% --> 235 income vs 99% --> 249 income.

I generally leave spending at 99%.

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Most likely because the game rounds things down. So your production is rounded down, so you spend less money on producing, so your net income is higher.

TANSTAAFL.

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20/20/60%

Erm, make that 17/17/66%

*blush*

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i posted on this when i was new to the game and didn't get any support. Nice to see some people coming into the game that have noticed this game feature. However I do think that it is a good feature to have to choose between production and research --just wish it made sense. The only way i see that they could have it make sense would be for research to require both factory capacity and lab capacity. But don't think i would like that.

Nice to see someone else noticing that there are some funky things that happen with the sliders too. There are a lot more things that can happen than just the 100% to 99% on the spending slider.

Another funny thing that can happen is with the focus. If you have the production at 100% and put focus on research, you can get more research than if you had research at 100% if you have a large procdution capacity and low research capacity.
Lots of creative possibilities.

I'm still playing update 1.2 haven't tried the 1.3 beta yet.

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Another funny thing that can happen is with the focus. If you have the production at 100% and put focus on research, you can get more research than if you had research at 100% if you have a large procdution capacity and low research capacity.
Lots of creative possibilities.

Yep. This is how I compete with the AI on an even footing at higher levels without messing about with tech trading and other "economy cheese", or going the diplomacy route (doesn't interest me). Although I go at it from the opposite angle...by the end of year 2 I have nothing but research labs and focus on military or social as required.

For all that it allows me to compete at higher levels, I don't like the current system at all. I'd rather see the research and production sliders decoupled.

However I do think that it is a good feature to have to choose between production and research

I agree. But you would *still* have to choose between the two if the sliders were decoupled. Tiles are a finite resource after all.

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You make some good arguements for decoupling the production and research sliders. I'm inclined to sort of agree except that it would require a magor effort to rebalance the game and the game is awfully good right now (update 1.2) and I would hate to see it messed up.

Like your creative use of focus but sort of wondering what map size/planet abundance/game difficulty level you are able to do that with. I see it working possibly on a gigantic map/abundant planets/suicidal level but think that a gigantic map/normal planets/suicidal level would be iffy.

I usually just put labs on research bonus tiles and tech capital. I put in 3 basic factories or equivilant on all the planets. Then adjust sliders for what I'm currently focusing on. I usually have 0% on either social or military production and use focus on research whenever it doesn't change the turns for what i'm producing. Occasionally i'll have to ramp up the research slider to 100% to get a specific tech. I do do tech trading myself but will have to admit it is sort of a little too easy, I'm thinking of trying a few games with tech trading off but just more interested in some other stuff first. Guess this is just 1 more example of why this game is so good -- lots of ways to get the job done.

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Why do you call the sliders "economic"? The DA book I got with the gold edition calls them employment sliders ... that means when your industry is at 100% you are employing your entire population as government workers. When you adjust the military,social,and tech sliders you are adjusting how much of your labor force is being utilized in each area ... what is the problem?? There is no WASTE of production because its labor not production capacity you are setting. If there is any REAL problem its trade ... lowering employment (i.e. industry slider) should logically show an increase in trade and taxable income as the private sector grows. This doesn't happen and is the actual problem with the sliders that I see. They act like production sliders when they should act like employment sliders. Lowering government employment should increase tax income as it does in any valid economic system. This one seems broke, but only because the devs couldn't decide which direction to take, apparently.

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I recommend the following treatise on economic employment theory for those who wish to understand the basic principals:

John Maynard Keynes (1936)

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

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that means when your industry is at 100% you are employing your entire population as government workers.

All those billions?

When you adjust the military,social,and tech sliders you are adjusting how much of your labor force is being utilized in each area ... what is the problem??

All those billions?!

Nope, employment has nothing to do with it.

There is no WASTE of production because its labor not production capacity you are setting.

I think the pont is that you can't fund research and production at 100% each.

Post #17 says it all. This part reminds of something

by the end of year 2 I have nothing but research labs and focus on military or social as required.

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All those billions?!
Nope, employment has nothing to do with it.

Don't blame me I didn't the DA book. That's what says they are employment sliders. But they don't act properly for either employment or production. Besides the in game labels read like production sliders, but the book reads like employment sliders leaving use with the worst of both worlds - the limits of employment sliders with functionality of production sliders. So its 50/50 as to which way to go. You prefer all production, I prefer all employment ... but the difference would probably be mute if it was corrected either way.

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Postscript: Perhaps the sliders were originally production sliders? Maybe there messed up intentionally because the devs couldn't figure out how to make a crippled AI perform? What ever the case your point is also valid...

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Cool down man, I was *joking*. I don't prefer either, like it's been said in another thread neither one makes any real sense. It's actually a funding slider of sorts, you choose how much money you'll pour into production. But this is a global problem with the economic system, not just the sliders. The taxation doesn't make much sense either, the tourism income too, etc. But these are seen as minor details that don't really affect gameplay - only how you perceive the system.

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Well, this system bothers me since GC1 days, and I really can't understand why it has not been changed : it's counterintuitive, convoluted and doesn't allow players to implement easily the production strategy they want !

Worse is that there would be a very simple and IMHO elegant solution : instead of one "Funding%" slider and 3 "mil/prod/res" coupled sliders, put :
- One "Prod Fundin %" slider (expense vs max total possible factory prod)
- One "Research Funding %" slider (same vs max research)
- And two coupled "Mil vs Social" sliders (x% vs 1-x%).

Make this and poof the production system becomes crystal clear

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