A Closer Look At the Economic Sliders

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...

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