Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
Danger..boring..boring..
Published on March 20, 2006 By Draginol In GalCiv Journals

So how exactly does/should production work? Here's how it will work in v1.1 which will seem pretty much the same to people who aren't really into the numbers but will be a major improvement to people who follow stats.

On your planets you build factories and research labs.  These factories and labs produce industrial units and technology units.

Your spend rate determines what % of your factories and research are to be funded. In addition, the 3 sliders funnel that funding in to military, research, and social production.

What affects production?

You also have a number of bonuses that come into play:

1) Special tiles will add a bonus to the given factory or lab's production level.

2) Starbases can assist factories and labs by cranking up their production by a %.

3) Planetary bonuses (from events) can increase research or manufacturing.

4) Your civilization ability in research, social production, and military production can have an impact as well.

Half of your bonuses (2, 3, 4) you are not charged for. You simply get them for free. Yay.

The code: (for those interested)

CalcCommerce().  This function looks at your factories and multiplies that by any special buildings (like a manufacturing capital). It then takes into account things like whether there's a United Planets issue involved (like the galactic prison).

CalcTechnologyProduction().  This function looks at the total value of the labs and other research providing buildings, multiplies that by any buildings that increase research production by a % (like a technology capital) and puts it together.

CalcResearchProductionBonus(). This function looks at CalcTechnologyProduction() and then returns how much bonus research you get from your ability, whether the planet has rings (10% bonus),  whether there's some other event in action, etc.

CalcProductionBonus(). Same as ResearchProductionBonus except it looks at industry related bonuses.

Sins of the past

Galactic Civilizations II's system was a carry over from the original game (2003) in which the various abilities, values, etc. were morphed based on play testing.  And in the case of things like morale which generates your approval rating, your morale ability is literally added to your approval rating at a rate of Morale Ability to the .90 power. Why? Because from play testing that was the most fun in how the various buildings and abilities worked.

But sticking with production and research, which is the real nuts and bolts, the idea here is to streamline this so that the mechanics are straight forward and easy to understand.  I also want to add tool tips that spell out this stuff if there's time.  If you have the non-English version of Galactic Civilizations II you may want to switch to the English version for 1.1 until the new text is translated.

Real world examples

So for spread sheet gurus, what can we expect in the terms of numbers? In the game I'm in I have two planets: Haven and Vizzard II.

My spend rate is 100%. And all my money is going into research. Haven is my capital and has 3 labs. The planet has a 12% research bonus due to an event. I have a bunch of starbases around it that double my factories and lab production. What should it look like?

I'm only charged for half the bonus production (so half the starbases, half the planet, and half the ability). So even though I'm getting 134 research per week from Haven, I'm only being charged for 94 of it. Yay. The other 40 of it is "free".  Where did that number come from? Well, the base production on Haven is 54 (24 + 30).  My total research is 134. 134 - 54 is 80.  So 40 of that extra research is free and the other 40 I'm charged for.  The original 54 I'm charged for so 54 + 40 = 94.

To the average player, this is a bunch of either "who cares" or "This is so complicated".  The system isn't really designed to be spread sheeted this way and in GalCiv 1, few people did.  But enough people had a huge outcry that they couldn't just spreadsheet this stuff that we ended up in a situation where we needed to be able to put this stuff together in a way that people could understand.

Eventually I get something like this:

If this all looks confusing and such, don't worry about it.  It should look confusing and complicated to most people.  But to people who really get into the numbers, this is what I think many of them were looking for. Very clean, straight forward economics, albeit with a lot of modifiers involved but at least it's knowable.

Where things get really a pain in the rear is when you deal with the new social wastage elimination.  Should unused social production get to get all those nice military bonuses? That is, if I've got say 50 social production going but I'm not building anything, should that 50ip's get all the bonus modifiers and become say 100 military production? 

