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The Flawed GalCiv2 Economy

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The Flawed GalCiv2 Economy

from GalCiv2 Forums
I feel a burning need to prefix this by saying I am a huge fan. I love the company, love the game. The game doesn't have to change one lick and I'll continue to play and support this company. This game is amazing and the philosophy of the developers and interaction level they continue to provide is incredible (being a developer I have a special respect for the level of support they provide). NEVER give that up. That said there's some obvious glaring issues with the "behind the scenes" workings of the game. I'd like to think the devs are aware of it, but this post is more for the community than for them, although I sincerely hope SOME dev reads this through ... even if their reaction is nothing more than "Yeap, we've got that one on the list". The reaction I would hope we wouldn't ever hear though is "shut up stupid player, I'm the developer and I know better." Well the truth is it is their game, they can do whatever they want with it and I love it and love the company so I will continue to play, but these issues ARE real.

First of all I'd like to thank Iztok and Wyndstar for the wealth of research they've already put into this game. I'm sure there are others before them or who helped them, but those are the two names that come to mind when I think about research put into this game. I admit I am a relative newcomer (I've only been playing for three months now), so I apologize to any earlier contributors.

So the point is quite simple, I think the Developers have dug themselves into something of a hole with the current economic system. It's simply an issue of "too many moving parts" which has allowed the current extremes to occur. It's also the result of what I have to consider intentional obfuscation of the inner workings. There's a lot of non-intuitive effects in the game which for the most part work fine if you don't think about them (for instance the fact that upgrading to a new building type can bankrupt you and that you should upgrade bank/economy buildings if you want more research/production), and sometimes I get the impression they don't want us to actually look under the covers. Anyhow here's my take on it.


#1. The production fallacy - Your buildings don't do what you think they do.

So you have a planet with 5 industrial sectors on it, each produces 16 production (according to the description), so your planet should have 80 production units?? Wrong. First of all the maximum it can possibly produce is based on the combination of your master production capacity slider, and the individual ones pertaining to the social/military sliders. So lets just say the master slider is set to 50%, now your 80 is capped at 40. Now you need to look at the individual sliders to find out how much you can produce of that 40. If your social production is set to 50% of the 100% pie, and you are trying to build an improvement on that planet, your 40 is now cut down to 20. This is extremely confusing, specially considering even with a master slider at 100%, you will virtually never get 100% of your production out of a building type. So you suddenly come to the stunning realization that by trying to be "balanced" (which would imply halved), you really end up quartered.

Here's the example. Lets say you put your production at 50% research, 49% social, 1% military, with the master slider at 100% (lets just forget about the master slider from now on, it's really really stupid and needs to go away). That's about as balanced as you can be. But, those sliders don't actually produce anything, they just limit things ... that's the fallacy. Now you have to go to your planets and of your production tiles you have to split them up evenly between industry and research. So lets just say you have 100 free tiles, 50 industrial sectors, 50 discovery spheres. Maximum production of 800, maximum research of 900. Balanced. But now the sliders come in and cut that 800 down to 400 for military or 392 for social, and the research drops to 450. 400 military and 450 research isn't 50/50 ... its actually 25/25. If you took all 100 tiles and put discovery spheres on them you would now have 1800 maximum research, and if you put your slider to 100% research ... you'd get your 1800 flasks. Same goes with the production, if you built all Industrial Sectors you'd have a peak production of 1600 hammers/shields for either social/military if you put 100% to the slider (though you'd probably prefer 1/99, which would give you a max military of 1600, and a max social of 1584. But nope, by going balanced instead of 50/50 ... you get 25/25 (or lower if you don't have the master slider at 100). This is VERY misleading and illustrates the innate problems in the sliders, specially the "pie" nature of the research/social/military sliders.

The all research/industry debacle is the result

So with the above being the way it is, suddenly you are left wondering what can you do about it? I mean the truth of the matter is that with any even remotely balanced approach you are likely NEVER going to see more than 50% of your maximum production in any area and more than likely never more than 30%. Well thanks to the unintended use of the "focus" mechanic, you can avoid this and actually get large percentages (more than the 25-30% most "normal" players ever see) of your hard earned production or research. The basic idea is pretty simple. Take the slider and put it 100% into research (or 99 social/1 industry), now build ONLY those buildings. Finally on every colony put the "focus" into the opposite (so if you are building research, focus social/military).

Lets see how it works. Lets take the 100 tiles from above and put 100 discovery spheres on them. 1800 max research and since our research slider is set to 100% research, whatddya know ... we get all 1800. Now with a focus on production we "convert" 25% of that 1800 into production which leaves us with 450 production and 1350 research. Holy moly!! The "balanced" approach produces only 450 research and 400 production, this produces 1350 research and 450 production from the same 100 tiles. Whoa ...


The culprit: The sliders

A lot of people responded to the initial idea with thoughts like "that's an exploit and needs to be nerfed" ... but if you ask me the strategy isn't an exploit, it's a symptom. It's a symptom of the fundamental flaws of the economy. The fact that by being forced to "balance" how much research and/or industry we make TWICE. First is with our building selections on the tiles, second is with those stupid sliders. To be honest you should only have to choose once. Either let us make decisions on a planet by planet basis by building our planets how we desire, or just let us build "general production buildings" and let the sliders decide what they make. The latter is REALLY boring, so I suggest the former. IF you want to put sliders in for each still, let them all go from 1-100 and forget the whole PIE aspect (again advanced players would likely just set them all to 100 and forget them as they currently do with the master slider).

