Honestly, let's not mess with things too much in terms of the economy basics. I'm not a big fan of requiring arbitrary resources for anything other than special (i.e. Galactic or one-per-civ) buildings, as that produces really bad choke points that, while Humans can be good at compensating, AIs have a hard time with.

Our current problem seems to be that Population and Raw Production are 1:1.  That's linear growth, and it's extremely hard to beat that with anything in the way of well-balanced improvements.  Given that Raw Production provides broad power - it's the economy as a whole - anything that provides direct improvement to it has to be VERY carefully managed.

The old method was Sqrt(pop) = Raw Production.   It think that's too harsh, but a good non-linear association would probably be best.

I'd vote for Logrithmic association between population and production, using Log Base 2.  That means you get doublings of production at 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32 population.  It means that it's not a huge deal if a planet has 8 or 9 population, whereas right now that 1 additional pop can be VERY significant in production output.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is this:

I'd rather we balance things with futzing with % bonuses on individual improvements AFTER we've cut down on the effects that huge populations have.  I think it's easier to do that than other approaches such a limiting number of buildings or requiring resources. 

We (the community) can then embark on a blitz of bonus balancing attempts, to find the right mix for everything, safe in the knowledge that the base mechanic of pop:raw production is settled and we're not going to be facing a drastic change in the overall strategy model.

I think the main issue is that population is not that much different from building the specialized buildings, yes you need food and approval but those are just buildings as well.

So you have 1 farm 1 approval building and 1 city, what is the difference to 1 money, 1 factory and 1 research building? You can move numbers as much as you want, either it is redundant because both do the same or either specialized buildings or population is useless.

In Galciv2 you had taxes to balance approval, so it was operating on a different layer and felt different, but population and specialized buildings are just too similar.

Frog, are you arbitrarily going to cap city population? 

I only build a single city on planets anyway so it really does not affect me but will cities be 'upgradeable' so you can grow past the one population increase?

I see it like this:

Some have suggested a planet claiming sytem. I realise they are different games with different AI, but that system existed in at least one incarnation of Space Empires. It was terrible, and without going into too much detail, it resulted in all civs essentially claiming all planets in range, which in turn led to diplomatic madness, and made peace absolutely impossible, ever.  In GalCiv III it would mean '- - - You settled planets we claimed' for all about all, always, in every game.

Others have suggested a closed border system a la Sid Meier's Civilization. If this were implemented in the same way in GalCiv III, then it removes the influence culture-flip mechanic from the game - which is one way some players have their fun. It would also mean that boxing a civ in would be possible (as it is in Sid's Civ) - which is inconsistent with a game set in space.

I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement in terms of the current engine, but as a compromise, I would like to see something that hits the middle of both.

I am really not a fan of starbases and shipyards being able to be built, for example, next to a foreign empire's home planet, and by extension, in influence. Others are, I am not.

Non Influence Starbases, and Shipyards that end up in foreign influence, should flip, albeit a little slower, in a similar way to asteroid mines do currently. This would happen taking into account any anti/pro culture-flip modifiers. Maybe I'm wrong but AFAIK currently flipping shipyard and starbases is only possible through diplomatic purchase or Ideology tree, and only once?

Uncolonized, habitable planets that end up within civ influence inside an already colonized system would get a 'claimed' flag automatically. If there are any planets in the same system that are not in influence, then they are fair game.

Any planets in a neighbouring system where influence has spread, but that has no colonized planets would still be fair game and no 'claimed' flag would apply.

This would only apply to civs at peace. In war anything goes.

I DID make suggestions.

...Anyways, I'm ready to put this to the bygones.

Moving factories and laboratories to flat bonusses is key to balancing them vs cities (/asteroids). As a best practice I would even suggest this model:
 - all common improvements only provide flat bonusses.
 - all colony uniques provide percentage general bonus and a flat bonus from taken adjacency.
 - player and galaxy uniques provide percentages and/or empire wide percentages.
 - citizens provide percentages
 - exploration age techs provide flat bonusses
 - other techs provide percentages

This begs the question about what will happen to the space elevator. I would tweak above proposal to this:

Basic Factory (BF): 1.5 + .25/level giving 1 adjacency
and
Space Elevator (SE): 20% + .25/level giving 2 adjacency

for a 3 BF triangle this adds up to 6 manufacturingin both categories.
for a 2 BF+SE triangle this adds up to 5 manufacturing and +20%

Keep in mind, that there is a dynamic balance between flat and percent bonusses. Suppose you get to choose between +1 flat manufacturing and +10% manufacturing If you have 15 flat manufacturing allready, you gain more from adding +10%. If you have two workers on this world allready (+60%) the +10% still only add one manufacturing, but the +1 adds +1.6 due to the workers and is better again.

Let's talk about population: Keep the model mostly as it is now (people hate seeing numbers of things they use to play go down more than seeing numbers of things they don't play go up). Population is interconnected with some many other balance aspects, it is virtually impossible to change it without unbalancing something.

