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 6)

Zartax

on Mar 08, 2006

First, I just want to say that my post became longer that intended, but please read through it anyway. It'll be worth it!

Weighing certainties against each other takes no skill, weighing two choices with uncertain results and picking the best takes skill.

Weighing two choices with uncertain results and picking the best takes luck. If you are informed of what effect the choices have you can make a strategic decision of which one will benefit you the most.

Anyway, I believe I know why so many players feel they are playing blindly. I mentioned it in my previous post, but I didn't emphazise it to be the center of the post.

I believe that global economy planning is to complex. It affects so many areas on so many planets that it is impossible to estimate wheather what you are about to do is good or not. As I said before, if I need to take into account the effects on every single planet of my 45 planet empire when I need that starport fast it's just too much to handle! Especiallt when one slider produces waste on most of the planets. That starport is actuallt taking 3400% more out of my treasury than intended, since all my other planets start producing social waste to complete that one planet starport. But I really need that starport! Is it worth reducing my total research by 5% and slowing down production of a factory at planet X1, a foodplant at X2, another foodplant at X3, a research facility at X4, a entertainment center at X5, another one at X6 and the list goes on and on and on and on. Am I supposed to make an informed decision on all that information? My brain would melt before I could come to any conclusion, so I end up guessing. It's ok if I don't make the brightest decisions all the time, but at least give me the theoretical possibility to try to make an informed decision. As it is now, it's like trying to drive 20 cars on different roads with the same steeringwheel. Very hard indeed.

Now, I'm not saying "make the game easier!", cause I like a challange. But the challange should not be to steer the car, it should be to win the race! Now the best option I have when managing my empire is to buy stuff not to hinder my other colonies, even though I have the production facilities to accomplish the task in a short time. They stay unused because if I want to use them I have to use every other facility of the same type at the cost of all facilities of other types, all over the empire. It's hard to steer.

The solution I present you with is very simple. Put the production sliders at planet level. One set of sliders for every planet. The sliders would control how many % of your facilities on that particular planet would be active. The researchslider would be standalone, and the Military Production and Social Production would be linked so that the total percentage never exceeds 100% but it can be below 100% if you want to save money or not maximize production for any other reason. Whenever there is no production only the maintanance fees (fixed costs) will be paid.

1. This gives you very good control over what your empire is doing and where. (The ability to steer!) You will no longer have to bend your mind around the effects on your empire for every little change and can focus more on what type of strategy you are going to use to eliminate those bastard aliens!

THE TRANSPARANCY WILL BE MORE APPERENT (

) since you are now able to understand the consequenses of the background calulations and mechanics if you want to.

2. Also, specialized planets can take advantage of their specialization since you can actually run all your facilities at once without reducing production on other planets.

3. Third, you will REDUCE MICROMANAGEMENT (Frogboy!) since you no longer need to go through every planet to change focus when you change your global slider (there no longer is a global slider!). One might argue that it'll take some micromanagement to set all the sliders on all the planets, but you don't have to do that frequently. Only when a major change appears. You core research world (example) will just sit there and reseach with the slider all the way up all the time. Whenever you can uppgrade your facilities it'll happen automaticly since your Social slider is up all the way and your military is all down (you probably don't have a startport here anyway).

4. DRAMATIC REVENUE SWINGS will be possible, but the best fix to that is the before mentioned dialogue box which ask you if you want to start upgrade and what the costs of that would be on a weekly basis.

5. If this is TOTALLY REDOING THE ECONOMICS SYSTEM is up to you. "Totally redoing" is in the eye of the beholder, but to me it seems lika a small thing to do. A problem might be to redesign the AI to handle the new system but I have confidence in your skills!

Alfonse

on Mar 08, 2006

One might argue that the social spending "wastage" is realistic.

Come on, you know better than that. You've made innumerable decisions in this game's design that aren't "realistic" in the slightest that were done for the purposes of gameplay. You can't suddenly single out one decision and justify it by saying it's realistic and expect us to buy into that.

BTW, have you noticed that nobody is defending this feature? With the exception of the realists, nobody has come forward and said, "Yes, I believe that it is a good idea to force player to either choose to waste money or waste their game time going to each city and manually specializing on something."

In most of the other discussions of GC2's functionality, even on the "early-game expansionism" thing, and even on the whole "hidden formula" issue, you've had some proportion of people who says that the game is basically fine with respect to that issue and doesn't need significant change. Or, at the least, their suggestions are either fairly minor or don't actually suggest changing the functionality itself. That isn't the case here.

I wonder why that is...

Social spending is essentially paying the salaries of the people who build things on the planet.

Replace the word "Social" with the word "Military", and the same logic applies. Yet military spending is conditional on its actual use.

zp00k

on Mar 08, 2006

It's pretty obvious why this was put in. They thought it was more important to cater to the not so hardcore players. Sure the hardcore players will whine all day on the forums. But they still make out 2.47% of their potential buyers and will probably have preordered the game 2 years ago anyway. They simply figured the not so hardcore players would get irritated by the budget swings and also probably not notice the wastage. While the hardcore players are driven mad since they can micromanage the wastage away they have to do it.

Luhh

on Mar 08, 2006

Okay, I'm gonna take a shot at suggesting a simple economic model that both can work globally and locally. Global control is more of a crise management, and make sure people are happy and you get enough money to keep up production, while local economy lets you continue to build new worlds without waste. Here it goes:

1) Factories are for starports and spaceship production, not social production. See 2.

2) Population is what builds the buildings on the planet, and will yeild social production points. These are your local contractors capitalists or however you'd like to see it. Factories are instead treated like morale production buildings, influence buildings etc. (see below for more detail.)

2b) Here one can decide which route to take. Should the population give the bonus, or should the social factories give the production value. Decide what would be best. Either route would work well. You can build these to speed up planetary development, or choose not to on a smaller world that won't need as many buildings. up to you.

2c) Now we'll probably see a bigger difference from low population production and large ones, so a nonlinear scale could be consdered here.

2d) Autoupgrade won't deplete your economy since social production is free. See it as local interest or companies.

2e) The structures themselves give basic production points in terms of Military production, research production, morale production, economic boost production value, food production etc. I will get back to this later on and explain why I suggest a crowbar separation here.

3) Remove the sliders in spending geared towards military / social / research spending. Social production is free and does not cost money. The people build the things they need on the planet with local economy, unless you in power of the government force rush projects, communist style.

3b) The global slider should instead be two separate ones. One for military (spaceship production) and one for research.

3c) Consider making the sliders for military and research go between say 0-200%. If you go beyond the default 100%, you'll get less and less increase in production the further you stray. You could say you are simply overworking a certain area, and the extra effort put in won't yeild as much as basic capacity allows. Somewhere between 50-75% extra production at maximum 200% spending. If this is abusive, then just keep them between 0-100%.

4) Keep taxes slider. Have a default value at x percent. The more you stray from this, the larger the benefits / penalties in terms of morale.

5) Keep spending slider. This should be considered a crise management tool when you are experience negative cash flows that you cannot handle or morale problems in your empire. Defaulted to 100%.

6) Farms are required in larger amounts. They are already too marginal, and also you'll be freeing up some space with the new economic model I suggest. A maximized world should at least have to work several farms. As it is now, the special farm resource is too powerful in terms of output, and is often not desirable even.

7) Separate global bonuses to research and planetary bonuses. Global bonuses increases local ones by the percentage mined or from racial advantage.

7b) global bonuses in morale production should also be added to the base square just like economy bonus production. This should be considered, as otherwise global bonuses would not benefit the planet originally, but it's not necessary, but other bonuses work right off the bat so it's just to keep things even.

7c) The same thing with the others in production, research, social production, influence, economic boost production and whatever.

7d) The reason I chose to treat global bonuses separately from local ones, and to make morale and economy boost, research boost, influence boost a production value is to make sure that the buildings will then be needed, and you'd be able to get direct feedback and information from the game formulas instead of trying to understand what you don't see. So in a colony when you'd open up a report you'd see an overview of basic production in each area, and extra bonus yeild in same colour but brighter and overlapping for instance and total value. Easy to make out just how much of each you need, and what they all do.

8) With an economic model like this, empire managment will make more sense, have more direct feedback from formulas applied to production values, and you'll quickly be able to decide what you need on the planet and in your empire. Better for the casual gamer, and better for the hardcore number crunchers. I'm a bit of both myself.