I sincerely hope something is done about this some day. Maybe only in GalCiv3, but someday. Ultimately the problem lies in how things are so misleading. There's already enough confusion around the basic production unit (which isn't a hammer, or a flask, but a billion credits) ... as a beginning player it was entirely unintuitive to me that my factory didn't actually make production of any kind, but rather it facilitated me turning credits into production units. Well this trumps that in a huge way, pretty much handicapping players who are not aware of the reality of the sliders and how evil they are.


#2. Farms, morale buildings, influence, espionage, trade ... all suck at the highest levels of play.

While #1 is in fact my REAL beef and I nearly wrote the post entirely about that, I feel that these collectively form what I call the "forgotten features" which intuitively should be FAR more meaningful than they ultimately end up being. I mean this game still has a tile improvement named "food distribution center" (or whatever) ... which is nigh-worthless. Clearly game balancing had been in overdrive and we are left with some artifacts of outmoded ideas and again, unforeseen consequences.

Farms: Even with a heavy focus on morale it becomes extremely inefficient to have planets much over 13-16 billion. That pretty much makes the 300% farming tiles completely worthless (and dangerous in higher end governments), and the food distribution centers are really a bad joke. When I first started playing the game I was under the (false) impression that agriculture would be a big part of the game ... and these artifacts seem to tell the story that at one point so did the developers. Now its not. Now a farm is just a required building, kind of like a Starport, something you put one down and forget about. It's a non-factor, so either shoe-horn agriculture into the game or remove it entirely. The basic farm techs are fine as is, but remove the tiles (at least the 300% one) and the food center. Still my opinion is if it doesn't serve a strategic purpose, it's not useful. Right now farms are only useful because smart players can place an agent on an enemy farm right before invasions. That's broken, not strategic.

Influence: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? I like the idea, but much like with farms and espionage, a player can completely ignore the entire concept and still play a successful game. That's broken to me. When I see influence tiles I just shake my head and put down a farm or another factory. I would LIKE to have to care about influence, but there's little point. It doesn't help me make more money (tourism income is a tragic joke), it doesn't help me trade (I've never gotten anything good from trading influence points), it doesn't help me in diplomacy. All it does is allow me to peacefully take planets (would be a good idea if it wasn't so painfully slow and/or expensive), and to win an influence victory. It needs to have a larger role in diplomacy, or have something meaningful. An influence starbase should serve SOME role beyond just trying to flip a planet.

Espionage: I have to admit it's kinda cool, but there needs to be better defensive options. With the scaling of cost things get silly as time goes on and if two or more opponents gang up on you, you can NEVER use espionage offensively. I think you should be able to build a spy network for home ... like CIA buildings. I know the counter espionage buildings effectively do this, but it should be on a larger scale and not have a massive tile requirement. 2-4 buildings across an empire to build up a half-decent defense would be nice (though by no means 100% effective), specially if it helped you with your offensive endeavors. Also more options like allowing spies to go unnoticed but not screw up enemy tiles, or focusing on stealing tech rather than just getting info. There's TONS you can do with this and when I discovered how limited the options were I was kind of sad ... I hate to bring up MOO, but one of my FAVORITE strategies was the super-spy approach ... which just isn't viable here. I'm not saying it has to be, but more options would be nice. And the whole spy on a farm thing is pretty broken as is, not so much because turning off a farm shouldn't hurt, but because no one has more than one farm so with a single spy you're effectively halving their effective ground defense. It wouldn't be an issue if planets routinely had 3-4 farms.

Trade: This just really needs to be looked at. Perhaps have the number of trade routes less limited by tech but more by population size. Like you get an extra trade route every 20 billion folks or something. Trade is brokenly strong early on, and fades into nothingness towards the end. A super trader race would be very fun if it were more viable on a longer-term scale. Perhaps if influence played a strong part of Trade revenue or routes you could kill two birds with one stone.

Basically my issues with all of the above is they're just not super viable, or even necessary. I am all for playing the game any way you like, and in fact I recognize this as the strength of the 4x style ... replayability heavily depends on the various styles of play and I'd hate to see it all diluted into a single generic style by requiring too many things, but honestly all aspects of the game should be necessary to a limited extent, and can be so without having to completely dilute the game. If you want agriculture as a part of the game, MAKE IT SO. Maybe even an agricultural strategy that's viable in some fashion. Trade should be viable. Tourism should be viable. Influence should matter a whole lot more than for flipping planets or whatever. These are some awesome concepts that just need a bit more weight in the game rather than just being a novel concept you play around with on super low difficulty levels.