But I would suggest the following balance modification for synthetics:

base pop cap: 10
approval can stay at 100
popcap is increased via technologies:
 - up to 15 within age of exploration
 - up to 25 within age of war
 - up to 40 within third age
 - up to 100 after that

It's probably not perfect, but it's an economical stepping stone towards finding the right numbers for synthetics regardless on whether it will be completely tech absed or improvement based in the end.

Short answer: No.

The issue is that production has two inputs: Population & Improvements.

Regardless of whether Population increases at logrithmic, linear or exponential scale, you still have this general issue where one path is inevitably going to be better than the other.

In 2.3, population affected production as the square root of the population. Therefore, population was a waste of time to focus on.

In 2.5, population had a 1 to 1 benefit to production which makes improvements a waste of time to focus on.

The player's goal is to maximize production and do so in a way that has strategic interest and can be communicated to the player in order to provide a counter strategy.

As the player, how do I keep my opponent's economy under control?

In 2.5 you can keep them from getting too many durantium resources which keeps their factory production limited.  But that doesn't stop the player from just having a huge population.

In 2.6, we have two resources to work with: Durantium for improvements and Promethion for population.   It's a lot harder to stop them on both axis's and provides the player a strategic choice.

I really like this concept.  I will have to think about that.

I don't think this would work well.  It boils back down to the commutative property of addition. Whether it's the population or the improvements providing the flat doesn't really matter. 

Fundamentally, the problem is that there are two inputs into increasing production: Population and Improvements.

The problem got exacerbated when we made Population provide 1 raw production in 2.5.  But it was a problem before, it's just that population was basically worthless before.

There are two general solutions to this:

1.  Have production only have 1 input (which I don't think is intuitive and flies in the face of history)

2. Have the 2 inputs have different paths to increasing that forces the player to choose.

Now, I don't think using resources is an ideal way to create a dichotomy.  But I can't think of a better way.  If you use tech as the distinction you are, in effect, just using a derivative to create your positive feedback loop.  At least with resources, the player is making choice A at the expense of choice B (Durantium and Promethion are not commonly captured together by a starbase).

One difference is that population gains you votes in the U.P., which the others don't.

In vanilla it used to be almost the only provider of flat bonusses, which meant you had to balance population against your planetary specialization, which was a good system. In addition you needed it to provide invasion troops. But both of these aspects are not a thing anymore.

But at this point I am not opposed to rethinking it's role entirely either. For example improvements requiring population to function, or ships requiring population to be build. Or pop being tied to rate of generating citizens. Just dumbfiring some random thoughts on this topic.

I like this idea.
A capital provides 5 pop, 5 research 5 wealth, 5 manufacturing etc. because its special.
A  base factory requires 1 pop to get 1 raw production in manufacturing, ditto basic research, wealth etc. They still have a % adjacency bonus.
Hubs don't require pop they just improve efficiency.

If you build a city there is nowhere for the workers to go, so no increase in base production, just unhappy people.

This way you have to have both pop and either manufacturing\ research \ wealth to function efficiently.

Tech Improvements decrease the pop needed so you can build more.

You can still have your mega planets but they will be mainly larger class planets and fewer.

Now there's the start of an idea- tie the citizen production rate to population, so that the choice to populate gives you a better (slightly?) rate of citizen production, and if you follow that path, colonizing potentially affects that by lowering your population.  this is based on population, not growth rate directly.

Hmmm, for synthetics, maybe adjust the citizen production rate by the promethium supply? (i.e. for synthetics it takes promethium to produce citizens at all) Let the rate at which they appear be affected by the supply of promethium on hand.

If I use durantium as the requirement for improvement builds, I don't get the bump in citizens, but I don't need to build farms and can build admin buildings instead if necessary.

I think we should separate the quantitative and qualitative aspects here.

The quantitative aspect is, that right now population is just the superior input by raw numbers. I think numbers can be found, which can get the two inputs reasonably close to each other. This is the aspect I was meaning to tackle and I don't think it can be neglected.

The qualitative aspect is the incomparables of the two inputs. Putting the numbers aside, I think you want factory manufacturing to be primarily limited by durantium and not by building space. Population is currently primarily limited by building space. Many colonies mean more food means more population.

On the other hand population is the jack of all trades, you can't make 'manufacturing population' at the moment. You allways get the three outputs wealth/manufacturing/research. It limits how much you can specialize.

Population is indirectly limited by monsantium and harmony crystals. One avenue of balance could be making it less efficient in the absence of these two but on par or superior when having both (Because the required ratio of city to entertainment/food is reduced).

What do you (or others) think about playing around monsantium and harmony crystals? Meaning finding quantitative numbers such, that population is on par with factories if neither have ressources, but factories are superior to pop if you have durantium and one ressource for population, and in case of having both monsantium and harmony crystals population is superior again?

It's not a good assumption that linking Durantium and Promethium to Factories and Cities will solve the problem of Population being better than Factories. A player with Durantium but no Promethium would fall behind in research. And the player with lots of Prometheon will win. Then the game becomes entirely dependent on RNG, rather than strategy.


