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 2)

Noghanimus

on Mar 07, 2006

Would it help if you would get a warning, plus a choice to turn auto-upgrade off, when auto-upgrade would cause such swings in income (or simply whenever auto-upgrades become available)? This would need only to be checked when gaining techs that give upgrades, so would not be too inefficient for the game. Should not be too hard for the AI to handle as well.

As long as the results of auto-upgrading are not unexpected, but are explained and can be handled, I agree with Alfonse and Peace Phoenix: let the player choose how to handle it. Transparency is a very important thing here....

Umlaut

on Mar 07, 2006

I think that when social production isn't being used, it should go towards tech by default. It drives me nuts in the late game when I have 40 colonies all building nothing and I have to manually go through and change to focus research (or turn that back off when an upgrade comes along.

It would also be nice to have more use of the governor screen for galaxy wide changes. You could set the overall expense levels on the tax pop-up and use the governor menu to change focus for idividual planets quickly.

Longbows

on Mar 07, 2006

Here's my 2c's worth.

First: EXCELLENT thread. Not many developers have the confidence to invite debate about something as "personal" as their own design of an economic system. I know it's a daunting task to come up with something like this (I've helped with a few) and I appreciate the fact, you let us give input on it.

I'll just sum up the ideas that have been mention and I agree with and add a few others (from concepts used in Civ series and Capitalsm 2):

ECONOMICS:
1. I agree a player doesn't need to be familiar with the exact formulas, however complex or simple they are. They do however need to see what the effects of decision will be. For those, you need a concept that goes along the lines:
planned CHANGE -> (Hidden) model -> predicted CONSEQUENCE

2. There are people who want to see the exact details on how these decisions are evaluated and results are computed. For those, one could add a graphic representation of the model in the Planet Details section, complete with all the numbers and modifiers, so they see what is going on. Would be a lot of work and maybe not worth it, but it WOULD clear up confusion of those who like numbers.

3. Changing focus of production facilities on a planet should be limited (as stated, you can't have your dock workers turn into scientist in a second). So either delay it (full effect in a few turns) or limit it (say only 50% military production can be diverted to science)

UPGRADING
1. I second the idea of a special dialogue box, that would ask the player which planets they want upgraded. As I understand it though, with the current economic model, this feature isn't even needed.

2. I'd like to see an auto-upgrade concept for ships (again, with the option to review the planned upgrades), so that I don't have to make a special class for every time I wish to upgrade shields or weapons. Keep the class, just change the loadout? I mean in real-life an F-15 carrying Sidewinder missiles and another F-15 carrying Sparrow missiles are STILL the same version of F-15. Same with Laser Mk.2 and Laser Mk.4? Changing the type of weapon (Beam -> Missile for ex.) is another matter.

GOVERNORS:
1. The current concept of governors is good, but lacking. What we have is a "macro" to execute multiple tiny orders we can't be arsed to. I suggest you expand and introduce REAL governors, so we don't spend time micromanaging. After all, the President doesn't manage the production capabilities of every single town in their country, why should a Galactic leader be concerned with every measly planet? I mean the AI players do it, why can't we get a bit of AI capabilities to work for our race as well?

2. Introduce something like Civilisations AI advisors, who suggest what to build, where and when.

3. Have different level of governors:
- Planetary - concerned with upgrades and production optimisation - you can always override them temporarily or plain sack them if you need manual control
- System or sector governors - concerned with planetary defence upgrades as well as (designated) fighter production and possibly even starbase upgrades if in their sector
- Galactic governor - keep your budget balances, your production maximized and your people happy. Tough one and may not even be needed.

4. Here's the fun part. You need to PAY your governers some sort of weekly amount. The better they are, the more they earn -> conseqently also manage better.

5. Here's an even more fun part. Tie governance to Tech Tree. Similarly to Logistics - which seems to include naval training for Fleets - add Governance. You get no governors by default, but can research Planetary, Sector/System and Galactic Management. Add levels in between to tweak their optimisation AI.

It takes away a bit of fun, but you don't HAVE to use gov's if you don't want. The AI is already in place, just give some to the player, so that we can concentrate on strategy, research fleets and overall direction of the empire.