Again I'm not trying to rebuild the game and I offer very few solutions for that reason. My fixes are meaningless as I am not employed by Stardock. Ultimately the problems are there and only become magnified as you play the game on higher difficulty levels. So many awesome aspects of the game boil away as too inefficient and ultimately unnecessary while the few remaining operate on some fundamentally misleading (I won't say broken) concepts. I'm not saying an influence victory should be viable at the hardest difficulty level, but influence should still MATTER. Farms and trade and espionage and whatnot all should too. I think the developers need to decide which of these concepts are strategic, and which are just not working. Clearly some they have already abandoned (farms), while others they seem to keep playing with (espionage) ... while others just seem in limbo (trade/influence). And then back to the first issue ... sliders. Just ... do SOMETHING. I LOVE the idea of the all research or all industry strategies and recognize that they require an abhorrently strong economy to power and are not "insta-win" by any means, but they should not be the ONLY way to get anything even vaguely resembling efficient use of your tiles ... but right now they're ALL YOU GET. Right now any balanced approach is just a waste of tile space. I realize the game is heavily balanced around this inherent "waste", but that's not a terribly good excuse. Balance the game on efficiency, not waste please. It is a great game as is, but it really could be a whole lot more. You could have high influence agrarian super powers who dominate trade contending with military super powers who can't subsist without the trade from the farm nations ... or whatever. The fundamentals are there.
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Reply #26 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
feralminded, your post was excellent!! thanks! My strategy is definetely changing. I used to build balanced worlds (if there were 8 tiles, 4 would have research buildings and 4 would have factories) Stupid me! Why not just build all factories and then focus each planet on research!
Reply #27 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Now I understand exactly why alot of the good players always built focused planets (all factories or all research)
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Reply #28 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Now I understand exactly why alot of the good players always built focused planets (all factories or all research)


I prefer to use full research (I tend to find that with a five generation advantage in weapons and in armor tech there isn't much the A.I can do to stop me). Only issue is getting the game started up early when you have to buildup your worlds.

The problem I've always had with all industry is that more often then not so much of that is wasted. Once you have a fleet of a certain size you don't want to build anymore, and once you have your planets advanced to a certain point all that is worthless, where as research is always useful.
Reply #29 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The problem I've always had with all industry is that more often then not so much of that is wasted. Once you have a fleet of a certain size you don't want to build anymore, and once you have your planets advanced to a certain point all that is worthless, where as research is always useful.


i've found the key to all-factories is to slowly switch many of them to being pure econ - not even a starport. - once you've advanced sufficiently in the tech tree.

overall i find the all-labs is better, except then it's a lot of work to switch over if you finish the tech tree, you can't work on both social and military production, and they take a very long time to develop.
Reply #30 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
overall i find the all-labs is better, except then it's a lot of work to switch over if you finish the tech tree


I have never once come any where close to finishing the tech tree. Perhaps my strategy is flawed....
Reply #31 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I have never once come any where close to finishing the tech tree. Perhaps my strategy is flawed....


"flawed" it is not. my sense, from reading your prior accounts, is that you're a "go for the jugular" kind of player. i'd be nowhere near finishing the tech tree if i was pursing war the entire time, and in games where i want war early on (as in a war of total conquest), i usually give up research entirely.
Reply #32 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Question about morale buildings, how would you like the behavior changed? This is something that could be addressed in 1.7.


Thanks for asking. Mumblefratz lays it out pretty well. And if you have the time, hopefully my The Death of Morale Buildings thread helps a little to understand the problem. Several things conspire under the current system:

1) Money (bcs) are the most important thing. For morale buildings to be useful, you must be able to get more money by using them. For a morale building to be useful, placing one of them must allow a 2.5% increase in your global tax rate... or two of them allow a +5% increase (or more) to your global tax rate. In DL 1.4 - two morale buildings DID allow for (at least) a 5% increase in tax rate. In DL 1.4, morale buildings were therefore worthwhile. Even at middle population amounts (13-20 billion) two morale buildings don't allow a 5% increase in tax rate in DA. Therefore, you should always build stock markets in DA, never morale buildings.

2) Higher populations only increase income slowly. Because of the sqrt applied when figuring out how much money a population produces. (Thanks again Iztok) So 20 billion people don't produce twice the money of 10 billion people. They produce only about 25% more. Therefore, higher populations are problematic for producing more money. You will make more money with identical tax rates with 4 planets at 9 billion population than you will with 2 at 20 billion. But at 9 billion you ALSO have no morale worries, so you are free to run at 79% for almost the whole game (excluding the first 30 turns or so). At 20 billion, it is almost impossible to run at 79%, so not only do you make less money by going this route, you can't support as high a tax rate, a double whammy. This makes the only option for money horizontal expansion - always grab as many planets as possible and keep them to the low end of the morale curve (6b - 12b, usually 9b), vertical expansion - a few planets with a high population - isn't a workable strategy.

3) As Mumblefratz pointed out, in addition to the lack of money produced by higher populations - they create a triple penalty on trying to maintain a higher population. The fact that VR centers, the best you can get in morale buildings, result in only a 6% bonus at the top really starts to show why they are not worthwhile. Plus, with smaller populations you are losing almost NONE of your income potential. I've said this before, but basically the problem is this: At low populations you have no need for morale buildings. At high populations when you might need morale buildings, they provide such a small bonus that stock markets (or factories, or anything that will help you in the game) are a more worthwhile use of a tile.

4) Empire wide morale bonus does not need to be weakened again. That you need a +1000% to be able to get a max bonus for a 25 billion population is already big enough. But compare the effect of empire wide morale bonus to morale buildings, and it is pathetic. That 5% bonus from an entertainment center isn't even that good for LOW populations, it is only a 3% bonus. It eventually drops to a 1% bonus for higher populations. When you look at the penalties associated with the higher end of the tax scale - I only ever run for most of the game at between a 69% and 89% tax rates - there is no way for a morale building to ever support a 2.5% increase in tax, which is the level they need to hit.

