Fuzzy math and game development

A trip inside the sausage factory of numbers

Published on March 6, 2006 By Draginol In GalCiv Journals

World of Warcraft is one of my favorite games. I was in the beta from the start of it and when released, re-did my Paladin. And it was good. I didn't really pay much attention to all the numbers. I knew that doing X was better than doing Y. I didn't really know how much better it was, I just knew it was from the description.

My Paladin today doesn't resemble too much my Paladin of that initial launch (let alone the beta). A lot of that is from player feedback. Third party tools combined with players putting all the stats together resulted eliminating a lot of the "fuzzier" mechanics. Things like "Procs" got dissected and analyzed at levels I couldn't even imagine. That's not necessarily a bad thing mind you, it just means the game has such large appeal that it's attracted both the casual gamers and the ones who want to understand the ins and out.

The first Galactic Civilizations was all fuzzy math. Even I would have a hard time explaining with precision how morale worked or how production worked in terms of putting together a formula. In GalCiv I, your planet quality was central to everything. Various planetary improvements, morale, and bunches of other attributes got in there to do all kinds of multiplications to the various numbers. The order of some of these mattered since there'd be an addition here, a square root there. The system was designed essentially that building improvement X was better for production than improvement Y. The numbers, in essence, were all relative to one another. Someone looking for an entertainment network to make their morale go up by 15% would be sorely disappointed.

For the sequel, I wanted to dispense with as much of that as possible. A factory would build X production units. A research center would produce Y research units. Period. How much of its capacity was used depended on how fully funded the building was.

Entering the sausage factory

Things get murky when you start dealing with civilization ability points. One might argue that if I have a planet where my approval rating is 50% and I have a morale ability of 10% then my approval rating should be 55% (50*1.1). And if I build an entertainment network whose job is to improve morale by 20% that my approval rating would then be 50*1.3 = 65%.

What about production? If I have a factory that produces 10 units of production and it's all on social production and my social production ability is 20%, then my social production should be 12? Sure. But should the player be charged the 12 units? Or should it be 10 units with the other 2 production as bonus? That's the way it is on research.

Speaking of which, if I have 10 units of research being produced and my research ability is 50%, shouldn't my research by 15? No argument from me. On the surface, that's how it should be. And indeed, often that's how things start out. Then you have human beings playing your game and all those good designs go out the window. Probably the biggest reason for that in this particular game is from the mining resources.

There are research, military, economic, influence, and morale resources. To keep the game from being too complex to the casual user, starbase modules that mine these resoruces are the same no matter what type you are building on. That is, A mining barracks adds say 10% to your ability regardless of whether it's a morale resource or a weapons resource. The problem is, a 10% bonus to research is hugely different than a 10% bonus to morale which is a huge difference form a 10% bonus to weapons. I mean, heck, if I have a ship with 8 attack, I won't even get an additional point.

And we're just getting warmed up. Should a 10% bonus to your morale ability increase it by 10%? Or should it add 10 points to it? That is, if my morale ability is 10% and I mine a morale resoruce for 10%, should my morale ability be 11%? Or should it add 10% to it and make it 20%? We add it because otherwise, any semblance of balance could go out the window (create a civ with a 80% morale ability natively and then these percent multipliers would get crazy).

Has your head exploded yet? Because it just keeps getting better. In order to have some semblance of balance, we mess around with the ability values in order for them not to get out of whack.

That morale ability? fCivABilityFactor = pow(fCivABilityFactor,0.80f);

At release, Your Civ Ability at morale was just that. But it turned out on a large galaxy you could have several morale resources cranked up to over 100 points each. So suddenly you could have 100% taxes and 100% morale. Oops. So it was changed .95, then .9, then .7, then back upu to .8. That's the sausage factory that's game development. Where all your nice clean, elegant mechanics start to get murky.

Your research ability? It's chopped in half for the same reason.