After a weekend of playing it both ways, I decided on no.  That social production is transferred to your total military production on the planet but it doesn't get all the bonuses. There has to be something to benefit the player who runs their economy well, otherwise we might as well just get rid of the economic system entirely and just have it a be a mindless grind of cranking out ships.

The other tough question is whether your base social production should get bonuses and all that good stuff and then have that magnified amount be transferred over to your military.  Again, after playing it for awhile, it just seemed incredibly cheesy that a player could see their ships get cranked out really fast because they had picked a high social production value. It also seemed counter intuitive.

Here's how I tried to game the system with a 2% Military and a 98% social:

So what Haven ended up getting in terms of military production was 1 from its base and 2 (rounds up on bonuses) on the bonus for a total of 3 natural military production from the 2% ratio.  Then the 52 from the base output from social spending is transffered over for a total of 56 military spending.

You can imagine some of the cheesy scenarios I went through though.  In one case, I had something like 300 military production because I got the bonuses from the social production and then that production got re-bonused when it was transferred over.  And at that point the entire game mechanic starts to fall apart.

In extreme cases there will probably be some slight round off error. It's unavoidable when you're taking 50% of 3 (for instance).  But you get the idea.

Damned if you do and...

What's ironic about all this work on streamlining this is that you will have more people who like the fuzzy stuff and argue the game has no "soul".

We could have just used flavor text on the abilities and saved ourselves a lot of trouble and had one group be happier with things like:

Military Production Ability:

( ) Basic
( ) Industrious
( ) Magnificient

And let the user "imagine" what those values meant other than "something really cool".

Master of Orion 2 had a bit of both. "Fantastic Traders" instead of Trade Bonuses.  And "Charismatic" instead of a set Diplomatic Ability.

I think if there's a Galactic Civilizations III that you'll see the abilities evolve into something that has elements of this.  It's important to note that Galactic Civilizations preceded Master of Orion in terms of a public release (original OS/2 version) so when someone thinks that GalCiv is really a "MOO clone" they don't realize how far back the game goes.

My view on this kind of thing is that games have to evolve over time and good games integrate features from proven successes. Otherwise, the game designer's just being obtuse IMO.


Comments (Page 5)
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on Mar 27, 2006
I think you are very confused. You see, if you wrote "Death to Micro" in a post and I quote you as saying that, then it is exactly what you said.


And you obviously missed the context in which you misquoted me. Further I already explained the 'Death to Micro' comment, its a matter of degree, its a matter of what you want to call micro. I've been quite clear in the kind of micro I do not wish to see.

Though you are the one who is compeltely confused. You say you are not for decoupleing the sliders or for planetary sliders, so what 'micro' are you actually supporting? You have a bug up your butt about the way in which the production will be displayed, that's it! I'm asking you how you can possibly know how it will be displayed until after it comes out. I'm asking you what difference it will possibly make. Seriouly, through all your petty insults it becomes clear that you are the one who hasn't thought this through, much less understands what the coming changes will mean.

Moo3 worst issue was the inability to Micro, and only the uninformed wouldn't know that. Civ4 has a ton of new Micro elements. More Buildings to build, more special units like the heroes, and double the amount of improvements for your workers to build. More resources to use, more trade resources to divy up in Diplomacy, and much more complex Research tech tree. Seems like double the amount of Micro from Civ3 to me. The great Macro things you probably are thinking about was creating stacks of units, automate workers, or emphasize in city view. These are good features, I admit that, but they are improvements not a complete destruction of Micromanagment.


My god you are dense. Micro has nothing to do with tech trees or improvements, and everything to do with how you control the research and construction of those items. In Civ3 it paid to constantly tweek down your research and manage your city tiles on a near per turn basis to gain maximum efficiency. In Civ4 you no longer need to perform these tedious chores since the production and research now carries over. Sure there will be times when you want to go in and specifically change around the tiles in a city, but for the most part this is not something that now needs to be done every turn. Further if you think you couldn't micro compeltely in MoO3 (other than planetary buildings) you are the one who is uninformed. Indeed the issues were that the micro was a royal pain in the a$$ to do. I'm not getting into the whole governer bit, either you accepted it and figured it out, or you rejected it and never bothered to learn it. Sufice it to say that for those who bothered to learn it it worked exactly as they understood it too, and you had more input into it than you might have thought.