5) I hate to bring up penalties, but in this case, you really need more penalties for running at 30%-40% morale. You only need higher morale for 2 out of 52 weeks to support a higher government. Your people don't revolt or defect (often enough) to matter. The population drop takes care of itself... because typically what happens is say I want to run 11 b populations, but researched too far in the farms line so now my planets have a 13b pop limit. They will breed up to 12 billion, get unhappy due to low morale, and die down to 11 billion again, then get happy, and breed back up to 12 billion, etc. All the while I have an 89% tax rate - and I still have my "base" 9 billion unmolested providing all the tax money on each world. Whether my population is at 11 billion or 12 billion has no real effect on my empire, so it doesn't hurt to have morale drop down to 35% (or even 25%) empire wide. They will get happier as they die, and they will always keep at least my 9 billion (real) tax producing population alive. Fixing the morale penalty for advanced governments will help, but doesn't solve the problem. First, you don't need to use advanced governments. Second, by "fixing" that problem all you do is force me to abandon the 12billion pop worlds (that I don't like already) and focus more on the 9 billion pop worlds (where the real money is).

6) Personally, if I had the code, I would make the following changes:
1. When people start dying, worlds start defecting. At lower than 40% morale you start to have a REAL chance that a world will strike off on its own, or defect to an opponent in close proximity to that world. This forces players to keep at least 40% morale for almost the whole game - bringing morale in as a factor even when money isn't a concern.

2. Morale buildings would offer a static bonus to approval, so that they can be used for larger populations. Say 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%. Yes, this does mean that with 6-8 VR centers you can support large populations. But, that is a 15%-20% loss in tax rate already (because 6-8 tiles could be stock markets) AND all of that population doesn't really produce that much money anyway. It more opens up influence and troop options.

3. Votes for government would be based off of a formula that remembered what your approval was over the last 26 weeks. The current week would be worth 26/351, the week prior 25/351... etc. and 26 weeks ago is worth 1/351. People have short memories, but you still would need to run at lower tax rates for a good portion of the year to be able to pass an election. This would combine with #1 to give people a reason to keep their approval above 40% for most of the game.

With just these three changes (well, really with just change #2, but I'm dreaming) morale buildings would again be efficient to use at some points in the scale, although still not necessarily all. You would also open up more strategy options with higher population worlds. It's not that I don't mind hundreds of worlds with 6-9billion people being taxed 89% and filled with stock markets, but its my only option for decent money. I think making all three of these changes would force players to again consider lower tax rates (down to as low as 69% even) and also open up the options of actually using some higher population worlds - although higher pop worlds would take work, at least they would be possible.


There are, of course, lots of other changes that could be made, but those other changes start to have far ranging consequences that alter the delicate balance already in place. I wouldn't alter penalties for tax increases, change the other penalties for higher populations, change what % of people pay tax in a population, etc. etc. without a lot more thought, because tweaks to any of those fundamentals starts to create unintended consequences that might drastically effect the game. But the three changes I listed, I think, would allow the current balance to stay in place while bringing in morale buildings as a realistic use of a tile in a competitive game.

Hope that helps. Thanks again for asking. You guys are the best!
- Wyndstar
Reply #33 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Hope that helps. Thanks again for asking. You guys are the best!
- Wyndstar


the best set of suggestions i've heard so far - but i expect nothing less from one of the few community members who's invested serious effort researching and pondering such issues. thank you very much, Wyndstar.
Reply #34 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Agree with the OP, *especially* with point 1. I was banging on about this many months ago and was also playing and advocating the all research/all factories approach which now seems to have become very popular as the most efficient method (excuse the crowing; I'm almost never ahead of the curve )

Regarding morale, Mumblefratz is spot on:
As long as the triple effect of base morale is in place you have a situation where there's a very sharp inflection point in the graph of population versus approval...


However, I think even if you fix that, there's still going to be a problem because at the moment, high populations offer next to nothing of real substance vs low populations. A few suggestions to offset that:

1) (Probably the main one) The point of rapidly diminishing tax income vs population needs to be shifted *way* over toward higher populations. Stop scaling tax income by the square root of the population. Personally, I'd go with linear, with (maybe) a progressively slower scaling at *high* populations to avoid 100B game breaking planets. A power somewhere in the middle would also work.
2) Cap the max production/research capacity on each planet by population; eg 10B people can produce 100 hammers and no more, regardless of how many factories are on the planet.
3) Make influence more powerful, or possibly make unusually low influence more damaging. I've never given a rat's arse about it and it's caused me no problems whatsoever.

I get the impression (my apologies if it's mistaken) that game balance is trying to be created by largely trial and error changes to the numbers. The problem with that is with pretty complex interactions between the various elements, any change is *very* likely just going to lead to a situation where some other setup is blatantly superior. It needs someone with a decent aptitude for math and lots of time and patience to sit down and calculate a system which is really going to be equally viable for lots of different play styles.

Please don't think I'm slagging anyone off here. The game's great. It's not like the balance holy grail is (even remotely) achieved by most strategy games. I applaud you for still trying to find it.
Reply #35 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Certainly the comments about morale are the most important topic that's been brought out in this thread and I don't really want to distract from that theme.

However a couple of points have been made that reveal an underlying attitude that indicates a fixed and unmoving strategy.

People seem to be taking "All Industry" or "All Labs" as an all encompassing strategy. The problem with these two paths, or any other fixed strategy, is that they tend to imply that someone develops their planets in one set pattern either optimizing factories or labs and then leaves them that way throughout the entire game.

I think this exhibits a certain inflexibility that results in folks not being able to reach their full potential. Certainly there are times in the game when a focus on production is important, just as there are times when a focus on research is important. Also not mentioned is the focus on income which is more or less important throughout the entire game.