Government waste

And what about "wasted" social production? In GalCiv I, military and social production was wasted even if you weren't building anything.

For GalCiv II, we decided to eliminate that. If you weren't building a ship or an improvement, you weren't charged for that production. That makes sense. Except, well, it turned out that players couldn't control their economy if social production was handled that way.

What happened is that say you're playing on a really large galaxy with 100 colonies and your economy is producing 5,000 net revenue per turn. Your planets have no improvements being built. Then an alien offers to trade you xeno factories. You take it. Then suddenly your net revenue goes to -2,000 per turn. Huh? What happened? All your planets started upgrading their factories and all that social production started to get charged for again. Yikes! Worse, it would gradually come back down as those improvements were completed all without the player doing anything.

Given that there's people who find the economic system in GalCiv II to be complex (what? separate tax and spend sliders?) having massively changing net revenue without user intervention would have put them over the top. So we ended up charging for social production. Which, is probably more realistic anyway and requires the player to put a little bit of effort into making their government more efficient. Still, it's not ideal because it has to be rationalized.

One of the ideas we had was to have social production go towards approval rating. But it's the same problem. Players see their approval alter by moving the spending slider and it's just another complexity.

Another idea was to have social production be added to military production on a given planet if there's nothing else to build. This is possibly more doable. And if there's no ship being built, it would still be spent. But at least that way, there's some benefit.

You have the power

Just like with World of Warcraft, games, especially statistics laden games like Galactic Civilizations are designed to evolve. We'll listen to what you have to say and together we'll keep improving the system. But never think there's a "best" system. There is only, at best, a system that annoys fewer people than the alternatives.

Comments (Page 1)

weasello

on Mar 06, 2006

A lot of people like to "see the numbers," as it were. For example; Influence Starbase. First upgrade gives me +1% influence. Seems like a huge waste of BCs, if you ask me! Especially considering the next one is like, +10%.

What is 1% anyway? Maybe if you guys put a tooltip that said "now: 100i after: 101i" I could see exactly what the net effect of everything is.

Similarly, I had a planet that was completely overtaken by influence. My borders were nowhere near the planet. So I constructed about 6 fully decked out influence starbases and replaced a bunch of research facilities on the planet with embassies. Had no effect whatsoever! Is influence cumulative? Is it static? Do I see immediate results? How will this improvement effect that space?

Alfonse

on Mar 06, 2006

But never think there's a "best" system. There is only, at best, a system that annoys fewer people than the alternatives.

There is a best system; it's the one that is transparent to the user. The one where the player doesn't have to wonder things like, "What exactly does a Research Center do? Is it really worth me having 3 of them on world X?"

In Civ, I can look at a city with 12 production, and I instantly know exactly what I will get if I build a factory there. I'll get a city with 18 production (and some pollution, but I forget how that one works exactly. It was a pretty simple computation, though). If it is worth the however many turns of production to build the factory to get 18 production in the city, then I build it.

You can't do that in GalCivII. You can't because it is never entirely clear what the consequenses of an action are. And strategy games don't work if a player has to make uninformed choices; they may as well be rolling dice and hoping everything comes out OK. On the lower difficulty levels, mistakes of this nature (building one too few of some building or something) are acceptable because the AI is nerfed. On higher difficulty, you just lose. Civ remains the superior game to GalCivII because you know what's going to happen; you can predict the outcome of a choice, and are therefore better able to make an intelligent choice.

Seeing the numbers isn't just a nice thing to have: it's the difference between making a wise decision and throwing a dart in the dark.

And I think one thing Civ was good at was having simple formulas. No power functions. No square roots. Nothing of that sort. Just simple 4th grade math. The way Civ balanced things was by making them more or less expensive. And Civ didn't have nearly as many cumulative bonuses; you got stuff from the terrain, and it was multipled by a couple of buildings. And maybe a racial multiplier.