What do you mean by this? You need a city by any tradable goods, you have to research 3-4 times more things to get the thing to place on the resource, you then have to establish a road between the other nation, and then you can trade those resources with them. More Micro only you dont know it because its fun. hahaha


Again, you have no idea what mirco means to the vast majority of people. In civ2 you had caravans you had to manually move to a destination. In 3 and 4 trade and trade routes are handled automatically. I'm not talking about resources either, which are handled via diplomacy, but the income you get through connecting your cities to each other and to other civs. More options does not mean more micro by definition. More micro, means having to perfrom repetative and tedious tasks which could otherwise be handled by a different game mechanic. Again, this has nothing to do with using your constructors or workers, and everything to do with having to fight elements like corruption or spillover waste.

Which gets back to your only complaint. That is that social spending should not go to military because you won't be able to figure out how much of it is going to go there. As a game mechanism they can go either way, it doesn't really matter, but it seems more people want them to send extra social into military rather than back to the bank.

YES you will have this waste still, and It'll be worse because you wont be able to see it, ontop of which you would increase Micromanagement of the Sliders 20 fold. I explained this in several examples that you have failed and refuse to become familiar with. Not only will you continue to have waste at high levels, you wont be able to see it, AND you would increase Micromanagement because of the guessing game with the sliders.


What waste? There will be no waste. The only thing that can get wasted is BC, and with this there is no wasted BC. You lose some potential bonuses, but even if the BC were simply returned there would still be no waste. And how is it worse for micro? You won't have to play with sliders any more than you currently do (besides which you don't seem to understand that optimal play has you move sliders to 100% and 0% anyway). You keep on saying you have dozens of examples of this 'waste' all I see is someone whineing about the fact that they won't be able to figure out where their BC is going, even though from the description provided by Brad it would seem completely trivial to see where its going.

1. I advocate decoupling. Coupling holds back planet-level specialization. Let's say you have a research heavy, industry light planet. 300 RP vs. 30 IP. Why should I be forced to cut research to zero in order to use all 30 IP? Essentially, that's what I have to do to upgrade my planets in a reasonable amount of time when a new tech comes along. Coupling punishes me for trying to specialize my planets, which was the whole point of making tile-based improvements available.


Well it may punish you for specialization, but so what? If you understand the game mechanism then you understand that specialization may not always be optimal. I don't buy this arguement at all becuase it is in the form of "I like X, therefore everyone should like X". So you will say is the counter arguement, but unfortunately for you, the counter arguement is already accepted. Further we seem to agree that decoupling doesn't really change much of anything, other than that there will now be a new 'best' strategy. My point here is that if all you do is change the 'best' strategy without adding anything new then why waste the time redoing the AI to learn the new system when the current system works perfectly well? This would not be a simple cosmetic change after all.
on Mar 27, 2006
ubertaco, calm down. There's no need for ad hominem attacks.

Specialization matters. There's a whole host of strategic decisions that planetary specialization opens up, that a generic planet structure doesn't support. The one I will focus on is geography.

1. Where do you put your centers of population? In other words, where do you fill your transports, where do your trade routes originate, and where do your taxpayers live? There's key military aspects, since population affects your land defense and where your transports launch from, and you need to try to defend freighters on trade routes from these planets. Also, you need to keep these planets outside of foreign influence to keep morale and taxes high.

2. Where do you put your research centers? These are planets with lower population (lower ground defense), and less industry (need to pull in naval defense from elsewhere). These are key soft targets, and placement of these planets out of enemy range is a key strategic decision.

3. Where do you put your industrial centers? These are ship producers. Military power radiates from here. Poor placement means it takes twice as long to get reinforcements to contested battlegrounds. Good placement means you can more easily intercept an encroaching force before they get to your soft targets.