Suppose we got rid of the Space Elevator, Computer Core, and Central Bank.
Have a Factory, Laboratory, and Bank, which each give 1 +0.5/Level yields.

Having 1 of each would give you the equivalent of 1 raw production. Yes, this is completely inferior to a  city. However, building 3 adjacent improvements of the same type would yield 6. This is superior to a city, but only in one aspect. This way, a specialized world is in fact specialized, producing more of 1 yield than the other types. This allows cities to be the 'balanced' option without being the 'best' option.

Higher tier improvements could have higher yields, but be balanced by costing resources. For example, Factory improvements would provide 1/2/3/4/5 Construction and cost 0/1/2/3/4 Durantium. Power Plants could provide 25%/50%/75%  and cost 0/5/10 Antimatter. Similarly, Laboratories could provide 1/2/3/4/5 Research and cost 0/1/2/3/4 Thulium and Research Hubs could provide 25%/50%/75%  Research while costing  0/5/10 Promethium. Wealth Improvements don't use resources because they're  bad enougha s it is.

I see the ploblem being one of dificulty in player optimisation, I'd have a system where each building has a pop requirement to run at full efficiency, then rather have different ways to get a planet going you have a system where you need to balance pop with when they can mostly support a new structure (should be percentage bassed) and then ypu have to consider food as a limiting factor to max pop.

TLDR, get rid of cities and have the hub graphics change to represent pop size, then make building output = pop req / pop tot, capping it at 100% output.

This does open up the balance issue of pop req for each building, but it shouldnt be as hard as the current population system.

As for events, I don't think having some EU2/EU3-styled events which trigger based on internal choices would be a bad thing.   These things have been put in 4X games before, Civ 4 in particular had a pretty good system for them, and FFH used them well.  You have someone really familiar with this on your team. 

I wouldn't want SK-style events for the reasons mentioned but random minor political events aren't a bad thing.

In terms of the economy and cities- isn't morale supposed to be the limiter on this? 

I would like this option much better than hard cap.

This is already the case.   Approval is a key determinator of Raw Production:  if you have more population than approval, you start losing Raw Production - i.e. a negative modifier applies as your planet gets unhappy. The opposite also applies - if you have a 100% Approval on a planet, you get a substantial bonus to Raw Production.  So you absolutely do have to manage Approval vs Population. 

The issue right now is twofold:  keeping a moderate amount of people moderately happy with Approval improvements is pretty easy; e.g. a pop 8 planet is quite trivial to keep 75% Approval on, and that still gives you a healthy Raw Production bonus (IIRC +15% or so).  On the opposite side, it's quite hard for the "average" civ to keep a pop 15 planet above 50% unless you have 3+ Approval buildings.

But that doesn't address the primary problem we have here, which is that under the current setup, the best strategy for something like a Quality 10 planet is 2 cities + 4 farms in appropriate configuration, plus 4 Approval buildings, and NOTHING else, and still be close to 75% Approval.  That can get you to a Pop 20 or more planet that's a powerhouse compared against anything else you could do with that those 10 hexes.  To say nothing if you do your Farms offworld, then you're looking at such a planet having 5 cities/5 Approval improvements, a 60% Approval, but close to a 40 population, and get that way before turn 150.

In the check-in, we removed the Promethion requirement for research.  

Two high level solutions come to mind:

1. Get rid of one.
2. Give each path a side-effect.

Strategy emerges when game elements do more than just one thing.

Look, I said as much above but it garnered no comment.  If you would stop proposing "the next upgrade" and instead propose the "next version" (e.g. GC4) you could go through alpha and beta phases to get the balance right before asking existing players, who have spent so much time and effort to dope out the secret rules, to evaluate the non-result, leaving you (us) free to experiment and get it right. 

I don't know how to apply it now except your "freeze it and go on" suggestion.  So freeze the less than perfect mods?  That doesn't help anyone.

They do need to modernise the manual.

It's probably better going 3 city, hospital 6 farms and relying for approval from technology. Keep in mind that even 30% approval still only has -5% production while 70% approval only gains you about 12.5 % approval. This means going from 70% to 30% approval as a tradeoff for getting a third city equates to ~-17.5%, but from the additional city you get ~+50% population. The big downsides are in influence and resistance. The disadvantage in growth is more than compensated by the hospital.

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On having a slept a night on the pop required to operate improvements (or ships), I am not quite happy with the idea. It would just be another cap, although an intuitive one. In the best case it leads back to the vanilla system with a golden ratio of pop to manufacturing.

Also from his posts I read, that Frog, does not want pop to become a jack of even more trades. I see his point. (Although the idea of tying citizen production to it appeals to me.)

Please don't get rid of one. But I agree strongly that every resource (pop also being a resource) should have multiple effects so that you have to choose which effect you want to use (e. g. needing pop to build an improvement so that when you build one type like production you cannot build as much of another type like research because there is less pop left to build more improvements) or you have to make sacrifices to use it (like morale loss through high pop, what should have more effects than just lower productivity, like chance for rebellion).