In GC2, how much research (for example) gets produced in a city is affected by so much:

1: Racial bonus
2: % of internal spending
3: % of research relative to the other 2 factors
4: Research Buildings on planet
5: Number and quality of research mining starbases
6: On-planet resources in buildings

That's a lot to balance. No wonder you had to come up with contravities to make it work out.

My suggestion would have been to do the following:

1: Racial bonus is a multiplier, but free.
2: Internal spending is the same.
3: % research is the same
4: Research buildings are a multiplier, not free (must pay for them).
5: Mining bases are like improvements in Civilization: they add a free base amount (improvable with modules) to planets.
6: Research resources on planet, when a research building is built, work like mining bases: they add a free base quantity to the planet's output.

The only question left is whether free resources are ever multiplied. This should be an either/or question. I would suggest not, simply to make it so that planetary resources (something you can't tell anything about until you actually settle the planet) don't become a decisive factor in the game.

Tweaking is then done on the research building multipliers, the racial bonus multipliers, and to the cost of the various technologies. No esotheric formulas and so forth to peer through. The player can easily determine how any particular choice is going to work out.

I'm not a big fan of cross-posting, but I made a really nice post with regards to the social waste problem in another thread, and I think it bears repeating here.

Galactic Civilization II is a very different game in many ways from the Civilization series. One of the biggest differences is that money is the foundation of everything that a "city" does.

What this means is that managing money therefore becomes the most important thing that a civilization can produce. Now, this has its good effects and bad effects, neither of which is important for the purposes of this discussion. What matters is that, objectively, the most important thing that a player must, must do to stay compeditive in the game is manage their money well.

This means watching what they build. In terms of military spending, this is pretty easy. That is because military production only draws from your account when you use it. If you need extra money, you know that you can just stop building ships. Or, looked at from the other way around, if you know that you're going to be building a grand fleet, and your total military spending outstrips your economy, then you know you'll be into deficit spending.

The tools necessary to monitor and manage military spending are pretty decent (though there could be improvements, but that's neither here nor there). Specifically, the most important tool is the ability to just not build anything. Another tool is to prioritize production on a per-planet basis. The last tool is the global slider for cross-empire production.

Now, the thing about building stuff is that there are times when you need it and times when you don't. When you don't need to be building ships, you're not building ships. When you don't need to build improvements, you don't build them. Simple.

The tools necessary to manage social production are fewer. Without the ability to return unused social production, you're left with the global slider and the per-planet priority. Neither tool is good enough. You can't "deprioritize" spending, so if you just want to return some of your social production, you have to pick whether you want to focus on research or military at that base. And the global slider is right out, unless you don't need social projects anywhere in the empire. Which is unlikely.

The thing is that the two tools are probably enough to get away with things, but it's a pain to use them. Using the production directly to control it is easy: you're either building stuff or you're not. If you use the queue correctly, it happens automatically. The other way is to alter the global sliders and then go to each planet and change their priority settings. Those planets that still need social should specialize in it. Those that don't need to specialize in military or research. However, you also adjust the global slider so that, by specializing in military (for example), military and research are equal (all other things being equal, of course). This would require upping the research slider significantly.

This is painful. And unfun. But, because the prime function of the player is to manage their funding, players either do it or they miss out on an opportunity for a more optimized economy.

So, by applying this feature, you have effectively made it much more difficult for the player to execute his prime function: managing funding. Remember, we already decided that, as a basic game design decision (indeed, what separates GalCiv2 from Civilization) that managing funding was a primary player operation. You have made this job not only more difficult, but you have made it possible for the player to spend a great deal of time doing something unfun, simply because it makes their empire (significantly) more efficient. There's a big payoff, so players will do it. But they'll hate you for it.

BTW, your argument for this misfeature (a technical term for a designed feature that damages the game rather than enhances it) about wild swings in money is ultimately rooted in a deeper problem: automated upgrades of facilities beyond the user's ability to control. Ships are not required to swap out Laser IV for Laser V, despite the fact that I just researched it. So what is the logic behind forced building upgrades?

