feralminded

Join Date 07/2007

The Flawed GalCiv2 Economy

I feel a burning need to prefix this by saying I am a huge fan. I love the company, love the game. The game doesn't have to change one lick and I'll continue to play and support this company. This game is amazing and the philosophy of the developers and interaction level they continue to provide is incredible (being a developer I have a special respect for the level of support they provide). NEVER give that up. That said there's some obvious glaring issues with the "behind the scenes" workings of the game. I'd like to think the devs are aware of it, but this post is more for the community than for them, although I sincerely hope SOME dev reads this through ... even if their reaction is nothing more than "Yeap, we've got that one on the list". The reaction I would hope we wouldn't ever hear though is "shut up stupid player, I'm the developer and I know better." Well the truth is it is their game, they can do whatever they want with it and I love it and love the company so I will continue to play, but these issues ARE real.

First of all I'd like to thank Iztok and Wyndstar for the wealth of research they've already put into this game. I'm sure there are others before them or who helped them, but those are the two names that come to mind when I think about research put into this game. I admit I am a relative newcomer (I've only been playing for three months now), so I apologize to any earlier contributors.

So the point is quite simple, I think the Developers have dug themselves into something of a hole with the current economic system. It's simply an issue of "too many moving parts" which has allowed the current extremes to occur. It's also the result of what I have to consider intentional obfuscation of the inner workings. There's a lot of non-intuitive effects in the game which for the most part work fine if you don't think about them (for instance the fact that upgrading to a new building type can bankrupt you and that you should upgrade bank/economy buildings if you want more research/production), and sometimes I get the impression they don't want us to actually look under the covers. Anyhow here's my take on it.

#1. The production fallacy - Your buildings don't do what you think they do.

So you have a planet with 5 industrial sectors on it, each produces 16 production (according to the description), so your planet should have 80 production units?? Wrong. First of all the maximum it can possibly produce is based on the combination of your master production capacity slider, and the individual ones pertaining to the social/military sliders. So lets just say the master slider is set to 50%, now your 80 is capped at 40. Now you need to look at the individual sliders to find out how much you can produce of that 40. If your social production is set to 50% of the 100% pie, and you are trying to build an improvement on that planet, your 40 is now cut down to 20. This is extremely confusing, specially considering even with a master slider at 100%, you will virtually never get 100% of your production out of a building type. So you suddenly come to the stunning realization that by trying to be "balanced" (which would imply halved), you really end up quartered.

Here's the example. Lets say you put your production at 50% research, 49% social, 1% military, with the master slider at 100% (lets just forget about the master slider from now on, it's really really stupid and needs to go away). That's about as balanced as you can be. But, those sliders don't actually produce anything, they just limit things ... that's the fallacy. Now you have to go to your planets and of your production tiles you have to split them up evenly between industry and research. So lets just say you have 100 free tiles, 50 industrial sectors, 50 discovery spheres. Maximum production of 800, maximum research of 900. Balanced. But now the sliders come in and cut that 800 down to 400 for military or 392 for social, and the research drops to 450. 400 military and 450 research isn't 50/50 ... its actually 25/25. If you took all 100 tiles and put discovery spheres on them you would now have 1800 maximum research, and if you put your slider to 100% research ... you'd get your 1800 flasks. Same goes with the production, if you built all Industrial Sectors you'd have a peak production of 1600 hammers/shields for either social/military if you put 100% to the slider (though you'd probably prefer 1/99, which would give you a max military of 1600, and a max social of 1584. But nope, by going balanced instead of 50/50 ... you get 25/25 (or lower if you don't have the master slider at 100). This is VERY misleading and illustrates the innate problems in the sliders, specially the "pie" nature of the research/social/military sliders.

The all research/industry debacle is the result

So with the above being the way it is, suddenly you are left wondering what can you do about it? I mean the truth of the matter is that with any even remotely balanced approach you are likely NEVER going to see more than 50% of your maximum production in any area and more than likely never more than 30%. Well thanks to the unintended use of the "focus" mechanic, you can avoid this and actually get large percentages (more than the 25-30% most "normal" players ever see) of your hard earned production or research. The basic idea is pretty simple. Take the slider and put it 100% into research (or 99 social/1 industry), now build ONLY those buildings. Finally on every colony put the "focus" into the opposite (so if you are building research, focus social/military).

Lets see how it works. Lets take the 100 tiles from above and put 100 discovery spheres on them. 1800 max research and since our research slider is set to 100% research, whatddya know ... we get all 1800. Now with a focus on production we "convert" 25% of that 1800 into production which leaves us with 450 production and 1350 research. Holy moly!! The "balanced" approach produces only 450 research and 400 production, this produces 1350 research and 450 production from the same 100 tiles. Whoa ...

The culprit: The sliders

A lot of people responded to the initial idea with thoughts like "that's an exploit and needs to be nerfed" ... but if you ask me the strategy isn't an exploit, it's a symptom. It's a symptom of the fundamental flaws of the economy. The fact that by being forced to "balance" how much research and/or industry we make TWICE. First is with our building selections on the tiles, second is with those stupid sliders. To be honest you should only have to choose once. Either let us make decisions on a planet by planet basis by building our planets how we desire, or just let us build "general production buildings" and let the sliders decide what they make. The latter is REALLY boring, so I suggest the former. IF you want to put sliders in for each still, let them all go from 1-100 and forget the whole PIE aspect (again advanced players would likely just set them all to 100 and forget them as they currently do with the master slider).

I sincerely hope something is done about this some day. Maybe only in GalCiv3, but someday. Ultimately the problem lies in how things are so misleading. There's already enough confusion around the basic production unit (which isn't a hammer, or a flask, but a billion credits) ... as a beginning player it was entirely unintuitive to me that my factory didn't actually make production of any kind, but rather it facilitated me turning credits into production units. Well this trumps that in a huge way, pretty much handicapping players who are not aware of the reality of the sliders and how evil they are.

#2. