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 3)

Xan

on Mar 07, 2006

Wow. So many armchair game designers.

Kazriko

on Mar 07, 2006

Perhaps rather than ceasing spending on social production, you could implement a system similar to the "focusing" that is already in the game. It would be "Automatic Defocusing" of social production. Any cash being spent on it would automatically go to Military if there's a ship being built, up to the production limit there, then would go to Research, up to the research limit there. I wonder if you could put the rest of that into maintenance on the buildings, then just lose the rest. I suppose that starting upgrades up everywhere would give the same net income change.

Personally, I always run a deficit for the first several years of the game until my income catches up, and fund it by selling technologies to the other races.

Foslex

on Mar 07, 2006

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)

The second option you have here is the case. When you "Focus" on an industry the amount you lose in the other two is greater than the gain you get in the third. that's why galaxy wide focusing is probably a poor idea.

I'm a player that is mostly concerned with what the result is, and don't particularly need to know all of the ins and outs of the math. While I do want more feedback about some bonuses, for me it could be as simply as a tooltips over my planet's morale when I have a Morale ability of 20% that say, "50% planet approval modified to 65% due to Civ abilities." Then I can check back a few turns later when I've built up that morale starbase so my morale ability is 30% and it can say, "50% planet aproval modified to 68% due to Civ abilities." That's good enough for me, I could care less about why 20% ability increases the final result on that planet by 15, while 30% increases it by 18. It's enough to know that it does. Just like knowing that a car gets better gas mileage at 55 mph than at 75 mph is enough for me to drive it without understanding the exact effects of drag and combustion that make it so.

To me the starbase numbers (or any other modifiers) just update the Stats on my civ ability screen. It never occurred to me to assume that having a 50% boost to the hitpoint ability should mean exactly the same thing as a 50% boost to the Influence ability.

The social spending does not bother me one little bit. It's the game design, and I try to play the game as best I can. That means paying attention to either my research so I get projects to build, my spending to keep things balanced, or both. To say it's unfair to make the player pay for unused production would only be a reasonable statement if the AI did not also pay. But it does. So it's fair.

Vulcannis

on Mar 07, 2006

While I agree with many of the ideas presented in this thread, ultimately I'll take a balanced, complicated game right now over a a simpler game that may at one point become balanced again. The real keys for me are: ease of use, then transparency.

Though I myself prefer fuzzy, complicated computations, in order to not be a chore I need a quick way of determining whether it's worth doing something. When I'm trying to decide if it's worth spending 200bc on a pod for an influence starbase, I need some way of knowing what the result will be. I don't need to necessarily see the numbers and calculations, but if I know that say the IP of a planet will increase by so and so, then I'm satisfied.

I think it's generally worth showing the whole calculation and math in general, as some players really enjoy that type of detail and will work it out themselves if it's absent. Save them the work.

In the end though there's only one real peeve I have with the economic system right now: the tedium of setting focus (military, social, research, or none) for my planets. Possible solutions, purely UI, in order of preference and building on the previous:

Add an indicator to the colonies list screen showing what each planets' current focus is.
Allow the focus to be changed for each planet from the colonies list screen.
Add a governor to change planet focus in bulk.

Zartax

on Mar 07, 2006

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?

Well, it says 33% at the end of all the sliders if you have them all to the right.

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

I'm aware that it's game design, but it's very illogical. I'm playing a game where I have my spending slider all the way up to 100%. I still get income into my treasury. Huh? Oh, so I must be using all my factories and labs to the maximum. But when I focus on research on a planet the research did increase! Huh? It's not maxed out? I thought I told the game to SPEND ALL INCOME. Now this bothers me. I have the factories, I have the labs, I have the income but I'm not allowed to use them? Why do I still have a positive fund/tax balance each week?