Now, to some degree, this goes into one of your journal entires on the weakness of the Dread Lords: they're tech advantage means that they can't use low-end stuff. So, when they take a world, they have to upgrade everything to DL-quality stuff before it becomes useful to them. This is all fine and good for the campaign, but forcing the player to spend time and building effort on such things in the regular game seems oddly like punishing the player for getter farther along the game.

It's one thing to restrict the culture from being able to build the low-end buildings after upgrades become available (though, personally, I prefer the Civilzation method of you have to build the low-end buildings as prereqs to get the high-end ones, per city). It's quite another to take money out of the player's hand to force them to "modernize" their cities. Or, as you have done with this misfeature, to take money out of the player's hand all the time.

However, if you're going to continue to keep this misfeature around (auto-upgrading), then Makris's suggest is pretty reasonable. It should, of course, include the display of both the unadjusted bc income as well as the actual (for this turn) bc income (perhaps in parenthesis).

Creston999

on Mar 06, 2006

With regards to the production and military units still being charged, I typically set every planet to focus on research when it's not building anything, so that the credits that DO get spent and at least spent on something that has a benefit.

The downside is that I have to do this manually, and in a large galaxy with 35 worlds, it becomes an absolute chore of a clickfest to go over my civs every six months and make sure they're still doing what they need to be doing. This is where the computer always beats you, because it does this for every world EVERY SINGLE TURN. It always runs 100% optimized, whereas a human is lucky if he runs at like 30%.

I think the best way to fix this is to have a planet that's not doing any social or military production AUTOMATICALLY default to focussing on research. Sure, you'll still waste a few units here and there, but not as badly, and at least you're getting a benefit.

Great article btw, it's fun to read about some of the underlying thoughts about the game, and some of these points I had never even realised yet.

Creston

Frogboy

on Mar 06, 2006

AlFonse, upgrades are automated by default but can be turned off. Go to the details screen and turn off that option. Before you call something a "mis-feature" you may want to make sure you're certain what you're talking about.

Also, comparing GalCiv II to Civ IV is not really apt here. There is no starbase equivalent in Civ IV. If we didn't have galactic resources to mine, the system would be a lot simpler. But the game would also be a lot poorer.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Creston999

on Mar 06, 2006

BTW, your argument for this misfeature (a technical term for a designed feature that damages the game rather than enhances it) about wild swings in money is ultimately rooted in a deeper problem: automated upgrades of facilities beyond the user's ability to control

You can turn that off, btw. There's an option in the details screen I believe. It's on by default, called "automatically upgrade buildings" or something to that effect.

Creston

Romeo11B

on Mar 06, 2006

I had a thought the otherday that it would be easier if starbases on resources gave you just a handful of resources. For example, I build a starbase on a military resource (whatever that could possible be) it would give plus 5 military resources to each planet in that grid. Or how about building an economic starbase and it gives you an extra 5 bc. Set numbers would be easier for me to calculate and understand. Right now it's if i build a starbase on the influence resource it makes my influence better. I don't know hom much better, but it's just better.

I like GalCiv2, but it is a complex universe to deal with.

Pode (the other one, it seems)

on Mar 07, 2006

To some extent the fuzzy math is realistic. I sincerely doubt even the legendary Alan Greenspan could sucessfully predict the EXACT impact of any decision on one country's economy, let alone a star-spanning empire of hundreds of billions. Galactic emperors will not have total and absolute control or transparency into evry aspect of their empire. Don't go MoO3 with that idea, but I'm actually enjoying the fact that I don't understand the game well enough to optimaize my strategy. I'm absolutley anal about doing that and often spend more time in excel than I do in the game of the month. It's been nice to be forced to throw up my hands and just have fun trying stuff. I know, I know, performance anxiety in my gaming marks me as a pretty neurotic individual, but hey.

LintMan

on Mar 07, 2006

To me it seems that there must be a better way to solve the problem of spending jumps when auto-upgrading is enabled than by charging for unused social production; the increased planet focus micromanagement (or big economic penalty from not doing so) seems to detract from the intended benefit of the auto-upgrade convenience.

If I understand correctly, in your example where social production wasn't wasted, with the player making 5000 revenue with no social production then dropping to -2000 revenue when the upgrades happen, this implies the player has at least 7000 social production. Correct? But if we instead have to pay for unused social production, that means that the player is paying that 7000+ cost regardless of usage, every turn, so he'd always be at -2000. Of course, he could adjust the social slider down and then set focus on planets he did need lots of social construction on, but to me that's at least as onerous (and still more costly) as upgrading improvements manually. And if you consider that this change was to protect relatively uninformed players from mysterious big revenue swings, those same relatively uninformed players probably won't be doing that micromanagement and will always be paying the wasted cost.

What if, instead of the auto-upgrade being purely automatic, whenever research or trade triggers an upgrade event, the player is presented a dialog box detailing the upgrade costs and potential revenue impacts, and offering a choice of what to do. Then the player will *know* what's happened and have directly approved his revenue going to -2000, or have the option to avoid that hit. If you do this, then unused social production doesn't need to be paid for, and auto-upgrading won't result in baffled players wondering why their revenues dropped (at least not if they're reading the dialog boxes).

Another help could be to highlight any numbers on the economic page (and/or on GNN) that have changed significantly from the previous turn.

Just some thoughts.

Alfonse

on Mar 07, 2006

AlFonse, upgrades are automated by default but can be turned off.

Really. Let me make sure I understand the progression, then.

You have this idea with production resources (military and social) that, when not using it, it doesn't come out of your treasury. Fair enough, considering how valuable money is.

Then one day you realize that updating buildings manualy is kind of a pain. So, you make an optional feature to let this happen automatically.

However, you later realize that this auto updating feature creates wild swings in the social production, thus potentially turning an overall positive income into a negative one arbitrarily. Since this can happen at any time, it can be very confusing for a neophyte. Not only that, even for a veteran, it can be dangerous should it happen on the wrong turn. Given this problem, you choose to solve it by forcing social spending to always be on.

That all makes sense (well, not the solution, because there are at least 3 better ways of solving the problem that don't involve taking gameplay away from the player. But, for the purpose of comprehending this logic, I'll accept it).

Now, here's the part I don't get. From your statements, it seems that the principle, and indeed, only, reason why you turn social spending always on is because of auto updating. However, auto updating isn't a required feature of the game! It's optional (though on by default). The results of solving the problem (a problem that doesn't exist when you're not using auto updating) cannot be switched off, and therefore affect players who could never encounter the problem. To them, there is no problem.

You must agree that it penalizes the player. It'd be really difficult to make a case that this is good for a player that doesn't use auto updating, and I haven't seen anyone try to suggest that this is in any way good for the player. Also, there's been no other justification for the feature put forth, so I will assume that this is the only such justification. And if the only justification for having this is that it creates confusion when auto updating is on, and auto updating is an optional feature, how does it make sense to penalize the player who doesn't play with auto updating on?

As to the issue of misfeatures, auto updating isn't a misfeature; indeed, I don't recall anything in the instruction manual that mentioned that buildings got better (there most certainly is no list of buildings, coupled with something telling you which techs give them to you), so I'd probably never have noticed that I had new buildings if it weren't for this feature (though, admittedly, that's more of a failing of my reading or of the lack of detail in the manual than of any goodness on auto updating). The problem itself is quite real and valid; what is a misfeature is the solution to that problem. It is very analogous to killing a fly with a bazooka. You solve the problem, yes, but you've damaged other things in the process.

