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 8)

106

pdesrivieres@yahoo.com

on Mar 09, 2006

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.

That's because you are rounding all floating point calculates down! If you would just add 0.5 to all floating point calculations before typecasting to integer then you round off to the nearest which I think would make more sense. Then in your example 8 * 1.1 = 8.8 -> 9. Also a non-optimal defense of 8 would have an effective defense of 3 instead of 2 (i.e., sqrt(8)=2.828427)!
Also, to get a military resource up to 10% takes 3 constructors all for no benefit (except for ships with >=10 attack). How about instead you get 5% when the starbase is constructed (like now), then 5, 7, 10, and 13 for the next 4 constructors for a total of 40%. I hate that the first two mining modules are only 2 and 3; I'm suggesting this change for all resources, not just military.

SOCIAL PRODUCTION SPENDING
Why should I pay if nothing is being built?! It forces me to switch my focus to military spending (where as least I'm not charged if no ship is being built) or research.

107

ubertaco

on Mar 09, 2006

Wow, the more I read this the more I realize just how brilliant the system in MoO3 was. You could set your tax rate, and after that planets spent what they could locally, though you could overdrive them as well manually.

You also got a certain surplus (from the empire tax, vs. the local tax) which you could then apply through grant sliders to up your production levels across the empire.

Of course the player nominally (though you could micro it if were insane) had little control other than to select what you wanted built, but it actually worked as it was intended to, and you had to balance your planets somewhat to ensure that local tax bases were high enough to support the level of mining/industry/research you wanted.

The application of this to GalCiv could work like this:

There are two taxes paid, to simplify the planetary tax is fixed at some nominal level (say 15%) then you have the empire tax which is on top of the planetary tax. Planetary spending is taken from the local tax first and used to buy production according to whatever is in the planetary queue. None of the planetary tax supports research, research is only funded from the empire tax.

Your empire tax is then used to fund research on all your planets (as modified by any labs on them) and as a grant to either specific planets who do not have a high tax base, or specific planets who are specialized in something beyond their tax base. MoO3 used overdriving penalties which could be applied or not, or you could just rule out overdriving and have hard caps.

I doubt many here will agree with me, and I doubt Brad will be looking to change the econ system in GalCiv2 that much, but those idiots at quicksilver actually got a few things right, only that they botched up enough other things to make it really really hard to notice.

Extra unused planetary tax could be converted into empire funds, or influence for that planet (MoO3 kept individual planetary treasuries, so that planets could individually deficit spend as well, though that might not be a desired approach here).

I would envision you being able to select which planets you wanted to provide with your empire grants with a simple check box, or a simple slider/textbox. You could fund them up to 100% of their capacity (assuming no overdriving).

108

Luhh

on Mar 09, 2006

Why oh why didn't they separate production from spending:

- taxes (global)

- spending rate (2 individual sliders. 1 for military and 1 for research. The higher rate on spending, the less gain per cost when running at maximum usage, or perhaps you could go beyond 100% to overwork in crises or when the situation demans it, but again at less gain per cost compared to base values.)

- Social slider removed, it is free and cannot be affected, OR if it can be affected, it would cost you to increase from default value, but default is free. )

- production (Local on the planet. The buildings have a production value in each category, social, military, research, influence, economy, morale, influence etc. This would make it very easy to see the effects of everything, and global values simply modify these base values and give output.)

- Global bonuses (mined resources for instance that increase production on planet by a certain percentage)

- Racial bonuses (free extra global bonuses. Free bonuses)

- this would mean that you wouldn't have to oversee all your planets continually to find out how much money they are wasting, and there would be no random or extreme fluctuations when upgrading.

- this would mean that you can still manage your economy globally in regards to spending and tax if you want certain

When I say a production value in EACH category, I mean morale, economy, influence as well like they increase by X pts. A global and racial bonus is then multiplied to that base value on each planet for an output value. Thus you could very easily see the effect of everything, and make informed strategic decisions.

