Sethai

Join Date 12/2005

+23

GalCiv III Economy

seeing how much i enjoyed the gal civ three tactical battling thread, and how weird, confusing, complicated and unfun the gal civ 2 economy is generally thought to be, i thought i'd gather peoples thoughts over how they do the economy for gal civ 3 if they were starting from scratch.

personally, i think the whole concept of production (for buildings and ships) is a pointless middleman. currently tracking the pennies as they move through the game's economy is a horribly arcane mess of sliders and percentage bonuses that allows players who are starting out to massively cripple themselves by the midgame. it also makes the best economy in the game the all factories approach (which is ridiculous) and it is impossible for the AI to deal with it effectively.

so why pay for production and then use that to build stuff, when you could just pay for stuff with cash in firstplace?

i'm going to go off on my own rant here. feel free to respond to it, or just post your own ideas on ho you'd design the gal civ 3 economy.

most science fiction authors assume the colonisation of space would be driven by the same forces which colonised the americas, and i think that's a good place to start. essentially, high taxation and overcrowding on earth would drive people out to new worlds where there were more opportunities, and the population of earth would start to outstrip earth's limits, driving companies and governments to mine asteroids

the best economy i have seen in a tbs (in terms of combining how societies actually work with fun gameplay) is actually in the total war games. cities (colonies in gal civ 3) are taxed independently and the amount of money they make is largely proportional to their population. taxation allows higher incomes but reduces population growth and moral. population growth is one of the most important parts of the game. a list of factors including taxation, base quality of the given location, overcrowding, infrastructure etc are all crossed off against other to produce either positive or negative population growth.

buildings are bought up front but cost no maintenance. in total war they allow the recrtuitment of better troops. in gal civ they would reduce the construction time of troops built there to practical levels.

the only outgoings in the game are military maintenance, research spending (which would be the only slider left in the game, and work as a simple % of max potential spending as the production slider does now) and what the player chooses to spend on buying ship and buildings on a turn by turn basis. as all income is local and all expenses are central, the pennies are a lot easier to track.

the elimination of production and building maintenance makes the game a lot more fun because it makes it a lot more difficult for the player to get in the red. but it would also allow us to represent all the same kind of gameplay decisions and scenarios in the game already. the game is more fun because choosing between one building or another, or one planet or another is not about trying to work out what will make a profit and what will not, but choosing which building will make the most profit, so the player can lie back and enjoy the game because all his decisions will be positive ones. building the wrong building will never reduce your income, just improve it less.

what makes the game challenging is resources. while population = income and this should be the most important part of the economy, resources. resources are what space games are all about. it is because of resources that you have cloud city in star wars (they were mining the planet for gas). in gal civ 2, resources are just floating gems in space that give you production bonuses, which is lame. it's stuff like this that makes you feel you are in space.

while population = income and this should remain the most important part of the game economy, resources allow a faction to work efficiently. essentially, say the game had three resources and every planet, asteroid or dyson sphere produced a certain amount of the three (say, energy, minerals and organics). divide your civ production by population and see how the ratio compares to the value defined as optimal by the game. if if was lower, then building things (centrally) becomes more expensive. you don't have to earn and spend resources like in AOE, you just have an indicator at the top of the screen that supply is either good or poor. if you have an excess you can start trade routes to another civ and sell a given amount for cash. you can even trade in more than you need, then trade on to other civs (and this is how the mercantile side of the economy would work, as opposed to population based side).

so the ideal empire ends up being a mixture of heavily populated planets like the homeworld which bring in lots of money and build the ships, and smaller planets/asteroids/moons/dyson spheres that bring in less money due to their lower population, but contribute to the economy by bringing in extra resources and keeping costs down. but crucially, every planet and building is a positive asset instead of a drain. this also improves the game because few planets if any will ever be as habitable (and thus heavily populated as the homeworld), so the a civ with twice as many planets is not twice as powerful.

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Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

+153

To really take the game forward and deepen the sci-fi atmosphere, they need to enable multiple economies so that truly alien species like the Yor and the Thalans can do their 'business' very differently from humanoid types like the Terrans, Altarans, and Arceans. Currency needs to be an option, not a fundamental unit as it is in GC2 (and Elemental).

Yes, I'm essentially making a plea for something like the 'complex' economy thing that was almost in WoM. I want to be able to run my Thalan hive like a hive and either ignore currency entirely or acquire it only through trade because it's a barbarian thing. I want multiple strategic commodities that act as vital parts of any star-faring faction--structural materials, energy sources, logic crystals, and the like. I want to be able to win without spending a single stinking BC and I want to be able to prove to those smug bugs from the future that money might not be able to buy happiness for a bunch of slavish drones, but it can buy more and bigger guns.