The problem with any of these so called strategies is the implication that you build your planets up and then you're done for the game. Frankly, I find that I pretty much rebuild each and every one of my planets at least two or three times during a game.

I usually start out with a balance between factory and research during the colony phase. As the game progresses I tend to rebuild individual planets towards either production or research, for whichever they seem better suited. Planets that will end up PQ9 or less (after all terraforming techs have been achieved) are really not powerful enough for either production or research and I just focus them on income from the beginning. Towards the late middle of the game I usually convert all research buildings towards either production or income and by the end of the game I replace all factories with stock markets. By the end of the game every planet is an income planet. However over the course of the game a lot of my original planets may be totally rebuilt two, three or even more times.

This allows me to adjust as required based on my needs. It does add quite a bit of micromanagement to the game but that's a price I'm willing to pay. Don't get me wrong, there are times when switching from one need to another that you effectively use focus to gain more of the other type of production, but using this as a long term solution isn't as effective as simply building more of what it is that you really need at the moment.

The enabling feature that allows you to do this is income. If you can develop a high enough income you really don't use any social production. This at least eliminates one of the inefficiencies associated with the sliders. You simply buy the buildings of the appropriate type at one per planet per turn. I can totally rebuild a galaxy full of 450 planets from one focus to another in perhaps ten turns. All it takes is an "extra" 100K in income per turn and you can convert anything to anything else very quickly, at least in game time.



Reply #36 from Stardock Forums Top
I think part of the problem is that the tiles are new. The production sliders WERE the way that you had to choose between research and technology in the days of yore. However, once you could start to build buildings on planetary tiles, suddenly there were two ways to choose between research and technology. Not only did this end up being redundant, but as you correctly point out, ended up splitting resources TWICE, so that you end up with a 25%/25% split. The only way to go to 100% is to choose all of the same thing twice in a row (all labs/facs - 100% in just one slider) - and that REALLY isn't intuitive.
- Wyndstar

I had wondered how a system like this one came about. When I first got the game, I played a few times and the results made little sense. Once I read up on how the game really functions, I saw how incredibly counter-intuitive it all was. I played it for a while longer though, solely as an abstract strategy game, but it's not the kind of game I really wanted to play.

Unfortunately, Stardock has spent a huge amount of time and effort trying to "fix" this system. And apparently that's what created this whole weird kluge in the first place. It's way past time to start over from scratch.

But I don't know if they ever will. It seems the game has developed a following of people who enjoy "playing the system" rather than playing a space colonizing game. I suspect that some of them would scream to high Heaven if Stardock "wrecked" GalCiv by making it work something like the way a normal person would consider intuitive - thus destroying all their meticulously practiced (albeit bizarre) slider strategies.
Reply #37 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Buying stuff is very time efficient, but it's also *extremely* economically inefficient and should be avoided as much as possible IMO. There's no real need to change your planets with the focused approach unless:
1) you're in all labs mode and finish the tech tree. Your labs are now virtually useless (but then you've also won the game already if you have tech victory on ).
2) you're in all factories mode, have built your fleet and are off to war so no longer need such a hefty production base. In this case you'll probably be converting to stock exchanges and this won't take long since you have all factory worlds!

As you rightly say though, unless you're a genius at forward planning, both strategies need to be supplemented by a very strong economy to make up for their inflexibility, especially all labs so you can support your pathetic production by buying your ships if need be. And of course to *get* to all labs in a sensible time, you've got to put a few factories down first!
Reply #38 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
But I don't know if they ever will. It seems the game has developed a following of people who enjoy "playing the system" rather than playing a space colonizing game. I suspect that some of them would scream to high Heaven if Stardock "wrecked" GalCiv by making it work something like the way a normal person would consider intuitive - thus destroying all their meticulously practiced (albeit bizarre) slider strategies.


I'd have thought people who enjoy playing the system (and I'm one of them) would welcome pretty much any changes. A whole new system for them to figure out how to beat.

Reply #39 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I usually start out with a balance between factory and research during the colony phase. As the game progresses I tend to rebuild individual planets towards either production or research, for whichever they seem better suited. Planets that will end up PQ9 or less (after all terraforming techs have been achieved) are really not powerful enough for either production or research and I just focus them on income from the beginning. Towards the late middle of the game I usually convert all research buildings towards either production or income and by the end of the game I replace all factories with stock markets. By the end of the game every planet is an income planet. However over the course of the game a lot of my original planets may be totally rebuilt two, three or even more times.


hi mumble,

i think you're conflating particular player strategy and outlook with the design 'flaw' embodied in the all factory or all lab approach. these are two separate issues. i often employ one of the two methods during a game, but i also find myself changing up the purpose for a planet, in ways very similar to your own, throughout a game.

the 'problem with the system' that makes the all factory or all lab approach counter-intuitive or flawed or exploitative or what have you - is that it allows you to do more production (industry + research) than a mixed approach without as appropriately serious drawback. flexibility in the terms you describe above applies to player's outlook on his/her tiles throughout the course of the game; but even you admit that you tend to reach certain peaks of development where all your tiles have been developed to a larger goal that may span months' or years' worth of turns.

the kind of flexibility that you should lose by employing an all factor/lab method is the flexibility to shift your production needs suddenly. i've found that can be a bit of a problem with the all-labs approach; but with the all factories approach, i've found there's more than enough flexibility if i focus all my planets on research and mess with the military/social sliders (allowing for focus exceptions in unusual circumstances).