Geographic considerations alone add significant depth to the game. This depth is muted without planetary specialization. I firmly believe that tile-based improvements and bonuses were added in GCII to add this depth. Punishing planetary specialization takes away from this.
on Mar 27, 2006
ubertaco, calm down. There's no need for ad hominem attacks.


Sorry, where did I attack you? I merely reply to people in the tone in which they reply to me. The first part of my reply was not directed at you at all.

Specialization matters. There's a whole host of strategic decisions that planetary specialization opens up, that a generic planet structure doesn't support. The one I will focus on is geography.


Of course it matters, but the difference is that it doesn't make as much sense to completely specialize. The problem is really only with heavy tech vs. production planets anyway. I'm simply pointing out to you that the optimal economy under this system is not heavy specialized worlds, though you still may do it based off of bonus tiles on planets.

Your strategic considerations are of course true, but they mislead you into thinking that any other system (other than individual sliders) would make a bit of difference. If you decouple you still cannot spend your cash as you wish unless your budget supports it. Making a 100% industry planet and a 100% research planet will be exactly the same as it is now. When you need to fund military your reasearch planet will still not produce, this doesn't matter whether the sliders are coupled or not.

Indeed its like I've said all along, decoupleing does nothing to the game, other than force the AI to have its code changed. It doesn't really help the player at all.

The difference between GC1 and GC2 isn't that you can or should specialize, its that you cannot simply build *everything* *everywhere*. In GC1 you essentially set up your governer build list then sat back and funded mil/soc as needed. In GC2 you have to plan how you want to lay out your planets based on how much room they have. That means not every planet gets morale centers, not every planet gets influance centers, not every planet gets factories, ...

It doesn't mean you don't still have manufacturing or research or money planets, it just means you set them up differently.
on Mar 28, 2006
ubertaco, I know that the first part of your reply wasn't directed at me. I was speaking up on behalf of others. Even if someone is being "dense", there's no need to take that tone.

Decoupling does make a difference. The comparison isn't between a 100% industry planet vs. a 100% research planet. A real-world research heavy planet would be 80% research and 20% industry. In the current system, research has to be dialed down to 20% just to use 15% of industry. This has enormous impact on the viability of a specialization strategy; industry heavy planets upgrade much more quickly than research ones, and research is hampered over an extended period of time.

The current system rewards a 50/50 setup. Planets can upgrade in a reasonable amount of time. Right now, the only reason you would specialize is if there are significant planetary or tile-based bonuses to encourage you to do so. Geography isn't a consideration at all.
on Mar 28, 2006
i am understanding now that a higher population will give more revenue for a plant. Will it also give more production or research also?
on Mar 28, 2006
ubertaco, I know that the first part of your reply wasn't directed at me. I was speaking up on behalf of others. Even if someone is being "dense", there's no need to take that tone.


Like I said, I respond in the same manner in which I am addressed. You can say that its better to be the 'bigger man' or whatever, but what the heck... this is the internet after all

Decoupling does make a difference. The comparison isn't between a 100% industry planet vs. a 100% research planet. A real-world research heavy planet would be 80% research and 20% industry. In the current system, research has to be dialed down to 20% just to use 15% of industry. This has enormous impact on the viability of a specialization strategy; industry heavy planets upgrade much more quickly than research ones, and research is hampered over an extended period of time.


Decoupleing does nothing to address this issue though. The only thing that addresses this issue is individual planetary sliders, which I think you agree are unwanted in the game.

For example assume you have equal amounts of production and research in your empire (though not necessarilly on individual planets). If you set your sliders to 50/50 coupled, it is the same thing as 100/100 (assuming tweeked down capacities) decoupled. In either system having a planet with a large imbalance leads to less efficient spending of both production and research. Balancing your planets will allow you to gain in efficiency (assuming your economy can handle it), but may not be optimal depending on the other strategic choices you outlined.