Pragmatically, a change like that would enable more interesting routes to influence and diplomatic wins because you'd need to do different things to dominate or ally with factions that were 'very' alien to yours. No more one-super-mall-impresses-them-all; gotta build malls for the mall rats and shiny framistats for the shiny metal neighbors.

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Well, personally, I think any game should have roughly three economic models to choose from. Subsitence, sustainable, and growth.

Subsistence should be militaristic and conquest-driven. They don't make what they need, they take it from others. They'd depend less on controlling worlds and more on raiding them repeatedly. They get bonuses by the number of uncolonized worlds in their territory.

Sustainable should be something that gets bonuses for not spreading out. They use less than anyone else, but they waste almost nothing. The only real difference between these and Growth is the Sustainables have higher colonization prereqs, and lose their bonuses if they exceed certain colony-to-territory ratios.

Growth are expansive colonists, always moving to a new world to drain dry, possibly nomadic. They get bonuses for having lots of colonies.

In any case, colonization and raiding potential should be determined by sphere of influence. If a world falls within your territory and you meet the requirements to colonize or raid it, then you do. No more build ship, send ship, lose ship. Just make sure the prerequisites and benefits even out between all three models. The same would be true of trade ships and the like, just farther out than your own territory. Perhaps colonization/raiding would be farther out as well rather than just your territory. Regardless, they wouldn't be individual actions anymore.

Now how to do all this? Money doesn't make anything. Money compensates for the production process, but by itself money is less than useless. Production is what matters. If you have no heavy industry, and no supplier of goods and services from which to import, then your money means jack. "rushing" production by buying the item has always irritated me in games. NOTHING ever works that way, period. With consumer goods, maybe...but not with big projects like a new factory, a new ship, or major infrastructure. The idea of "buying" something major like that is usually an abstracted idea that someone was already building it and rather than wait for yours to be done, you buy theirs and give them yours and pay the difference. This is preposterous with regard to social infrastructure or other mega structures such as starships. No one is just building one for the fun of it and waiting to see if they can sell it. No, they start building it AFTER someone has already agreed to pay for it and made themselves contractually bound to pay up when it's done.

So if not money, then what? It can't just be pure production?

Simple...energy. What is our economy right now truly dependent on? Energy. That's why fossil fuels are so outrageously profitable right now, and why their sellers are desperate to impede any worthwhile research into viable strategies for renewable energy. As such, "economic" improvements if they exist at all should boost everything but energy. Other improvements would boost individual stats such as production, food, research, etc.

Now, I'm not really proposing a radically different system. Imagine instead what galciv2 would be like if all the economic improvements were called power plants (removing the production bonus power plants), and the credits were all energy units. Now you have all these ways of generating power, and all these expenditures use up that power...just like in real life.

So how does production fit into all this? Caps. How much energy can you spend to research a tech or build a ship? The answer is, however much the facility can use or however much of a surplus you can generate each turn, whichever is lower. If your factory can use 100 units of energy per turn, and the ship you're building costs a total of 1,000 units of energy, then your one factory can build that ship in 10 turns, of course. That is assuming your budget has that much energy to spare each turn.

I think the biggest blunder of the galciv2 economy is the nature of the sliders. In fact, it's such a nonsensical blunder that I'm not even going to go into it. What they should've done is make the main slider determine how much of your income is spent on all production. The sub-sliders should then determine how that amount gets divided between each production type. That's that. After that, it's the improvements themselves that determine how much production is done based on the spending. If you set the sliders so that your factories get 100 energy per turn, then they'll build the ship in 10 turns. If you set the sliders so that they get less than that, it'll take longer. Simple, clean, intuitive, effective.

As for the "treasury", it's not unreasonable to conclude that a major factor in finally joining the interstellar community is the technology to store large quantities of energy indefinitely. That said, this should be capped, perhaps that can be the "economic" improvement instead...the storage facilities. The more of them you have at higher techs, the bigger your treasury can be. If you fill up, anything left over is completely wasted. That should put a damper on those who go full-tilt econ and "rush" all production at all times with a giant treasury buffer for emergencies.

Speaking of "rushing" production. It can be allowed, to a point. You can "buy" 50% of the item's total cost (no matter how far along production is), at an energy price equal to double the entire cost of the item. You dump more energy into the factory (or whatever) to run at full capacity 24/7. This can only be done once per item in the queue. I can hear you saying "but what if we get attacked and we need a ship to defend with in a hurry?" To which my response is, tough crap, I guess you should've defended your world better from the start, huh? Bad stuff happens suddenly, and there are only two viable options to deal with it. Prepare for contingencies in advance, or suck it up and hope you can rebuild afterward. That's the nature of the real game.

One last thing about energy. Some worlds have environments that are conducive to producing natural gasses like methane and such, while life-bearing worlds will almost always have large fossil fuel reserves. These should be accounted for with energy bonuses on planets. They should also come with an appropriate permanent decrease in base planet quality due to pollution.

Holy crap that's long. Sorry people.

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