Ok, I went into the game just now and tried a couple of things. First of all, the spending distribution sliders aren't really that. When I change bias from military to social to research the total spending displayd as "Allocated spending" changes. This must mean that I'm not distributing funds with the liders, but acctually deciding how many % of my factories/labs will be used. Also, the text right above the Spending-slider says Industrial Capacity. So this is what you change with the spending slider? How come then, when I have it at 100%, I can only use 33% of my industrial capacity due to the spending distribution sliders? Misinformation or game design error? If I were the devs, I would just skip all four sliders, or rather, skip the spending slider and put the others on each planet, having the Military Production and Social Production sliders linked the way they are now and the Research slider standalone and have them do exactly what the do now, that is, deciding how much/many of your factories/labs you want to use.

Scumbag509

on Mar 07, 2006

"Armchair Developers"? You mean "gamers", right?

When you come right down to it, if it doesn't make sense to the gamer, the system has failed. Obviously, many gamers are currently at odds with GC2's economy, because it fails to provide that which is *required* nowadays - precise, correct information. GC2 simply doesn't provide that. Instead, it provides irrational and illogical answers, which the Devs attempt to rationalize at every turn.

Sadly, looking at the original's current state, it won't be fixed in this one, either.

LordSloth

on Mar 07, 2006

#31 - "Wow. So many armchair game designers."

You say that like its a bad thing! I'm proud to be an armchair game designer. I don't think I can make a better game, or even a fun game. What I do like to do is come up with ideas. Even if they are unusable, they might inspire a better gameplay mechanic. No matter how different they are from current gameplay mechanics. Series change or stagnate. Not always for the better, but sometimes so. Occasionally I might come off as egotistical, but that's only because other people aren't real.

You're just bits, zeros and ones, designed to taunt me.

Seriously though, they made a good game, they know it, I know it, I just don't feel its necessary to carefully pick my words. On certain subjects, I expect my words to be taken with a grain of salt.

Augusten

on Mar 07, 2006

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.

So what? It makes complete sense to me. What doesn't make sense is social production points spent to produce nothing. You guys choose to have auto-upgrade on by default, and then blame auto-upgrade for making things confusing for new players?

Give me a break. On the whole, the mechanics of GCII are great, but wasted social production is a foolish design decision.

Zeviz

on Mar 07, 2006

First, a huge thank you to Stardock team for being so willing to listen to player input. This was one of the reasons I bought this game.

To avoid social production waste (and micro-management headaches it causes), could you add a Halt Social Production checkbox for planets (and make it accessable in the Colonies overview list next to the starport links). This would not only help mitigate unexpected spending swings when upgrades come along, but would also help in cases when you need to quickly build-up factories on your manufacturing worlds in preparation for war.

Alfonse

on Mar 07, 2006

I thought I told the game to SPEND ALL INCOME.

No. You told the game to spend 100% of the income that can be spent on each planet.

I'm a long-time Civ player and I've never played any GalCiv before. So, when I looked at it, I understood what they were intending to convey with the sliders even though they didn't explain it very well, because it is similar to the concept of trade in Civ games.

The way GalCivII works is like this. Given a planet with its buildings, resource enhancements, and so forth on it, the game computes how many units of each resource that the planet can produce at maximum. Then, it takes the results of the 3 resource sliders and uses those percentages to determine how much 100% production is for this planet. Lastly, it applies the results of the global slider to that to determine how much production is generated and how much money is actually consumed.

When I actually write it out, it sounds very strange. But because of my Civ background, it feels perfectly natural.

I'm not sure why they didn't just give you 3 independent sliders; it would certainly have been easier for them. However, at this juncture, doing so would have significant consequences for the game. AI would have to be majorly adjusted to compensate, and so forth. I wouldn't want them to try such a significant change in their game that could easily break the whole thing.

derekroth1

on Mar 07, 2006

Two points

1. In Civ III, the corruption model became this unfun feature that basically made far off cities worthless. It also made it hard to have a big empire, because the more cities you had, the worse it got. It was justified because in real life there is corruption, and maintaining a huge empire is difficult and should have its problems etc. But, as far as I know, In Civ IV they did away with stuff like corruption all together. Why? Becasue it is a game, and people play games for fun.

