Edit: Sorry missread your post.

I like the Creativity chance to get a tech as it's something I've always chosen anyway and now I get a bonus for it. But I believe a couple things do need to be tweaked:

1) Just 1 point may be a bit low. Perhaps 2 points.
2) It needs to be disabled after Discovery Sphere. I won a tech victory last night and got each one of those expensive ones early based on Creativity. The last one had 40 turns to research. I got it down to 29 and bam, Creativity kicked in and I won the game. Of course it was kind of nice to not have to sit there and hit the turn button for a half hour to win the game so there is an upside to it.

I've used Creativity in the last half dozen games I've played and the one thing I've noticed is that it only seems to kick in when I have less than 10 weeks left researching a tech. Sometimes it will kick in with more than that, but those times are few and far between.

It also seems to depend on how many total weeks it takes to research a tech when you start researching it. The higher end techs almost never get done early while the mid-range techs will get a creative finish somewhat more often.

I don't think that Creativity is too unbalanced as is, and the point cost is fine. I've played a game where I begged, borrowed, and stole every creativity boosting tech I could from other factions and even then it didn't change much.

I really think that if some set of abilities are a staple and picked up at their max for every game, something overpowering is there for them. An increase in cost for those abilities may be in order to make you sit back and think if it's still worth while, and which one should you pick if you can no longer pick up both max econ and max morale.

Back to the subject of Creativity, I'll keep it in my line-up for a while yet to get a good grasp on it's proc rate. I personally haven't noticed it go off at anything above a 10% rate, but I haven't been documenting it to have any real data. I don't plan on it to give me that 10%ish proc rate, it'll just be icing on the cake for me.

well, despite the sour taste that's worked its way into this thread, i'd thought about doing this myself. thankfully i have a firm enough grasp on statistics to offer some insight. 200 is generally considered statistically valid sample (standard error of 5%), at least in population studies . since we're only trying to figure out how frequently creativity works, this means we can test 200 game turns (or just under 4 game years), rather than 200 games.

to establish a better sense of the correlation between luck bonus and the frequency it triggers, it'd be best to test it at multiple bonus levels, i.e. a 200-turn game with a 0% creativity bonus (to establish a base line for comparison), a 200-turn game with a 25% creativity bonus, a 200-turn game with a 50% bonus, etc.

if we assume that there's no other factors involved in the creativity tigger other than your actual bonus, then there would be no need to impose other controls on the experiment. does the game actually tell you when creativity has worked? (even when i have played with it, i've never noticed; i usually just ignore most pop-ups in the game if i can't disable them). continuing on the assumption that creativity works in vacuo, and we have a reliable method to tell when it's been triggered, the only data we'd need to collect is the game date each time creativity triggers.

however, i'm not sure any of us know for sure that creativity in fact does work in vacuo. it could possibly be tied to other variables in the game, which is why if i were going ot set this test up myself, i'd probably create a custom map to do it (thus you'd have the same starting conditions in every game. i'd also probably play in cheat mode, just to better control any pesky AI who'd want to kill me. game events could present an annoyance; ideally i'd run these tests through without re-loading the game at all, but i'd probably err on the side of re-loading if an event occured that could potentially interfere with results (even with mega events disabled, some of those minor events could potentially have an effect).

if the creativity trigger is tied to another game variable, it seems to me most likely that it'd be tied to research. i'd want to play 6 games in total: three games at 0/25/50% creativity with X amount of research being done every turn, and a three games at 0/25/50% with 2x research being done (which could be accomplished relatively easy running in cheat mode).

perhaps the best way to monitor the effect of creativity without recording lots of data every turn would be under these conditions:

create a custom map with 1 planet for yourself. quality doesn't matter. on your first turn, fill that planet with some sort of research center and complete them in that turn by using the ctrl+J cheat. it's probably a good idea to leave 3 tiles empty (you're likely to get research bonus tiles in at least one of the various test games - best to simply leave them empty).

create a custom mod with a unique tech tree. delete every tech in the game, and replace them with a linear tech sequence called "test bed tech X" where X is the number in the sequence. make them all cost the same thing. i think this would provide the easiest way to keep track of how many techs get completed. i'd still write down the game date every time a tech was completed. i'd also probably delete the various ship modules in this set up, so that the AI couldn't build anything.

disable all victory conditions. since the AI won't be able to build anything, you can basically play the game for as long as you have techs.