The odd thing is, I might go so far as to suggest that auto updating, as a feature, is something that should never be turned off unless it ends social waste. What would be the point of wasting production on nothing, when it could go into a new building (except that the new building may have a higher upkeep cost)? And if the city was already building something, the auto updating only adds its stuff at the end of the queue. And you can still prioritize around it. In such cases, turning off auto updating is only a penalty; it is never an advantage.

There aren't?

The equivalent to starbases in Civ IV seems obvious: terrain enhancement. That is the function of a starbase; to give nearby cities access to greater resources, be it trade, production, or food. Or other special resources.

Now, Civ IV doesn't have a thing that is an exact equivalent. But terrain enhancment serves the same basic purpose. You have to build a unit (thus slowing you down. When you're building this unit, you're not building something else). That unit has to move to someplace near the city. And then it has to deactivate itself for a few turns. And the result is something that improves the resourcing of a city. The only real differences are that, while GC2 does less "terrain enhancement" overall, it costs a lot more to do it in GC2 than Civ (you lose the unit).

And the purpose of the analogy was to show the difference between a lucid resource system (Civ) and an arcane one (GalCivII). It was to argue against the point that Draginol was making, which was that good balance effectively requires an arcane resource system. Civ offers pretty good balance without resorting to arbitrary numbers and power functions and so forth.

To some extent the fuzzy math is realistic.

This is a game in which planets from other star systems can be almost next to each other. Where the distance between stars is exceptionally close (by real standards). And where you can conquer the galaxy in a year.

Realism left a long time ago. This isn't Sim-Galaxy; this is a game. Justifying any feature just because it is more "realistic" is wrongheaded; you need to do it from the standpoint of good game design.

When I want to play an economics simulator, I'll buy one. That's not what GC2 is.

Scumbag509

on Mar 07, 2006

I don't care how the devs rationalize it, making me pay for un-used social production is wrong.

VelvetDevil

on Mar 07, 2006

1. Thank you for the communication.

2. Though your examples of starbase effects are something of a tangent to the notion of a perfectly transparent UI, the notion of using a flat 10% isn't a necessary one. I don't think many of us care whether or not it's a consistent "10%" across all resources mined, we just want to know what the heck we're getting from our constructor. Frankly I'd *MUCH* rather see simple sentences such as:
"Your approval rating will become +1% higher."
"Your galactic research will be increased by 140 research points per week."
"Each billion citizens in your empire will generate an additional 1bc per week. (Your current population is 15.6 billion)"
or "All of your ships receive +1 to each of their existing weapons."
The numbers, are of course, pulled out of the air and are irrelevant; the *point* is that it's not likely that any of us care in the least whether or not these represent "10% jumps", we just want to know exactly what the darn thing does when upgraded or mined.

3. As for social production, it must be changed. (An opinion, and a strong one). Frankly, your entire preference toward requiring "spending" on production could be rethought. It's much simpler for the gamer to know that more factories will build allow for bigger projects and faster building of smaller projects, just as more financial/commerce centers will generate more money (they don't appear to, sadly, though they should insofar as the gamer's expectations are concerned). There's already a choice between the money / production at the level of choosing planetary improvements. You don't need to make them choose twice.

By using this model, it's very easy to set up specialized worlds. Planetary "focus" wouldn't be something you adjusted with a slider or a click on a bull's eye ("You there!! You 50 dock workers, we need you in labcoats, stat!!!"), but rather with something adjusted with planning, and careful selection of which improvements you place on which world.

VelvetDevil

on Mar 07, 2006

1. Thank you for the communication.

2. Though your examples of starbase effects are something of a tangent to the notion of a perfectly transparent UI, the notion of using a flat 10% isn't a necessary one. I don't think many of us care whether or not it's a consistent "10%" across all resources mined, we just want to know what the heck we're getting from our constructor. Frankly I'd *MUCH* rather see simple sentences such as:
"Your approval rating will become +1% higher."
"Your galactic research will be increased by 140 research points per week."
"Each billion citizens in your empire will generate an additional 1bc per week. (Your current population is 15.6 billion)"
or "All of your ships receive +1 to each of their existing weapons."
The numbers, are of course, pulled out of the air and are irrelevant; the *point* is that it's not likely that any of us care in the least whether or not these represent "10% jumps", we just want to know exactly what the darn thing does when upgraded or mined.