Again though, there is no extra waste, there is no extra advantage, there is no benefit in decoupleing.
on Mar 28, 2006
The current system rewards a 50/50 setup.


Actually, I've found that my industrial capital is better at research than anything but the most intensive tech planets. By building all those factories and the industrial capital, and then focusing the planet on research (no research buildings built, of course), I can get a planet that has about 80's in industry and 50's or so in research.

I imagine that this strategy becomes more powerful with the beta, since this planet won't be wasting vast sums of money on social spending.
on Mar 29, 2006
Actually, I've found that my industrial capital is better at research than anything but the most intensive tech planets. By building all those factories and the industrial capital, and then focusing the planet on research (no research buildings built, of course), I can get a planet that has about 80's in industry and 50's or so in research.

I imagine that this strategy becomes more powerful with the beta, since this planet won't be wasting vast sums of money on social spending.


Yeah, I've been doing this in the latest beta, research centers are a waste of money and time now... factory planets can upgrade themselves and will outproduce most research planets until very late in the game. Now that I don't waste trillions into social spending, all my "research" planets are filled with factories. I've set up a traditional 'research' planet just to compare and it only comes out a bit ahead after several years of building and upgrading (when compared to a factory-research planet of the same size) because the needed factories take up valuable slots and the build time for the research centers with a few factories is ridiculous. Only when you've reached the end game, with a ton of excess money to buy/upgrade everything including those factories into research center will it really shine. This is very odd, because for most of the game the factory-research planets will produce a ton more research, and especially odd considering my factory-research centers can pump out ships like no tommorow when I need it to as well (normally they don't build ships). Going with this method, I don't even need to research down the 'research' buildings path at all. They should seriously take a look at this, something seems really off here.
on Mar 29, 2006
Perhaps they should just make the focus add 50% to the capacity of whatever you are focusing on, and reduce the other by 75%. That way you cannot overshoot your research capacity with factories.

So if you have 100 production and 10 research with sliders set 50/50 (so 50 production and 5 research) when you focus on research you wind up with 7.5 research and a reduction to your production of either 3 or the whopping 37, depending on how its implemented.
on Mar 30, 2006
Now that I don't waste trillions into social spending, all my "research" planets are filled with factories. I've set up a traditional 'research' planet just to compare and it only comes out a bit ahead after several years of building and upgrading

I started playing the game with the latest beta. In my second game I used the same strategie. It works.
The economic system is not allright at all. There is no logic. Deficit spending on one side - uselessness of money on the other (if you don't use it to upgrade your "industrial" science wonders). The only argument for the current economic system could be the (realistic) necessity to reallocate people (as written before). But the game doesn't consider this in an adequate manner.


on Jun 03, 2006
Yep you can reallocate your industry directly into research in the beta through focusing, but this reallocation loses any bonuses, so you are spending 1BC for every 1 Research. But the important thing is that you can run your factories at 100% capacity (by using 0% research), and then reallocate this into research without any loss in capacity. A slight waste on a manufacturing capital but anywhere else its extremely effective. If I run my empires at 0% research I basically have double capacity and can beat the computer easily. If I run at 25/25/50 then the specialising works much more sensibly. So if you consider this a cheat (which it is) then leave your sliders at 25/25/50 and don't ever touch them, even at the start!

Focusing in general seems to be a way to make planets run at 100% capacity even though it seems designed that most buildings run at 50% capacity (or if you dont touch the sliders at all then research buildings always run at 33% capacity!). I mean really though the sliders should start at 100% spending and 25/25/50 allocation for a beginner. The default settings are not very good at all.

Even without the focusing cheat it still seems the best strategy to run at 0% research just so all your buildings work at 100% capacity. Then do your research through espionage,trading and conquest (especially at the hard difficulties where the computers quickly have lots of techs to sell!). But I really believe the game was meant to be played at 25/25/50 and going off this setting just spoils it.
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