...some of that might not make sense if you lack a background in statistics. considering that it's new year's eve, i'm not about to jump into a set of tests like this, and i probably won't (as i already said, i don't have a problem out-teching the AI... the best way to complete techs quickly is to build more research labs--the all-labs approach is great for this).

but if you really want to be certain of how creativity works, this would be the most comprehensive way to get hard data, and possibly even regress its algorithm.

(PS: in case anyone questions my background is statistics or research design, i'm trained as a sociologist. i've conducted both demographies and ethnographies, and research design was a significant topic i focused on while i was a student).

i don't think it's necessarily and issue of the econ bonus being overpowered per se. i think it's especially popular with people who maximize their score for MV games, and that's because of the game mechanics.

in GC2, everything that isn't random boils down to money: your ability to make it, and to spend it (ideally to spend it with the most efficiency). nothing in the game matters if you can't pay for it. in lights of the early economy crash that most players experience, and the ability to recover from it quickly* and go on the offensive is the most reliable way to win games.

*recovering quickly is why, IMO, morale and pop growth are other popular bonuses. when i'm playing an MV game, i want to win as quickly as possible. starting off with a high morale bonus is key. but on games i play for fun, i don't worry about morale too much, because i can usually secure enough mining resources and trade goods that i max out the effects of the bonus quite easily. but if i'm trying to win quickly, nothing beats the Krynn's +50% morale bonus (except perhaps the super breeder ability on a custom race... the Torians are the only race that ends up worse (in terms of bonuses) than a custom race with the same super ability).

Creative does seem awfully powerful, but I haven't played with it enough to make a fair judgment.

Sorry if I brought any sourness, was just trying to disagree politely.

i wasn't pointing fingers, nor will i, but i don't think you contributed to that sense at all.

Oh don't worry, I think we all know who the sour apple in this bunch was, but we needn't talk about it any further than that ::)

Anywho, well, I don't have any experience with modding the game so I don't think I could do something like that Dystopic... if someone made such a mod and gave it to me then I'd be happy to do test Creativity thoroughly, but until then I think I'll have to stick with taking notes of whenever it procs ingame ::/

I don't suppose I'd be able to get away with simply not playing a race that gets any Creativity bonuses in their techs? Such as the Arceans; they get something like +10% to Creativity when they research their version of Space Militarization, right? I mean, as long as I don't research anything or obtain anything that boosts Creativity, I should be able to stick with 25% all game. Of course, that assumes Creativity works completely on its own; that is to say, it is not effected by any other factors, which it may very well be. Ugh ::(

Stardock, where are you? v.v

I just played over 250 turns, and had it proc three times.

TA, gigantic map, four opponents (Korx, Drengin, Korath, Terrans), played the Yor, picked Creativity as one of my options. This was actually a saved game, and I'd already researched Shields 3, Warp 5, and ... I forget how far on the missile tree, because I got a black hole launcher or whatever from the Vegans.

I didn't record precisely when it procced, because I'd forgotten I'd picked it in the first place, but after it did, I checked my race selection screen and the Yor do have it.

Yeah, I played a good few hundred turns with the Yor after having researched their +10% to Creativity skill thingy and only had it proc once. This sounds like it's more complicated than the game is letting on >.>

I like the way Creative works now. It's fun. You know, fun, that thing you're supposd to have when you're playing games.

Stepping on ants can also be "fun". If you are trying to justify the potential overpoweredness (Yes I just made that word up) of Creativity by saying that it's "fun", then I should remark that I find a well-balanced game where no power or racial bonus truly outshines the others to be fun. What now?

Try giving this subject more thought, please.

i'd say if you really want the devs to re-evaluate creativity, the best course of action would be to bring up your concern in one of the primary TA forums. however, i'd hold off on doing so until they've released the Altarians and Thalans. IIRC, they plan to do the most intesive re-balancing and AI tuning after they've completed the tech trees and other new game features.

and if it's not out of line to suggest, i'd also try to be a bet less defensive when others disagree with you, even if they outright insult you. it'll help make your case seem more worthy of consideration, even if it's unfair. in general, aggressive words and actions don't win you sympathy from others.

and if my suggestion is out of line and unwanted, i apologize.



yeah, the "experiment" i thought up was rather elaborate. however, modding most of the game is extremely easy by design, though i'm not sure if mod support is fully implemented in TA as of yet (when it is, there will finally be support for negative bonuses, which i'm highly looking forward to).