in games employing a traditional method, i usually trail somewhat in industry, but far excel in economy and research. using the all-factory method, i excel in industry and still carry an appriciable lead on research. with the all labs method, i can get my research to the point of dwarfing the other AI players' to a single pixel on the bottom of the minigraph, and i don't trail in industry much more than i otherwise would - but that was still whilst raking in the dough. if i wanted to focus on production instead of income, i think i could have even outpaced the AI's industry.

for me it comes down to a feeling: "i paid, in time or money, to build this thing, i pay to keep it around, and i can afford to pay staff to work round the clock, helping to employ the billions of people on my world - so what's stopping me exactly?"
Reply #40 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
i think you're conflating particular player strategy and outlook with the design 'flaw' embodied in the all factory or all lab approach. these are two separate issues.

I had to look up "conflating" although the gist of what you mean is clear from context.

Of course you're correct, in fact I wasn't trying to relate the two issues at all. I was merely trying to point out that some peoples take on these strategies seemed rather robotic and I was encouraging folks to not be afraid to rebuild your planets as necessary.

Buying stuff is very time efficient, but it's also *extremely* economically inefficient and should be avoided as much as possible IMO.

I disagree. Buying ships versus building them is extremely inefficient economically, however buying regular buildings is not nearly so inefficient. Super projects and wonders are inefficient as well, however your run of the mill buildings are not nearly so bad.

For example, a stock exchange built on an open tile costs a mere 1148 bc, a bargin at half the price. Add to this that when rebuilding you are most often builing one building on top of another and even though you don't get full credit for buildings of different types when building a stock exchange over a manufacturing center or invention matrix or any other high end building it usually costs only 438 bc.

Even when "buying" ships you can simply produce the bare hull and then "upgrade" the ship to whatever you want for far less than the cost of a rush buy of the ship directly.

In any case the economic focused strategy does require a certain critical mass to achieve. It really doesn't work that well in medium or smaller galaxies. However, I can gaurantee that in a decent sized galaxy I can outproduce you with a few planets with factories and the rest with nothing but stock exchanges than you can with any all factory strategy that you care to implement.

In many a game I've produced 300 ships per turn for turn after turn by simply buying them. These are typically ships that would take 4 to 6 turns to produce on most planets even if 100% populated with Industrial Sectors. The best anyone could hope to produce to match this using ordinary production on a comparable sized galaxy would be about 100. So in the most inefficient situation of buying ships I can be about three time more productive with my million plus bc per week income than can be achieved by producing them. When it comes to building simple buildings I suggest that I can be about ten times more productive than the all factory strat can be.

Certainly everyone is welcomed to their own opinion but in this case my opinion runs totally contrary to the one that you've expressed. I submit that it's producing buildings and ships that is the far more inefficient method.

[edit]
To explain this a bit further it really doesn't matter what the conversion rate between bc's and production units are. When looking at one unit of production costing 1 bc and then comparing that to what it costs to rush buy anything then you will naturally come to the conclusion that producing things is more efficient than buying them. But that's flawed logic.

The true comparison is to compare how much can be produced per turn by conventional production methods and then compare that to how much can be bought if all your resources are dedicated to income.

The answer is that you can ultimitely buy far more if all your resources are dedicated to income than you can produce if all your resources are dedicated to production. The fact that your production costs 1 bc for every 5 bc that I spend to buy the item directly matters very little when my income is 20 times larger than yours.
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Reply #41 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
The true comparison is to compare how much can be produced per turn by conventional production methods and then compare that to how much can be bought if all your resources are dedicated to income.


I agree, but I still strongly dispute your claim. Let's say each stockmarket adds 100BC of income per turn (an overestimate, I believe). From a production point of view, that tile can *effectively* be considered to be a factory producing 10BC of production. An industrial sector produces more than that even at a most basic level. Once you throw in civ and economy starbase bonuses, the difference between the two can become pretty big.

For example, a stock exchange built on an open tile costs a mere 1148 bc, a bargin at half the price. Add to this that when rebuilding you are most often builing one building on top of another and even though you don't get full credit for buildings of different types when building a stock exchange over a manufacturing center or invention matrix or any other high end building it usually costs only 438 bc.


Will the extra income from the stockmarket cover the extra cost incurred in the time it would take to build it? The answer to that depends on the planet's income. *No way* near the start of the game, but it's highly possible from the middle onwards.
Reply #42 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
How much a single stock market adds to your income is not a fixed amount. First off it adds 25% to the planets current income which is based on the population of the planet. Secondly that planets income is then multiplied by your economic ability which with techs and wonders of various sorts (MCC) along with economic resource mining can easily be in the range of 400% to 500%. Add to that the double economic prosperity event which is a not uncommon occurance and I can earn in the vicinity of 1.6 million bc's per turn with approximately 450 planets. Dividing 1.6 million by 450 results in an average per planet income of a bit more than 3,500 bc's. Even allowing you the equivilient of 10 to 1 production efficiency which I think is a very high estimate (it's probably closer to 5 to 1) this is the equivilent of 350 units of production or almost 22 Industrial Sectors on each and every planet in the galaxy. So I will grant you that if you can build up a galaxy full of planets with an average of 22 Industrial Sectors on every planet in the system you could probably match my total level of production.
Reply #43 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
It's hardly a fair comparison if you take something which may very well not happen! But anyway, don't forget I have a fully built up econ starbase network, more than doubling production on every planet. Oh, and because of the insanely favourable economic conditions, I'm *also* running a nice surplus which can be used to supplement things.

