Quack,

The starbase build queue has been suggested before, but I don't know if it will make it into Gal Civ 1 or Altarian Prophecy, but it may well appear in Gal Civ 2.  You can use rallypoints to get almost the functionality of your auto-improve suggestion.

AmulekBird: I don't usually get to finish a game.  Most of mine turn into test games that would have anomalous scores if I submitted them because I use cheat keys when debugging.  And since I'm the only person in my empire who actually plays Gal Civ, it seems kind of pointless to submit. 

Waldorf2000: I don't know how many people actually complained, but that was the story I had from Brad, so probably enough people complained about it.

We may address the 'wasted spending' issue in Gal Civ 2, but probably not in Gal Civ 1. 

Hi CariElf,

thank you very much for your answer. Once again we can see why you have such a high reputation in this community. Brad was very lucky to get you as an employee and I hope he knows it

Just a personal comment:
Customer always complain and it is absolutely necessary to get this kind of feedback. Otherwise it would not be possible to build a mature product. Sometimes they are right, sometimes not. :notsure: Sometimes they are right and the functionality could be better but the proposed solution is even worse. At first it semms to be the easiest way to give in. But the responsible person is always the developer. When he or she gives in he or she can't blame anybody else when the change was not an improvement. I had to learn that the hard way by myself.

P.S. I know that you know all that already. I could just not resist my wish to communicate that. I hope nobody is offended.

Maybe I'm way off track here, but to me, there is a very simple solution to this problem.

If you aren't building anything, then you get bonus credits rather than wasting the resources.

I read here about the rent and layoffs etc... and although that makes sense, when designing a game you have to balance between realism and fun. This doesn't sound like the kind of thing anybody wants to worry about. We don't worry about the difficulty of hiring new employees instantaneously, or real estate, so I don't see the difference.

To me, this just seems like one of those areas you gloss over for playability of the game. The idea that if you don't have anything selected that you lose all the money you put into production to me is far worse than this alternative.

To me, it's a royal pain in the ass, because I'm a slow starter. I build up my core empire fast, and then expand. The aliens always sell off their enhancments before I take over them, so I'm stuck with some of my planets fully developed and others not developed at all. That's a pretty awkward state to be in the way the game is currently designed.

Again, this is my opinion of course.

For the apologists - isn't the maintenance costs of most social projects the equivalent of "wages, property taxes", and all the rest?

I don't see why there's such rabid support among a couple of the posters here for this element of the economic model. It has nothing to do with obsession for perfection or realism - it's just one of the few holes in the game design.

The game calculates spending from the bottom up, right? The social slider represents the percentage of production capacity each planet uses, and then each planet's factors are used to determine how much that X% of production capacity costs. If another coefficient is added - 1 if there is anything in the queue, 0 if there isn't - then this will fix it.

I know I'm deluding myself - there's no way in hell it'll be that simple, and I'm not sure if that's even how the game calculates social spending - but it's an example of how to plug this hole.
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I guess it was a misunderstanding. Most gamers don't want to have more micro management. The apologists thought this thread is about sliders for each planet, right?


Not exactly. Maintenance is for wages etc. for this specific plant. The discussion is about the wages etc. of the construction companies of that planet

Thus it would be a compromise to waist only half or a third of the money.

What do all the others think?

Huh, I seem to have edited my last post at the exact moment you posted. Now I can't go back, take what I put in out, and post it here. Anyhow, I added stuff about how social spending 'should' be calculated.

I don't want more micromanagement. The coefficient thing I posted above means no micromanagement and no illogical waste.

As for what is meant by 'wages', that's all just apologetics and fan fiction. There's no real gameplay explanation.
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Hi Duodecimal,

I had already seen your changed post. I doubt that Stardock needs any help to implement the number crushing, they did it on purpose Thus I did not refer to this part of your post.

The confusion is because there are two types of apologetics.

a) In OS/2 tames you saved all your money then you did not build anything. Some customers complained that there should be some spending to keep up your capacity. Thus Stardock changed the code and now we waist all the money. This is not realistic, too. Thus I proposed the compromise to waist only half or a third of the money.

Some thought it is about sliders on each planet. But this was a misunderstanding. There were discussions about that but not in this thread. I think that we all agree that we don't want that.