Whatcha think?

Vanir

on Mar 07, 2006

Frogboy:

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

I don't have a problem with research getting chopped in half, I have a problem with the game not telling me this. If a 50% research bonus is actually a 25% bonus then please label it a 25% bonus. Otherwise you're guaranteeing a continuous stream of confused people showing up on the forums asking about their broken research bonus.

Alexender000

on Mar 07, 2006

How I see the gouvernements working in GalCiv2 is rather more simple than most would suggest. You've got the population wich pay taxes in order to receive services (health, education and ect.). Now some would love to micromanage everything but let say that by taxes we control both the social expenditure and the taxation level (After all, this is a strategy game not a economic sim with a side of war (for that go to Supreme Ruler 2010, now THAT is one complicated game). Back on the subject, the number of money we see in the budget would be the "surplus" meaning what left after the population is taken care of. That money is then subtracted and increased by some factors (Tourism, trades for the plus, Maintenance, Military upkeep, Civilian Upkeep (I.E. Colony infractructures and maintenance) for the minus). What left is then put into our hand to prioritise, to invest in any of the three main fields (Military Production, Social Production or Research Grants) allowing the industrial/research capacity to do so, after all, no matter how much money you throw at someone, there's only so much they can do. The industrial capacity represent that fact. At 100% it means that all your capacity is used, no expense bared but no Gouvernement can normally acheive this kind of performance alone so we are allowed to control the extent of the capacity to use. The main thing to remember tho is that the Gouvernement dosn't actually build or research anything by itself. In fact, just like the current gouvernements, we give money to people to do stuff. Let me explain with a simple exemple. Let's say our economy provide a "surplus" of (at 0% industrial capacity) 100bc/week and that our factory can produce 200mp and our labs 100tp. Added this give us a industrial capacity of 300. Now since the game use the simple rule of 1mp (or tp) cost 1bc, if we were to use our full capacity we would have a dificit of 200bc/week (300bc (production) - 100bc (surplus)) and for the sake of the exemple let's say we can't afford to run a dificit, we are then forced to use only 33% of our industrial might. Now we got 100bc of production to allocate. Social and militare sare the mp so max 200points there and 100 for research. Again for the sake of the exemple, we will put our priority at 25% Social 50% Military 25% Research wich would mean that our factory (across all our colony) will produce 25 hammers, 50 shields and 25 beakers. Now those numbers are bonified by some factors (Race abilities, special planet tiles and planet bonus (Dilemma events or moon/rings) and of course the starbase and galactic resources mining) but all in all that the big picture for the economy of GalCiv.

Now the reason that I dislike the new waste system is this. As I said earlier, the gouvernement dosen't actually build or research anything, it only give directions and control the military (starships). That means that when I build a factory, what I actually do is order the previous factories (or those included in the initial colony and ect.) to build a factory and then pay for it by the rule of 1mp for 1bc wich pay for the wages, the materials ect. But the truth is, I am not the owner of the factory, sure I control it and if I need it production, I use it but the real users, the real owner of the factory I invested in by building/subsided it is the people or more specificly the private sector. This is the only way you could actually "force buy" something. The private sector is what make all those gadget the populace use and it also it that fill all those mini freighters that you taxes for revenue to invest (or store). As for research, we pay/subside the contruction of labs to wich we issue grant in the given field of research we want to discover. My point is we pay for the maintenance of all those building already and we pay to produce things we need (ships and whatnots), but we pay the private sector for those things therfore, the gouvernement dosn't produce "waste" (apart from corruption but it's not in the game), the private sector does (by building non-essential stuff). The gouvernement dosn't build toothpaste or civilian space yatch, therfore, if there is no "contract" to build inprovement or ship or research, we can't be charged for the production these improvement does beyond the maintenance fees. As for the suggestions of using the "waste" to boost research, it could be viable but only as long thet it dosn't exceed the research capacity for the planet implied. I would however prefer to return to the no waste scheme.

It just dosn't make sence for me to pay for production that I don't need nor use.