I may add or update this later, but this economic doesn't have waste, works smoothly, allows specialization, allows easy global management and crises control in terms of morale and cashflow etc.

zp00k

on Mar 08, 2006

Oh I've just gotta throw my 2 cents in so here it goes...

This stuff makes my head hurt and I'm really good at math. A game is about fun. Something adds to the fun or it doesn't. I don't want spreadsheets upon spreadsheets of numbers representing all my production I get enough of that in the real world. Here's a news flash for ya. The real world is a pretty complex place. This game does a very good job of modelling certain aspects of that world. Of course they take liberties with some things in order for the game to actually stay balanced. And trust me when I say balancing something of this magnitude is a monster undertaking when you can go from a map of like 10 stars to a map of over 100. So I say job well done devs.

Now as for the *well I need to know what this does to make an informed decision*. Hey guess what. Play the game. If you build a research center and your research goes up guess what that building did. Hey look at that it gave me a larger number at the top of the screen then I had before. Why? Who cares. It went up. Obviously I can now research something quicker then I could before I built the thing.

The economy has got to be the simplest thing in the world if you look at it this way. You have revenue and you have spending. If revenue is larger then spending then guess what the little number on the lower left of the screen is green. If spending is higher then it is yellow. What more could you possibly gain from getting all the little under the hood bits that most likely will just confuse the heck out of you even more. Sure a hard core numbers player is frustrated by this but too bad. The rest of us that just want to know the text is green. Why is it green? Who cares.

Now as for how things affect your numbers again play the game. You can't be an expert right out of the box even if they did give you all the fancy numbers you want. Take the time to get a feel for what things you need to do in certain situations. Oh hey look my revenue is negative maybe I should try to build a few ecomony buildings or maybe a trade route or two. Couple of turns later it's green. Go me! Or maybe I should raise taxes a little. Hey look at that it's green but now my approval is red. Hmmm.... maybe they don't like that... I wonder if there is a tech that would help. OMG look there is an entertainment tech maybe I should research that.

I'm sorry if this sounds very simplistic. I think that if you just stop and look at the information you are given in the game you'll realize that it gives you everything you need to know. And sure it's tough to predict how something is going to affect your empire. But you know what? After you've played a dozen games you'll be able to very accurately predict how something is going to affect your empire. And without all the fancy math or numbers.

[Sarcasm] Yeah right since there are no enemies you need to defeat in this game we need to fight the economy system. [End Sarcasm]

You seem to think that if the math is simple everything can be easily predicted from the start of the game to the end. This is wrong. Even in such a simple game as chess the possible outcomes are endless. Or even better, you should try playing rock papers and scissors. Yeah sure you can predict exactly what will happen if you go with rock for example, except you don't know what your opponent will do. The key here is that you know exactly what you are doing, but still have no idea if it will work or not. You have to get into the head of the opponent, anticipate his moves, plan your countering etc. This is strategy and it is much more interesting then your suggestion to go play 20 games to get a vague semi-understanding of what you are doing yourself.

MindALot

on Mar 08, 2006

I'll like to add my support for the following possible changes.

Idea #1) (not originally mine)
Allow the users to decide if they want excess social spending to be wasted or not. A simple option specified at game startup or config file parameter. Something that can be done quickly to help (most ?) of the arguments disappear until a long-term solution is made. Have the default the current behavior (even though it is reverse of the manual). It's not perfect, but it might calm down the .. discussion.

Idea #2)
This is a change of interface, and a bit more logic. Stay with me and let me know what you think:
change a) All cost of social spending is first spent on planned projects. For the 'realism' factor - think of it as government priority. While the government may not be the best at eliminating all waste in the empire, it is able to figure out what projects/planets have priority for the funding (the planets that have work to do).
change

Document how much from (change a) is going to waste - something as simple as having a small bar one the social slider marking what the current optimal spending is. This allows people to adjust their spending to meet their needs, but if they chose to ignore it, won't suffer the 'all your bc all belong to us' symptom of discovering a new tech.
change c) - completely optional - Add a check box next to the slider for (change

that locks the current spending to match the optimal level. This allows the player to ignore the 'management' of increasing/decreasing spending, but at the result of the user will see (and be able to tell why) their cash is vanishing.