Hopefully this is a "hindsight's 20/20" issue, because otherwise since the solution is so clear to the both of us, they left the waste in to spite the nitpickers.

Oh, I don't know about sliders on every planet being such a bad thing.

I'm playing in a gigantic galaxy and I now have 245 colonies. Some I've just colonised. I want to put starbases in the new sectors I own and up production on them, but I can't. I really need those new planets to have a higher production level than the old ones, especially for constructors.

Even on some newly-colonised, well-developed planets, it tells me there are no resources for constructors (for some reason, but maybe I'm missing something) so I have to send ships from my home sectors on the other side of the galaxy. I already have a large fleet of ships so I don't want to increase overall military construction.

How about a compromise? Have a global slider that affects all local sliders. If you increase the global slider, all local ones increase as well and vice versa. That way, you can just use the global slider if you want. That'd be handy, as my new planets tend to always be on the borders of war zones.

Yes, I'm a micromanagement bunny At least, I am when the circumstances need me to be.

I certainly like the idea that production isn't wasted. Especially if you are paying wages to a potentially idle workforce, you want them to produce *something*, be it luxury cars or replica Altarian holo-movies to raise your income. In MOO2, you had the option to produce "trade goods" to raise income, or "housing" to increase population growth.

I mean, the argument about wages and whatnot is all very well and good, but does that mean that if you reduce your social slider to 0%, you've suddenly laid off the entire social production workforce in your ENTIRE empire?

And you don't see why sliders on every planet is a bad thing? I should have missed something .

But I think to remember that in MOO1, you have sliders on each system, but I could be wrong.


Tempting but I fear it isn't praticable: since increasing a slider means decreasing the others, I fear that few people will understand how it work. Just look the problems some already have with more, taxe rate and spending rate.

More, are you using propaganda on your planets?

since the social slider to 0% means that others has increase, it could be just be seen has having a very versatile population that can do anything: military projects, social projects or research.

How about sliders for each governor?

Your shipbuilding worlds' Governor will have little need for social spending - his military slider will be set higher than the rest. Newly colonized worlds' governor will max out the social slider. Core worlds will be devoted to research.

Separate build queues seem to be little-used in the game now. This might make using the different governors worthwhile.

But enough about GalCiv 2. How about just zeroing out production spending on worlds not building anyting?
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Actualy, the solution that comes to my mind right off is to offer a moral boost for "unused" social production and maybe for "unused" shipyard production as well.

The idea is that if there is government money going into the social production queue with nothing queued up, its being used to subsidize consumer goods production for the local population. If there is government money going into the military (ship) production queue with nothing queued up, its being used to subsidize commercial shipping and improves moral in that manner.

Of course, this changes the entire dynamics of the game so it would require re-balancing everything. Probably not something for GC1. Maybe a usefull idea for GC2 though.

Here is an alternative idea that is very similar. The money spent in production queues that are blank is pooled into a single empire wide value that is then distributed around the empires planets equaly. Kind of like a global propaganda campaign.

Lots of ideas

Rob

> More, are you using propaganda on your planets?

(sorry, don'tknow how to quote)

No, I don't use propaganda, except if I notice a planet with *really* low morale. I usually just rush-build a stadium, entertainment network, multimedia centre or something cheap like that. By the time the aliens hate me enough to try and destabilise me, my morale is too high for it to matter anyhow.

You did have individual sliders in MOO1, and it had its low points (when I forgot about one planet and suddenly found it had 200 odd missile bases!), but it did work. Sliders done well aren't a bad thing, sliders done badly are MOO3

Now, the one slider per governor idea I like. That's a very good compromise. I'd use that in combination with the existing system - that is, use the global sliders to set the proportion of income to spend in social, military or research, and then use the governor sliders to divide up each spending chunk between each governor.

If you use the 'Q' button after highlighting what you want to quote, it will quote it (in theory). It never works for me. Instead type [ quote]Paste desired quote here[ /quote]. Lose the spaces and it should work for you.

I can't stand wasting production, i would like like either to have "trade goods" for cash, or some other bonuse for the porodution or at least not have that cash wasted. Seems simple and logical, for now i just never stop buiding social improvements, sometimes buiding stuff that has more maintaince fees than i like or even stuff i don't need like morale improvements on planets with 100 morale already, hoping that it will come in handy in the future.


