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.