Economic model fixed. No losses. No unecessary micromanagement needed to constantly alter sliders. Buildques will handle themselves without micromanagement needed. New planets can still develop and older worlds can specialize in different areas. Less hassle, more info, better control, more newbie friendly, easier to read for advanced players as well to make informed decisions on what they need at hand.

109

nesf

on Mar 09, 2006

This is a very interesting thread and there seems to be two distinct points of view here. Some people seem to like their strategy games to be very simple mathematically and essentially predictable to a large extent, others seems to like their strategy games to be more complex and less clear-cut. Personally I fall on the latter camp's side. I do enjoy games like Civ where the number crunching could be done by a 10 year old but sometimes it's nice to play a strategy game that gives you that feeling of uncertainty when you're making decisions. The maths in this game are not that difficult, but they are not the kind of calculations that most of us can work out on the spot mid-game. Whether that's a good or bad thing seems to be very much a matter of opinion.

Essentially this argument comes down to a simple point. This game seems to divide people over whether it should be a relatively streamlined and transparent space sim that is light on the economy management or whether it is a complex game that is as much about the economic decisions as it is about the warfare ones. Personally I think this game has been designed with the idea of "grand strategy" in mind and that it is all about the complexities entailed in running an empire. I really like that about this game. If I could simply sit down and number crunch a few effective strategies for the different races I would get very bored with the game very quickly.

Strategy games, and wargames especially, can sometimes degenerate into "optimisation battles" where players eek out that last drop of performance through careful study of the mechanics rather than any actual strategic concepts. A cloudy system will tend to make this kind of play style very difficult. Some people do genuinely enjoy "beating the system" and that's fair enough, but that does not mean that the devs have to make it easy for them. Especially in a single player turn based game where it would tend to be the case that people are prepared to spend time playing around with the system.

That said, this game's system is by no means ideal and the problem of social production being wasted is a major issue imho. It does stabilise the system for new players but the idea of converting wasted social production into military production and/or research points, does work. The player can see the production going somewhere and if they start to build something new then their research level goes down, but their net income doesn't change. You have stability without the need for micromanagement or making it overly complicated (imho). But then, this is a very seperate argument to whether the maths should be simpler.

You can have the complex maths and a relatively straightforward front end imho. But asking for simplified maths? That would result in an entirely different game wouldn't it?

110

ehnProdigy

on Mar 09, 2006

#103 by Citizen amanasleep
Thursday, March 09, 2006 1:10 PM

Honestly, the wated social production doesn't bother me. The problems are:

1. The "focus" buttons are too inexact a tool. Should be sliders.
2. The econ sliders themselves are counterintuitive. Research should have it's own independant slider. Social and military should have their own sliders, but they can still draw from the same production capacity.
3. Each planet should have its own production and research sliders. That way your best planet is not penalized by the economic priorities of the rest of the empire (implementation of this might obviate the need for the focus buttons/sliders).

If you have money and capacity, you should be able to use it. In the current system, you can conceivably be at 100% spending, with a large positive income, and still have a large amount of unused capacity. The only way to make use of it in the current system is to force buy it for many times it's actual value.

Ultimately, the system has been balanced for the current econ setup, and changing it as outlined above would doubtless make it many times more efficient, forcing an intensive rebalancing of the game (and recoding of the AI). I understand if it can't be done.

The transparency issue, on the other hand, is entirely withing SD's control and should be addressed. This problem extends to every aspect of gameplay, and Stardock I feel is obligated to publish this information and adequately explain it to the players. Whatever your system is, however it works, it results in a playable game, so without making a single change to the system you could instantaneously make the game easier to play and more intuitive simply by publishing a complete listing of all relevant game mechanics, including.