3. As for social production, it must be changed. (An opinion, and a strong one). Frankly, your entire preference toward requiring "spending" on production could be rethought. It's much simpler for the gamer to know that more factories will build allow for bigger projects and faster building of smaller projects, just as more financial/commerce centers will generate more money (they don't appear to, sadly, though they should insofar as the gamer's expectations are concerned). There's already a choice between the money / production at the level of choosing planetary improvements. You don't need to make them choose twice.

By using this model, it's very easy to set up specialized worlds. Planetary "focus" wouldn't be something you adjusted with a slider or a click on a bull's eye ("You there!! You 50 dock workers, we need you in labcoats, stat!!!"), but rather something adjusted with planning, and careful selection of which improvements you place on which world.

drank

on Mar 07, 2006

I'd also like to advocate transparency as the most important thing in the GalCiv economy. I don't agree with the decisions to have such complicated formulas, but hey, you guys are the game designers and you get to do it your way, not my way!

But I agree with others on this thread that it becomes almost impossible to play the game well at higher difficulty levels if the player can't anticipate the consequences of their decisions. Since I assume you're not going to undertake a major rewrite of the economic model at this point, I think you could help players the most by focusing on in-game documentation that shows where the numbers are coming from.

The Civ IV tooltips are the gold standard to copy here, in my opinion. They make it easy to learn the game, because it's always clear where a given number comes from and what the player might do to raise it or lower it. The GalCiv equivalent will be more complex because the formulas are more complex, but I still think you could do a good presentation without tons of development time.

I think the added benefit of this kind of in-game documentation is that it becomes easier for you guys to see whether your formulas are having the intended effect. And it's obvious to everyone when there's an actual bug in a calculation vs. a complicated formula that gives an unexpected result.

Peace Phoenix

on Mar 07, 2006

whenever research or trade triggers an upgrade event, the player is presented a dialog box detailing the upgrade costs and potential revenue impacts, and offering a choice of what to do. Then the player will *know* what's happened and have directly approved his revenue going to -2000, or have the option to avoid that hit.

Yes, I think the main problem is for the player to be aware about what happens, when and why. Once he is informed, he knows what to do and isn't really surprized.

Walldorf2000

on Mar 07, 2006

What if, instead of the auto-upgrade being purely automatic, whenever research or trade triggers an upgrade event, the player is presented a dialog box detailing the upgrade costs and potential revenue impacts, and offering a choice of what to do.

I very much second that.

I was very happy when I heard that the waste was stopped in GC2. Now I'm a bit dissapointed that this nonsense comes back.

It makes it very hard to manage the economy and leads to very much micromanagement. Please rethink about that.

Furthermore I second that the player should get more information about the mechanics. I don't mind when it is complicated but I really would like to understand what happens

It's very dissapointing when you invest in factories and then just realize that you did run into a game cap and everything was wasted. I understand that caps can be necessary to avoid exploits and to keep the numbers sane, but I really would like to know about it beforehand.

Don't get me wrong. I love GC1 and GC2 should arrive every other day (it was shipped on 2nd of March) and it will still be my favorite game. I play GC since good old OS/2 times.

I'm a software developer as well and I know of the temptation to jump on the "when you ask for it you get it" wagon. And when it goes wrong you can say "you asked for it". When there is a problem it is your duty to find the solution. Listen to all the complains and suggestions but don't make a hot fix. Please take your time and rethink this mechanics in-depth. I'm very confident that you will find a solution which makes even more people happy than the current one.

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