BTW, the cost to buy buildings ranges between about 8 and 10 to 1. Ships are usually 10 to 1 or worse, although maybe this gets lowered a lot by choosing neutral.

That said, in specialized circumstances (galaxies which happen to have *lots* of econ resources), I'm inclined to agree that the production levels are similar, which makes your approach superior for its extreme flexibility. In most galaxies, though, I don't think it has the edge.

Edit: come to think of it, I don't know why I'm defending the all factories approach when I usually play the all labs approach! I consider it superior because there are plenty of resources and buildings which boost your research ability, high end research buildings have much better production (especially in DA where industrial sectors have been nerfed yet again) and the extreme lead in tech means you need next to no ships to totally dominate. I consider that in combination with enough econ to buy your ships (may not be efficient, but has huge logistical/convenience advantages) to be the optimum approach.
Reply #44 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Actually the double economic event seems to happen to me in most games I've had although the length of time it hangs around does vary. In any case you may certainly have a fully built up economic array. You may even have 6 fully built up economic arrays (as I had in one game, I was actually optimizing research not production but that's another story) for a total of 96 fully built up econ SB's but the end result is that this will cover only a very small percentage of your 450 planets in your gigantic galaxy.

If you have 16 econ SB covering every planet in the galaxy then again perhaps you may come close. Also your insanely favorable economic conditions do not really come into play unless you're essentially granting my argument that income trumps production. In any case you would probably need your insanely favorable economic conditions to merely support the maintenance on all your industrial sectors. After all you only have industrial sectors and a starport on each planet otherwise you're losing production.

BTW, while the cost of building on a bare tile is in the 8~10 to 1 range that you mention, the cost of building "upgrades" is closer to 4~5 to 1 assuming your upgrading from one type of building to another. If your upgrades are of the same type (factory to enhanced factory or marketplace to bank) then you get full credit for the previous building on that tile. Also, as I mentioned previously, if you buy the hull and then "upgrade" to the final ship you end up paying about half what the direct ship purchase would have been, although I will grant that this probably will still be pretty close to the 8~10 to 1 figure that you mention.

As far as the applicability of the strategy, I did mention that it did require a certain critical mass to be effective, however in every game that I've ever played in a gigantic galaxy I've exceeded 800K bc per week income and some of these games did not include the economic prosperity event.

I actually have (or can get from Endgame.sav files) screenshots from at least 4 separate gigantic galaxy games to prove that an average per planet income of at least 2,000 bc per week is not unusual. Can you provide me a screenshot showing a single occurrence of a per planet average of 200 MP's or SP's of weekly production? Remember not just a few planets with this level of production but an average over all planets in the galaxy. If you can then I will grant you that perhaps you might come close to my strategy.

Personally I wouldn't doubt that you might be able to achieve this with a few econ SB arrays as long as the galaxy size wasn't too big. However, if that is the case then I would suggest that what you're proposing is as restricted to smaller galaxies as I have already admitted that my strategy is restricted to larger galaxies.

In any case I'm not saying that I can reach similar levels of production I'm saying I can reach levels of production that are close to three times that of any regular production means.

BTW I hope you’re enjoying this verbal sparing as much as I’ve been. It’s been awhile since I’ve had an interchange as interesting as this has been. But I also hope you can post a screenshot of the impressive levels of production that you’ve been able to achieve using your strategy. For every one you post, I can post two that top it. Go ahead, make my day.
Reply #45 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Didn't see your edit until after posting my last post. Certainly one thing the economic approach can't do is to generate research. If only we could purchase research could this come close.

I've actually combined high income with dedicated research planets surrounded by 16 econ SB arrays to good effect. The game I mentioned where I had 6 fully developed SB arrays I think I had two planets with an excess of 10,000 RP's per week of research and 10 planets in excess 4,000 RP's per week. Overall I had over 30 planets that exceeded 2,000 RP's per week and this was in conjunction with my typical 1.6 million bc weekly income.

The bottom line is that in essence we're arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In no case that I can think of do you ever really need to go to the maximum production that has ever been achieved to simply win a game. In the same way you never need the maximum income or maximum research. These things in reality are more academic arguments about what may in some sense be "better" when in fact all of these approaches do work.

Even the subjective opinion of what determines "better" will vary between reasonable individuals. I'm not in particular denigrating either the all factory or all labs approach, in fact I use both approaches myself at varying points of the game. Also from game to game I may use more of one or the other. But my main point is that I haven't had a single game that really didn't at one point or other incorporate *all* of these strategies and that remaining fixed on any one of them (even income alone) is the wrong thing to do.

My underlying point all along is that mobile forces will in the end always defeat fixed defenses no matter how strong. I merely got into the trap of arguing income versus production because it seemed you claimed that production in all cases is better and I can certainly point out many where it's not.
Reply #46 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I don't keep my save games and I'm a bit short of time right now (especially since I seem to be spending what little I have left on here! ) But don't think that means I'm ducking out of the challenge...it'll be fun to find out. I'm very confident in the all labs approach, since you can get insane x00% bonuses to research as well, plus I've done it many times. (Actually I suspect your approach is pretty much this one anyway for most of the game, just with the balance *way* more toward moneymaking than I go with) I'm not at all convinced about the all factories on your settings. What's your usual difficulty level, version and typical galaxy setup?