1. Exactly how the economy is calculated, and how bonuses are applied.
2. How all other bonuses are applied.
3. A glossary defining all terms used in the game, and what characteristics, technologies, bonuses, or abilities they refer to. This is critical! There are many game terms that are inconsistant or totally mysterious. This is completely unacceptable. Why should a player encounter a reference to a bonus in the game and then have nowhere to go to find out what the bonus refers to? Unbelievable. There is no excuse for inadequate documentation of major gameplay-affecting terms.
4. Exactly how combat works, complete with formulae, how all bonuses combine, and relevant gameplay examples that give real results. The manual's examples are especially laughable, with typically coy SD answers like "suffice it to say, this will be close". That example should not have been close anyway, according to the manual itself! Of course, since it is clear that combat does not actually work as the manual explains...

Stardock has created a complex game the underlying mechanics of which are balanced enough as is to work and be enjoyable (with some exceptions). In any event, I am happy to play the game as designed and with whatever tweaks the designers see fit to include. But the lack of documentation on how to play the game, and the incredible amount of inaccuracies in the documentation provided are the principal reasons I am leaning towards not playing it any more until the devs get it together to provide it. Correct, adequate documentation is the bare minimum that a game company is expected to provide, and Stardock fails to meet that requirement.

This documentation should be added in game in a single "GalCivilopedia" or provided in a single document available for download. I see a few things like weapons and armor tables becoming available and this is good, but everything needs to be in one place, and still does not explain underlying game mechanics and modifiers, whach are even more critical.

Bumping this poster's suggestions. By no means is this poster's post a flame and it actually provides constructive suggestions that can be implemented to improve this good game; so Brad/Frogboy you should definitely take heed of this great feedback. I agree especially with the second part about documentation and transparency which I think can be done without having to re-do the AI or Economic system.

111

Luhh

on Mar 09, 2006

#110, #103

We all agree about more documentation and feedback. But giving each planet a local slider would require a GREAT deal more micromanagement and that is why something like my #108 is more preferable. In #103s model there's a flaw. Let me explain:

ex) Your economy is running low, but you are unable to increase taxes more, so you need to decrease spending. Hence you reduce the spending slider - BUT - here's the thing - BUT - it's a much better choice to enter and change spending sliders among local planets, since what they each produce aren't as important from a macro perspective for the empire. Thus the intelligent thing to do is to look through and decide which planets spending sliders you should cut down, to keep important productions up on others. This creates a new monster instead. Though I can agree that this monster is no way nearly as bad as the one raining currently.

Feel free to read my post #108 and see what points that are good, and those that are less good overall, and what could be done better or differently. I didn't type everything and explain every idea as that is just too much to read for anyone, but at least some basic approaches to how to change the economic and bonus model etc, that will make feedback more distinct, keep complexity and at the same time reduce micromanagement. There may be better suggestions still.

112

Saber Cherry

on Mar 10, 2006

That's because you are rounding all floating point calculates down! If you would just add 0.5 to all floating point calculations before typecasting to integer then you round off to the nearest which I think would make more sense. Then in your example 8 * 1.1 = 8.8 -> 9. Also a non-optimal defense of 8 would have an effective defense of 3 instead of 2 (i.e., sqrt(8)=2.828427)!
(...etc)

I'm all for full floating-point. I've been trying to get the Dominions series to move to floating-point for years, to no avail... but then, they like real-world dice. In a sci-fi game, there's no real reason to eschew floating-point behind the scenes, even if things are displayed as integers. Then, maybe, lasers would do more damage by the 6th tech... instead of 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2!

113

Zartax

on Mar 10, 2006

Now having a system that allows you to make an estimate on the results without knowing exactly what they'll really come out to, is accurate and enjoyable.

The specifics of how it does, doesn't, or should run the economy, I'm not terribly interested in getting into right now. I'm simply arguing against the idea that everything should a clear-cut formula that given an exact input it produces an exact output (in fact, I think there should always be some sort of random element within a formula in the game engine so at no point is there an exact input -> output result).

