Allocated Spending seems very confusing

am I the only one who thinks it's confusing?

from GalCiv2 Forums
I just got this game the other day, and most of the time since I've been trying to figure out the enigma of allocated spending, more specifically why it sometimes fluctuates as you move the distribution sliders around. For the sake of simplicity, assume in the following that industrial capacity is always set to 100%:

What I have figured out is this: When techonology spending is set to 100% of the budget, the allocated spending (minus bonuses and maintenance) is based entirely on your techonology capacity. When military or social spending is set to 100% of your budget, the allocated spending (again, minus bonuses and maintenance) is based on your manufacturing capacity, and whether or not you are actually manufacturing anything.

The question,then, is: what is it based on when you are using some mix of budget allocations? This I have not figured out. It appears to be some kind of complicated formula based on a weighted average. One thing that is certain is that your total allocatd spending, minus bonuses and maintentence, can never exceed either your technology capacity or manufacturing capacity, whichever is highest. This I find to be extremely unintuitive. It seems to me that if you have the spare capacity...why can't you use it?

Maybe someone understands this better than I do who can help me. I like to have a full understanding of these sort of games before I really get into them so I can play it well. The whole spending aspect of this game, to me, just seems incredibly over-engineered, as if there were too many cooks in the kitchen during the design phase of the game. I dunno, though, maybe I'm just missing something obvious...

I guess I should also add that I am using v1.4x of the game, for what that's worth...

Ben
5,157 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
This topic was discussed in the forums many times before. If you search around you should be able to find some more information/misinformation.

I was a big fan of understanding the numbers in a game as well, but I gave up trying to get the exacts of "the sliders." Now I play them more on feel, though it may take you a few games to get to that.

Once you start trying to take into account that a planet NOT building an improvement shunts extra production to ship building(and vice versa I think), and start using specialization, and economy starbases, and try to factor other bonuses such as the artificial slave center, the number crunching truly makes your head spin.

To me it seems like the 3 sliders are more like 2 sliders, production and research. It seems to make little difference whether military or social is higher if you use specializaitions on your planets. It does seem to matter how those 2 relate to the research.

Now that I look over my post, I guess I didn't really help at all. My advice though would be to not bang your head against the wall too hard on this one, it seems many veterans of the game don't fully grasp the sliders concept either.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I agree with Elwood on this. I just deal with the sliders by incrementally adjusting them if I feel I need more of this or that. Also, there are folks that build only factories and use focus to get research out of them and vice versa. I tend to think this isn’t such a good idea because AFAIK you don’t get your manufacturing bonuses applied to research capacity that’s been focused to production and vice versa. Elwood is also correct that this has been discussed a number of times on this forum.

Kblore probably has the best grasp of this topic of anyone I know and hopefully will weigh in on this thread and give you some top notch advice. Failing that you should search through the forums and you should be able to find some useful advice.

Here’s a couple of links to threads that discussed basically this topic.

Questions on Planetary Spending

Question about Production

Please ignore my post in this second link and go right to Kblore's reply (#8).
Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The implication of all of this, as near as I can tell, is that you will never be fully utilizing all of your potential manufacturing/tech capacity. Either you will be wasting some of your technology capacity or you will be wasting some of your manufacturing capacity, or both.

I think there should be an equation which determines what the maximum utilization is, in percentage of capacity. Assuming for simplicity's sake that you are building ships and improvements on every planet, I *think* said the optimal usage, in terms of ( ( % manufacturing capacity utilized + % tech capacity utilized ) / 2 ), would just be proportionate between your total technology and total manufacturing capacity. I.e. if I have 200 technology and 200 manufacturing on all my planets, with ships and improvements being built on all, I *think* the max utilization, as described above, would be 50% social + military, and 50% technology...I think...
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Either you will be wasting some of your technology capacity or you will be wasting some of your manufacturing capacity, or both.

True but when you use "focus" you're actually getting some portion of the "other" type of production just without any bonuses being applied. Of course some is wasted as well.

As I mentioned earlier some folks use either only manufacturing or only research throughout their entire civ and simply use focus to get the other type of production. If there were no production or research bonuses in the game, I would agree, but there are such bonuses and they can be quite substanstial.

Still if you only have manufacturing, at least when your producing ships you are fully utilizing all of your productive capacity. The other issue is that your production needs vs. research needs change throughout the game. I actually tend to change the mix of research and production buildings on my "core" planets as my needs change. I usually always have a manufacturing building on any tile with a manufacturing bonus and a research building on the research bonus tiles, but otherwise I'll go back and forth between manufacturing and research buildings as my needs change. I think this fact kind of defeats the concept of a single max utilization equation.

I think the bottom line is there will always be waste of some sort, I don't think there's any way around it. IMHO the normal way to deal with it is to have a good balance between manufacturing and research early, when you need the research and ships are cheap. Later in the game the need for research lessens and ships become a lot more expensive so you convert most of your research buildings to manufacturing.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Just to add a corrollary...

That is why production and research bonuses are worth less than equivalent economic bonuses.

You will always get 100% of your economic bonus, you will only get 100% of your other bonuses when you are committed to 100% focus in that category.
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I agree - it is more of an intution thing you get after playing a few times. For me, that is refreshing.

Coming from other TBS games, I too had trouble with the economic system in GC2 at first - but I hung in there and even though I don't really understand it's deepest workings, I now find it adds to the challenge and great interest I still have in the game.

In other games in the genre I've easily come to grips with the art of building an economy after playing a few times, but GC2's ecomonic model still throws me a curve now and then even after playing for 8 months. In the real world no system is 100% efficient - you always must weigh options and sometimes choose the best of non optimal ones. The game mirrors this well.