IonizedChicken

on Mar 07, 2006

Hrm...

I definately would want to see some sort of list of consequences for my larger actions, and I would like it if the numeral system was plain to me as well, if only because I'm curious.

But, here are several comments:

Longbows:
1) As I said just above, I fully support the idea of knowing the predicted consequences.
2) Yeah, focus should definately be delayed. It takes a lot of time to shift money and workforce between development fields. Perhaps diffrent levels are in order as well -- like the Social Managment screen (The thing with the taxes bar), except without numbers. Of course, the level would be in propotional to the delay.

3) Yup, third the dialogue box idea.
4) I doubt an auto-upgrade for ships will be terribly useful, though if its easy to impliment it can be an option. Remember that upgrading ships is not like upgrading structures -- upgrading structures is free (The upgrading itself, I mean, not the results), though it takes time, while upgrading a ship takes both time AND money. If you have too many ships you want upgraded you may suffer a sharp drop in your treasury, especially if you are in the beggining of a game.

5) I'm not sure how I stand about the advisor thing.

6) If we have so many governors to do our work for us, why would we need us? I think you went overboard there a bit. Though, I would like governors to be able to perform more varied actions than what they can currently. Perhaps a way to mass-construct buildings, as well as ships, would be in order. I've too many times encountered an empty queue that could have been used to build something. Another idea is to add the ability to set a development focus to all of the colonies. Hell, maybe even to auto-upgrade ships.

NOTE: Alex, could you PLEASE arrange your post in paragraphs? It makes my eyes bleed...

Dewwar

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.

Apparently, I am one of the few in this thread that agree with this poster. I'm also not worried about wasted social spending, cause it seems quite realistic. In real life (at least the american government) there's a spend it or lose it policy. If a group gets budgeted a certain amount of money, the spend it, regardless of whether they have anything worth while to spend it on. It'll be new laptops for everyone, or a ski trip, or anything just to spend that money before the budget period is up.

It's sad that things work that way, but it does make sense in a sick sort of way.

-Dewar

Zartax

on Mar 07, 2006

I totally agree about the game being hard to understand since you cannot see all the numbers and stuff behind the screen. Also, I'm quite curious why, oh why, I can't use all of my factories and labratories at once, if I have the money. I quote the manual:

"For instance, a Research Center provides a colony with 12 tp. If Spending Distribution is set to 100% research, then it will produce 12 flasks. If you Spending Distribution is set to 50%m then it will only produce 6 flasks."

Excuse me, but what's up with that?! If I have 12 bc, why can't I have it produce 12 flasks without completly hampering my military and social production? Same thing with the focus. How come the focus on research affects production, when it's not done in the same buildings? I can se how focusing on military production lowers social production and vice versa since they are all done att the same geographical location, but research? That one should be unaffected.

The ideal would be for me to just access the planet, se how much potential production and research it can achieve, and the set the number of bc I want to spend on each. Just like that. No focus, no sliders to control moneyflow (except the taxation slider). Nice and simple, just pure facts.

As of now, if I want to minimize social waste I set the sliders to low spending on social and focus on it where it's needed. But that might not be enough. Let's say I dont have a starport at that planet. Why are my factories producing military production? To ajoust it so I get more social production, I have to focus, and if I need more, I have to change the economy of my WHOLE EMPIRE! Just to get that planet going! Now, that's just wrong!

LordSloth

on Mar 07, 2006

Regarding the waste of social production and the inability to balance the economy.

In brief:
Situation: Get a new tech that allows new improvements, like a research center.
Solution: Ask the player whether he wants to upgrade his factories, and displays the estimated weekly cost (as simple as the social spending for the first week, or as complex as the average estimated weekly spending) and possibly an estimate for a completion time and total overall cost.

Alternate version of the upgrade screen, perhaps a planetary upgrade governor similar to that of the rally points.
I know a few people are discontented with the inability to build lower level factories, on bare planets. I'm not feeling that eloquent and my brain has ran out of words.

hotcoffeedude

on Mar 07, 2006

Excuse me, but what's up with that?! If I have 12 bc, why can't I have it produce 12 flasks without completly hampering my military and social production?