I'd be _very_ happy with (change a) alone, however, the other two seems to add the following features - more information for the user, and gives the user the option to avoid more micromanagement at the known result of cash flow fluxations.

Good/Bad - feedback?

zp00k

on Mar 08, 2006

The option to waste your social is funny, checkbox; waste my social, sign me up! hehe. How about a checkbox for automatically blowing my fleets up and also one for turning my income negative.

Kane716

on Mar 08, 2006

@ #57 by Citizen GJDriessen

If I understand this correctly, and please correct me if I am wrong, when you have your social production slider on say 25% and a planet is not producing a building, then the money or hammers are lost and not used for anything except paying those lazy workers on this particular planet?

Yes thats how it currently works.

triopus

on Mar 08, 2006

I would like to see separate spend rate sliders for industrial and research. The industrial spending can split between military and social with a second slider.

Advantages:
1. Simpler UI with three sliders instead of the current four.
2. You would have more control over your budget. Why combine industrial & research spending and then reallocate them with three awkward sliders.

Alfonse

on Mar 08, 2006

1) No dramatic shifts in net revenue that aren't user controlled. That's why we have the social spending as-is. To prevent a scenaroi where smeone ends up going from +3000 per turn to -2000 per turn because they traded some tech with an AI.

2) No increase in micro management.

3) Does not involve totally redoing the economic system.

This is easily solved.

Replace auto updating with a dialog box (perhaps optional, thus replacing the auto update option) that pops up when the user gets a tech that causes an update. Ask the user whether he wants to apply this update to all his cities or not. Let the user know how this affects his bottom line.

No wild swings without user input. No micromanagement (unless you're going to argue that micromanagement is answering a yes/no question in a dialog). And it doesn't require you to alter the economy itself in any way other than reintroducing the functionality as you originally designed it.

And, best of all, it has no more impact on the overall gameplay than simply bringing it closer to the original design.

Muzakman

on Mar 08, 2006

My suggestion for improving the economy system?

De-couple the sliders from each other.

Make research, social, and military spending independent of each other. The inspiration for this comes from the fact that I can be running an economy at full spending, fully optimized for production/research/social, and still be making thousands/turn, yet my economy is still not really running at "full" capacity. By setting the sliders independently of each other, you would introduce the possibility for greater efficiency into the system; over-all there would be less waste, since you could pay as much as you wanted into each section, within your treasury and income limits of course.

I'm not sure if this meets Frogboy's criteria for a valid request, since I can't say how many times I've been told "hey we've got this change we want you to make in this program. Don't worry - it'll be simple!"... and have the whole thing turn into a nightmare

Just my quick thoughts on the subject!

ninlarr

on Mar 08, 2006

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).

You know (by now obviously not when you wrote this garbage) that the so-called "mis-feature" can be turned off by clicking on 2 things.

How does it feel that your 60 minute-to-write speech got owned by 60 seconds of rebuttal?

Pick your face up on the way out

ehnProdigy

on Mar 08, 2006

I've been lurking on this thread for a while now and have been following the lines of argument. As somebody who is a big time fan of 4x games and economic based games like Capitalism 2 and The Corporate Machine, I have to whole heartedly agree here that I am wasting way too much time micromanaging the slider bars in order to get my empire to operate even barely efficiently and profitably.

I love this game but I have to agree, Social Waste is just a waste of my time doing a meticulously boring micromanagement task when I'd rather spend it designing ships or strategizing my next battle. Whether or not it's realistic is besides the point and completely a moot issue. T he issue is that it's not a fun thing to do, but according to this game design and economic system I have to micromanage the slider bars because that's the only way I can get my economy to work. I shouldn't have to do that.

ehnProdigy

on Mar 08, 2006

YunHarla

on Mar 08, 2006

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.

Oh, so that's what's screwing up my economy!

This entire economics thingy is way too troublesome, and I just wanna build my ships and conquer the galaxy

SUGGESTION: Add "auto upgrade buildings only if Net Income is more than +NNN bc per turn" where NNN is configurable by input box or slider, and default it to +100bc. This way, we'll not suddenly find our treasury depleted mysteriously. And DON'T queue these auto-upgrades in the production list, as user selected build-jobs or upgrade-jobs should have priority always.

Do try to make the economy less daunting else it's a turnoff......

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