Ok. I believe we agree here at some level. I can also enjoy a game with random element, where some tings are unpredictable. Like having a planet stop producing since a "plague" is raising havoc or other stuff. But with the current setup there is no randomness in the economy, there is only "fog". Three empirewide sliders and some focusbuttons is a too unprecise tool to grant any overview of how to manage your economy. Say we have the situation I mentioned with the plague. So I need to raise the production of other planets to compensate. Doing that via the sliders creates a rippleeffect through my whole empire which is hard do predict. It's not random, it's just too complex. Having random elements is ok, having inadequate tools is not. That's why I want unlinked sliders on all planets. A more precise and easy-to-use tool.

I think the suggestion you made is fine, although having independent sliders on every planet of you're vast empire would be a pain.

Not having any control over my empire is even more painful, imo. When you change the "galactic" sliders you'll probably have to go through at least half of your planets changing focus anyway making planetary sliders less micromanagement-heavy since you only have to tamper with the affected planets.

114

Lucian Gyiira

on Mar 10, 2006

Wow. And I thought I was a micromanager! You people are insane with this stuff. Myself, I prefer to be immersed in a universe in which my empire's every teeny tiny little function isn't at my control and I can't optimize because of it. But it seems I'm one of the few. Or the only, maybe. Though I suppose this is why I can't be competitive: I want to actually have some fun with the game. If your idea of fun is crunching numbers, I personally would recommend you get a job as an accountant.

At least then you'll be making money!

115

Luhh

on Mar 10, 2006

Wow. And I thought I was a micromanager! You people are insane with this stuff. Myself, I prefer to be immersed in a universe in which my empire's every teeny tiny little function isn't at my control and I can't optimize because of it. But it seems I'm one of the few. Or the only, maybe. Though I suppose this is why I can't be competitive: I actually want to have some fun with the game. If your idea of fun is crunching numbers, I personally would recommend you get a job as an accountant. At least then you'll be making money!

I also want to have fun with the game. But there is a major basic design flaw that forces a player to micromanage something he doesn't even know much about. Where is the fun in that? Should you instead not care at all about the strategic decisions and be forced to click about like a lost child? If so, then they have obviously failed with their intentions imo.

I don't want more moicromanagement. If you read through the thread again and some of the answers you'll see that many solutions requires less management, while giving a better understanding and feedback. After that it's up to you just as before to make decisions based on at least some basic analysis or just wing it and do whatever you you like. It will be more fun for all parties. As it is now, I don't see any benefit to the current system whatsoever. It's a lose-lose situation.

The problem is that they set out from a flawed basic design, and added even worse tools to try and counteract effects from the flawed basic design to even further the problem, and ended up making a bit of a mess of it all.

There are still lots of good parts to the game, so if they find a way to fix the economic management, I will be a very happy gamer.

116

Lucian Gyiira

on Mar 10, 2006

But there is a major basic design flaw that forces a player to micromanage something he doesn't even know much about.

I must be a complete ignoramous, because I honestly have never micromanaged this stuff. In fact, I never noticed it.

117

WTF_Chuck

on Mar 14, 2006

Well, the problem with realism is people don't often play games for realism. Too much realism is a serious detraction from game play. The tax and spend system in place is exactly that. Too much realism, it is abyssmal. I wish it could be removed but since I see the phrases "married to it" etc. I am thinking it won't be. I hope you can find some way, at least, to make it not suck. Just one small way would be to bump the econmy system so that spending and maintinance didn't suck the life out of the game with little micro management details, milking trade routes, and bilking other races out of thier credits just to stay afloat. It currently sucks. My economy in one game, which I have saved has several planets that pull down 800+ net credits in a non boom, but that is not enough to cover the obscene social spending I must keep on to develop one single world. That is WITH 5 FULLY UPGRADED GREEN RESCOURCE BASES!! 5 (FIVE)! I make 1800 in trade credits (this has to be a record??) and that is still not enough. A boom jumps my profit up to 10000 bc a turn (not remotely kidding). Could there be a happy middle ground? Cut back on costs spending maintinance etc. Arguing that one could argue spending would have to take place even if a factory was idle is weak sauce my friends, what is this maintiance money for I say?! Why can I shut down all the factories in the empire but not one!? This needs serious tweaking (or a complete overhaul) before it isn't, for me, the least fun aspect of the game. Remove it entirely I say. Follow in the footsteps of the great ones. A winning combination doesn't need to be changed to a system you have to spend time defending. Complexity can add fun, let me just agree with that, but this sort of change does not add fun. Next thing will we have imperial corruption?? whole planets that only produce one shield and the rest are red? Realism of this sort just gets attacked and attacked I would jetison it now if I were you, or you could alternatly read the experiences civilization has had with that idiotic corruption system, and finally in civ 4 it is gone, but they add this new retarded spending system (based on population etc.) which is basically the same thing and think it won't get the the same complaints. Find other ways to limit the game that won't be so obvious to players, if you can't make a workable ai without foul realism additions. Otherwise you can suffer through dozens of complaints through some five generations of games like civ did. They aren't done yet either.