Oh, and with the crazy econ bonuses you're talking about coupled with that galactic event (which I don't get often ), even starbase arrays, max racial bonuses and nothing but industrial sectors on every planet will be hard pressed spending all the cash!

Regarding the costs, it's true that upgrading is cheaper than buying things fresh, but it's *also* cheaper to build upgrades. The ratio doesn't change much.
Reply #47 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Also your insanely favorable economic conditions do not really come into play unless you're essentially granting my argument that income trumps production.


I'm not following you here...the favorable economic conditions automatically come into play because of the map and galactic event. I'm still going to maximize my economy by whatever means I can in order to pay for my production, I'm just going to sacrifice as few tiles to it as I can get away with, which with those bonuses is most probably none!

And yes, I am enjoying the exchange.
Reply #48 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
But don't think that means I'm ducking out of the challenge...it'll be fun to find out. I'm very confident in the all labs approach, since you can get insane x00% bonuses to research as well, plus I've done it many times. (Actually I suspect your approach is pretty much this one anyway for most of the game, just with the balance *way* more toward moneymaking than I go with) I'm not at all convinced about the all factories on your settings. What's your usual difficulty level, version and typical galaxy setup?

Actually you can see from my profile but it's suicidal, DL v1.4x (long story), gigantic galaxy, abundant everything with military conquest the exclusive victory type. I do vary up tech rate and the enabling and disabling of tech trading. Essentially I look to maximize score. I know that's not everyone's thing or that it necessarily means much of anything one way or another, it's simply what I do.

Also I've recently started playing Metaverse League games that run pretty much totally counter to the above style. These games are run once a month and everyone plays the same randomly selected game. The size is limited to medium galaxies and below and all settings as well as the required victory type are randomly selected and change from month to month. It's actually a good way to get some experience in games that you would otherwise not play. The point of the league is to help everyone improve their game while providing some friendly competition.

However, no fair switching from essentially arguing all factories versus all income to all labs versus all income. These are much different beasts due to a number of reasons. The first is that of course you can't buy research. The second is that, unlike production, research does have resource mining bonuses comparable to economic resource mining, as you pointed out. Then of course since there's no way to buy research then there's no way to compare the two other than the now totally arbitrary 10 to 1 ratio that we've apparently agreed on. At least in the case of production there is some basis in reality for defining such a ratio. But I really have no idea of how one would legitimately compare income to research.

Yet again I've been concentrating on income in this discussion simply because I think you pretty much made the assertion that "all factory" was in some way superior to "all income". I do think if one is forced to chose only one out of the three types I would put most of my accent on income. However, my main point was and still is that a relative balance between all of these types as well as the ability to go from one to the other dependent on the in-game situation is most important.

Of course on another note it's apparent that we've successfully, although hopefully not intentionally and without malice, hijacked this thread from it's intended topic. In particular the most important point that came up in this thread was the complaint about the workings of morale and Frogboy's response to that with a request for suggestions (in itself somewhat of a digression from the OP as well). In all reality I find that development far more interesting than our mostly cerebral discussion about whose pet strategy is better.

Perhaps, you could open up a thread about all factories (or is it now all labs) versus all income and we can take it from there. However, my opinion of income versus research is definitely different than my opinion of income versus production for precisely the reasons we've both mentioned. I don't know as if we have all that much to argue about if that's the new topic, but I do have some killer screenshots of what one can accomplish with an economic SB array around a set of dedicated research planets (actually 6 such econ SB arrays, or perhaps it was only 5, I may be a little hazy in my rememberance). I do save my save games for a short while after I finish a game but I do delete them after a bit. However, I do have the Endgame.sav from every game that I've submitted to the metaverse. That means that I can document quite a few of my games but the only snapshot I have is from the end of the game.
Reply #49 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Of course you're correct, in fact I wasn't trying to relate the two issues at all. I was merely trying to point out that some peoples take on these strategies seemed rather robotic and I was encouraging folks to not be afraid to rebuild your planets as necessary.


ah, well then, excuse me just a second while i wipe the egg off my face...

there. in that case, i agree with you. now that i re-read your post, that's clear.
Reply #50 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
In any case the economic focused strategy does require a certain critical mass to achieve. It really doesn't work that well in medium or smaller galaxies.


that's probably be why i haven't really tried pure economy before; i can't stand managing that many planets. i lately taken to playing on gigantic, but restrict the stars to uncommon and tight clusters, tweaking planets and habitables between occasional, common and (sometimes) abundant. i like to have 25 or so colonies after the rushes have passed, and these settings allow me to feel like space is big without being an overwhelming task for me to manage it.

i also don't have a production strategy tuned to higher levels of difficulty, by preference. i like to use the few planets that get ship bonuses as my primary offensive shipyards. all of my planets get shipyards of course, but by the end of the game, they're usually missing factories all together. farm, shipyard, initial colony, and stock markets; sometimes counter-espionage centers. at that point i'm earning enough to build up a massive treasury and can rush-buy several turns worth of ships if needed, but i prefer to build on my shipyard planets only. in the games i play using my federation ship pack, the main shipyard planet is invariably renamed Utopia Planetia (yes i know it was in orbit of Mars in the ST universe; leave me alone trekies).

but anyway, that post/strategy was interesting, and maybe one day i'll work up the patience to try finishing a game in a galaxy that size.