Is this really how it works? I assumed if all sliders were set to the right (100% spending, military/social/research all rightmost) **and you had enough funds**, that you could get %100 of your potential for each category. Isn't this how it works?

Veinless

on Mar 07, 2006

Grand redesign:

Production of hammers, shields, flasks is based on population and modifiers.

1 billion population = X "production units", at a cost of X BC.

Labs and Factories serve as modifiers. Each lab or factory gives you an extra Y% towards research or social/military.

Overall production formula:
Production (Z) = Population (X) * (1 + Y)

The only cost is for X, as well as the maintenance cost of labs/factories.
There is no cost for the extra production. That is, you are charged for used X, not Z.

One slider, which I will label machine time, is used to set the spending balance for social production and military production. If one type of production is not occuring, all machine time is spent on the other production type. If neither type of production is occuring, this slider is irrelevent - no funds will be spent on idle machines.

The other slider, which I will label production/research bias, is used to set the spending balance between production and research. If no production is occuring, this slider is irrelevent - research will be at 100%.

Labs and factories will still have maintenance costs associated with them, so they are not "free". However, their modified production is not charged for directly.

Planetary budget costs will be constant - they will not change based on what is being produced. This is because the money is being spent on labour. We could aways implement another slider to reduce total planetary budget - that backwater world gets a minimal budget, etc etc. I am not fond of too many sliders, but this must be considered.

This would total change the makeup of the game. I do not know if it would be for bad or good. Only time would tell.

Alfonse

on Mar 07, 2006

Excuse me, but what's up with that?! If I have 12 bc, why can't I have it produce 12 flasks without completly hampering my military and social production?

Because that's the game design. You have to make choices. And those choices have consequences.

It might be interesting to let the 3 global resource sliders be independent of each other. Unlike the way Civ uses trade (turning it into luxiries, gold, or research), GC2 operates on a more global scale. Each city pays into a pool, and each city then draws from that pool to fund its stuff. With a system like that, it would certainly be possible to uncouple the 3 global sliders from one another.

But that would be a very different game from the one we have here. And the consequences of making that change are pretty significant.

redshift8

on Mar 07, 2006

Let me start by saying that I appreciate the dialog and think that your company makes some very interesting games. Unfortunately, I think the fuzzy math criticisms are well founded in this case. Not understanding the game mechanics cripples a turn based strategy game, especially at the higher difficulty levels.

It seems to me that having arbitrary 10% steps to "To keep the game from being too complex to the casual user," is making the game more complex. 10% seems to mean nothing at all. You could call it 1 unit of moral improvement to keep it simple for the casual user. There, now it's simple. Then give us non-casual users someplace where we can find out what 1 unit of moral improvement does, or 1 unit of production improvement is. They don't all have to be the same (for very valid balance reasons), but tell us what they are.

Calling it 10% is misleading and makes the game more complex, not less. Really, why do you think casual users will understand that 10% might mean just about anything (it's magic), and at the same time think they can't handle the concept that a moral module gives a 4% bonus and a research module gives a 2% bonus.

In summary, please don't use percentage improvements on the tooltips if they aren't remotely true, and PLEASE give us a way to understand what will happen when we make a change. If there is some falloff (like you only get half the bonus after 75% morale, and 1/4th the bonus after 85%, and a cap at 95%) at least tell us where those points are.

On the wasted social production front, I think that putting the unused budget into military would work. Otherwise, you can have some kind of always available "trade goods" social project that would return most of the money (and provide jobs for the citizenry).

redshift8

on Mar 07, 2006

Sorry, double post.

avarice112

on Mar 07, 2006

I'm a long time player of since the OS/2 version and I actually enjoy the LACK of transparency in economics system as it lends to realism.

This is for two reasons 1)the real "science "of economics is never so ideal as x + y = z and 2) decisions of scale are rarely based on 100% information.

I would rather choose the general direction of my empire than spend my time calculating and recalculating the net effect on my revenue of the 200BC spent on 1% morale booster.

That's my two cents.

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