118

Frogboy

on Mar 16, 2006

I think going forward the rule of thumb will be:

Provide places where people who want to know all the numbers can, if they want, find out more where they come from and clean up areas that aren't intuitive.

119

ubertaco

on Mar 16, 2006

I think going forward the rule of thumb will be:

Provide places where people who want to know all the numbers can, if they want, find out more where they come from and clean up areas that aren't intuitive.

Sounds like the most sound option to me. I am a recovering power gamer, who likes to be able to see under the hood (so to speak) even if I'm trying to resist min/maxing the whole thing

More generally though I think GC2 suffers from lack of explaination, even fuzzy ones, on many aspects of the game. There is also some 'dirtiness' in calling the same thing (moral/apporval) different names in different places. That is just confusing more than fuzzy.

In particular since GC2 is a SP game there shouldn't be the same insane need to be able to min/max to perfection since you arn't going to be facing another human who has done so already. More power to the AI if/when it is able to do so

120

Akapopalous

on Mar 20, 2006

I haven't heard any alternatives that wouldn't create a worse issue or require a drastically different economic system which isn't going to happen in a 1.x, that's more of a sequel thing.

Any changes to the system would have to fall under these guidelines:

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.

We obviously like the economic system. But we're open to ideas. Someone saying "it's broken" isn't persuasive. It's not broken. Opinions are not facts.

Thank you very much for sharing your parameters. As some users have already said, we deeply appreciate it when you developers take the time to communicate with us. With them in mind, here's some ideas to revamp the economic system:

Add a warning screen when an upgrade-granting technology is aquired (by any means). It could give the following information: "Your recent aquisition of [technology x] grants you [building y] and has caused [z] planets to resume spending on social project upgrades (representing an increase of [w] bc's from last week." This seems to be the main circumstance that would cause massive unexpected budget swings, but if you know of others, please tell us those as well.

Add a 'budget cap' option for spending; preferably a seperate one for Military, social, and research. The budget screen already gives sperate tallies for each of the expenses, so those could represent what can be maximally spent. If the user checks a box next to a budget cap field, they can then enter a cap, otherwise it is 'greyed out' and reads 'max spending' If they enter a cap, then the performance degrading percentage (Cap/max) could be applied to all the worlds in much the same way as the industrial capacity slider works now.

If you wanted to be really quick-n-dirty about it, you could just have a single budget cap box. Then take the proposed cap minus fixed expenses all divided by the maximum possible expenses and have the 'Industrial Capacity' slider jump to that percentage. That still leaves a small problem of the percent getting rounded off on each planet and not adding up to the exact cap, but it would not be bad (based on the law of averages) and you could just try to get across that its an 'approximate budget cap'

If you're still fond of industrial waste (the monetary kind, not the chemical kind) you can force the player to spend whatever they propose the cap to be. I suppose you could argue that would increase micro-managing since players would be keeping a keep eye on their spending, but I know I already micro and 'micro my macro' to work around the particulars of the current system.

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