2. Even thought the corruption model sucked, people continued to play in large part because at least it reacted in a predictable fassion. You could easily taylor your playing style around something because it isn't a mistery. In fact, it was so well understood that some people found ways to exploit the corruption model in ways the AI couldn't possibly do.

Change the model, or justify it. Either way it is a game and games have rules. Unfortunately, no one seems to know the rules for this one.

zp00k

on Mar 07, 2006

The economic system should let the player concentrate on making choices 1. what he will get from his planets and 2. what stuff he will buy. Industry for building stuff faster, labs for more research, economic buildings for more income. It all boils down to building more ships, researching more stuff, developing your economy and resources.

I really don't see any point in game mechanics that introduce optimizing your economy. Avoiding wasted social production is a blatant example of this. Only choice is between saving your fingers and sanity or getting more out of your empire. No strategy here, just optimization micromanagment. Then there's balancing the farms, morale and market buildings for optimal income. This could be argued that there is some strategy in this since for example building farms give you an additional different advantage of more troops so this is OK.

And Screw fuzzy calculations. Why are they needed for someone who dosn't care about the numbers? They need to be saved from getting tempted to look at the equations even they can understand? Try to force the advanced players into this style of gameplay as well so the no-numbers-thanks players don't have to feel inadequate? I really don't see why playing with your gut feeling would be any different if the math is fuzzy or straight. But everyone who likes to fully understand exactly what strategic choices they are making agrees that simple is better.

Brilliant economic systems in games would be moo1. A bunch of sliders all in the same place you can acess directly from the starmap. What a revolutionary idea, no damn extra screens you have to wade through. Amazing how the amount of extra screens seem to be inversely proportionate to the screen resolution. Instead of having 3 different ways of "focusing" your production as in galciv2, just one set of sliders to do both the mid-long term terraforming vs factories vs defenses AND control short term choice of what to build now, more ships, more economy or more research. Might argue that it lacked long term specialization of planets in how much space to allocate for defenses vs factories vs terraforming since there was just one cap for each.

Heavensblade23

on Mar 07, 2006

Fun and realism are two different things and sometimes they go in opposite directions. It might be more realistic to only have a vague idea of how to plan your economy, but I don't think it's more fun. GalCiv2 is a strategy game. In order to make good strategy I need good information, and right now I don't think we're getting it.

I think transparency is more important than balance. You can tweak the numbers all you want but the player needs to know what they are in order to play logically. If a 50% bonus doesn't really give a 50% bonus, don't call it that. Call it a 25% bonus or whatever bonus it really gives. If the bonus is dynamic then tell me what the bonus is for me, right at this very moment.

gabemrock

on Mar 07, 2006

I think transparency is more important than balance. You can tweak the numbers all you want but the player needs to know what they are in order to play logically. If a 50% bonus doesn't really give a 50% bonus, don't call it that. Call it a 25% bonus or whatever bonus it really gives. If the bonus is dynamic then tell me what the bonus is for me, right at this very moment.

I agree 100% (but is that really 100 percent?

). I like every aspect of the game except the inconsistency of displays and the opaqueness of all the modifiers. If different "+10% bonuses" affect different attributes in different ways, they shouldn't both use the number "10". I don't care what scheme is used to calculate different production levels, points, or modifiers. I just want the in-game numbers and text to tell me what a new building, or starbase, or module, or tech is actually going to do.

Zeta Gundam

on Mar 07, 2006

How about making social projects ramp up and down in terms of cost.

So when a building is first put down, the cost start at a small fraction of the total, rises each week until it peaks at the half way point of its build time, and then lowers until the project is finished.

So, a sine wave sort of effect, which happens a lot in economic-type data. Costs per week would be less "fixed" this way, but would be more gradual and no wasted money.

Does this make any sense?

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