By the way, when do the AIs start tearing apart there own improvements before getting invaded? What tips them off? I thoght maybe some of these panets with 2 improvements where just poor and/or poorly developed, but if they are pulling a Russian tech and burning their own cities down, than that is something i hadn't considered.

How about this, plainly sliders for each planet is micro-management taken to the extreme (nano-management?), so let's use the governor system and give each governor his/her/its set of sliders, which by default would mirror the main sliders, but could be un-latched with a check-box.

I think this solution give a good compromise which won't detract from the macro-managers ability to run a large empire, and will allow the micro-managers some fine control over spending.

From a realism point-of-view this is consistant as you could have a military governor with a list of military improvements but with most of the money put towards military production, a tech governor who spend more on research and so-on.
This would give a bit of 'personality' to each governor.
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I don't catch it: why would you have governor with sliders? Governors are linked with social projects. It is a build queue that have nothing to do with the spending on a planet: planets that are using the same governor aren't equally developped. So they need to have differents sliders.

But I could miss something.

When you first colonize a planet, you can set it to a governor who's social spending is at 100%. The build queue will contain the projects that you want on every planet, but only the bare minimum.

Once the planet is done building what's in its queue, it pops back up (as things are now), giving you a chance to change the governor to whatever strategy you think that planet should follow. One governor for core research/influence with equal social and research; one for manufacturing/shipbuilding with equal military and social; one for generalized worlds.

Combine this with the code eliminating social or military spending when there's nothing left in the queue, and it's a perfect balance. Maybe add a couple more governors, if possible.

You don't need multiple sliders to eliminate waste - in fact, multiple sliders do nothing about that problem. It's just another balance between macromanagement so generalized as to be impractically inefficient (as things are now) and micromanagement so infuriating no sane person will play the game anymore (as things are elsewhere).

In fact, a few more governors would be great for this strategy. You could have mid-, late-, and end-stage development governors for each major planet strategy (early development would probably be pretty much the same across the board, no matter what kind of planet it is).

In GalCiv 2, you might set up an automatic succession of governors, once the social queue is complete for each one. That way you won't have to figure out which governor you need to switch a planet to once it's done with the social side of spending. A line of military governors will gradually decrease social spending until they're at 90% military once all the projects are complete (leaving 10% for end-game techs, I guess). Same goes for non-shipbuilding planets and their increasing allocation towards research.

As long as you don't go nuts and set up an obscene number of governors, making changes for emergencies should require only a half-dozen or so modifications to the governors' priorities, instead of going from world to world and changing their governor or manually setting build queues.

Peace Phoenix:

I had in mind later in the game when the majority of planets are developed, the established planets will probably have most of their infrastructure in place so most of their spending will be research and military. However new aquisitions will probably require more spending in infrastructure, while any spent on research would be mainly wasted if the new planet does not have any labs etc.
The main advantage of using the governors is that macro-management types can ignore it, whilst still giving the micro-managers some degree of fine control.

Duodecimal:
Right, right & right again. You show how such a scheme could help the macro-managers as well.


**** Happy Valentines day to all ****

Is it better to just keep buidling things in the que rather than waste money, i know that the maintance cost can add up, but is it offset by the increased taxes from increased morale and production?

I should miss something: what is the link between taxes and production?

What to do about costly (for a mantenance point of view) social projects that don't do anything about morale? More, if they add production or research, a part of the bonus need to be paid.

No, not really, what's the point of building shipyards on a planet that's never going to build an offensive ship, equally why build defences on a planet way behind the front line when peace is breaking out all over.

What I tend to do is build these things until they are one month from completion, then move onto the next item, but I would much prefer not to have to do such micro-management.



I wasn't clear when I first suggested sliders for the Governors, what I had in mind was just the production sliders. This would be consistant with the game concept, you have central government setting the tax rate and spend rate, but each governor is free to set the production(Mil)/production(Soc)/research ratio as he or she (or indeed; it) sees fit.
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Strek: I don't understand why you have quoted me in the previous post. I was asking an explanation about what Dirt Craver has written.

I understand the concept of having governors sliders, but I personnally feel that you shouldn't link the sliders with a production queue. For me, it is 2 differents things that should be separated in order to be efficiently used.