i've done some light modding on the TA beta by editing the base files directly. the one you'd want is AbilityBonuses.xml, and is probably located at C:\Program Files\Stardock\TotalGaming\GalCiv2\Data\English (though your file location and language edition may vary). you can edit the file in notepad; ctrl+F to find "Creativity", though that particular ability is near the very end of the file, so you can probably just scroll all the way down.

honestly, if you just look at the info in the file, you can probably figure it out--it's really not rocket science. you can reduce the ability from 25 to whatever you'd like, or conversely raise its cost in ability points from 1.

you can also add extra choices if you'd like, and it's only slightly more involved. increase the value in the "AvaiableOptions" tag from 1 to 2, 3 or however many choices you'd like to make available. then copy the three lines that contain the "Option0..." tags (Text, Bonus and Cost), and paste directly below the original three lines. in the three new lines, change the 0 to a 1. then change the text and values as you see fit. simple as pie.

oh yeah, don't forget to back the file up first!

In terms of "overpowered or not", does it depend somewhat on how much +research you take? For example, a race with lots of research bonuses will, statistically, get less from Creativity than a race with no research bonus.

I suspect you fine people may be exaggerating slightly. The thing with the creative procs is you don't tend to notice them until they do something wonderful.

I often play with creative on, since I'm normally playing all factories and need every hint of extra research I can get my grubby little hands on. I also play +20% research and technologist normally too.

I never gave much thought to creativity until one game with the iconians where it proc'd all over the place, loads of times I had just started a tech on an absurdly long duration and it would proc. Or even better I would finish 1 tech and it would discover the following one at the same time. A lovely bonus. So I fell deeply in love with this talent point.

Since then I have played many games with races that have extra +creatively and never has it been quite so good again. I would either get cheap techs or techs 2 turns from finishing. The point being I got lucky when I noticed it, and I have not been that lucky since.

Luck is a factor in real life too. I remember several stories from my old Grandad and his time in the world war two. And on these occasions it was only due to extra ordinary luck that my dad and I am here today. Really, sometimes ridiculously things happened to him to keep him around. Now of course for every him, there would have been several more who were unlucky, God rest them. These guys did not just hit new game when their time was up.

Sometimes you get lucky with creative, and sometimes you get nothing from it. But if its not that its something else. A mega event at the perfect time. Starting a game to find a 700% bonus tile on your HW. Starting a game to find a PQ29 on your doorstep. etc etc.

I suspect its strongly possible that if you think Creatively is overpowered its just because you had a game where it was, more to luck then anything else. What we need for this discussion to carry any further merit is lots of hard numbers of random games.
If everyone plays one game and makes a note how many weeks research the talent saved them, and the total number of weeks played. Then we can work out a basis to value the talent.

I.e.

I played a normal research speed game, procs saved me 26 weeks out of a 500 week game. (example only)

If we had 20+ of these examples we could work out an average, until then we are just guessing, or dangerously drawing conclusions on anecdotal evidence. You would need to carefully note how many weeks you had left on your current tech every single time you hit turn. Then when it procs note that number down (minus 1 because you hit turn) then post here. Until then lets not pretend we are just guessing wildly.

Try being less of a pompous pretentious jerk, please. Just because I don't post 3000 words of pseudointellectual wanking on the subject doesn't mean I didn't think about it.

wait, are you playing all-factory AND +20 research/technologists?

research bonus has no effect when you use the all-factory strat. just maximize a research resource in 1 turn to test it--you'll see no improvement. what you instead want is industry bonuses (i go for military production since it has a longer-term effect).

This is not true (assuming we're still playing DA). The improvement might be small since it's working at 25% of its normal effect, but having a high research bonus can greatly enhance your research even using the all-factory approach.

It's most noticeable when you amass a 100%-200% research bonus. At 200%, your research is at the same level as your production, which is grossly high, and also costs a fraction of what that level of research would normally.

I notice them because the game pops up a little window saying "Congratulations! You've won the lottery!" and I've been used to creativity working subtly all the way back to the first GalCiv.

Last night, I played a huge galaxy with the Krynn, with fast tech research, and purchased Creative just to see how many times it'd proc. About 200-odd turns in, I've seen it about eight times, and two of those times was at the start of researching a tech that had 10 weeks or more left to research. One being the last tech in the government line.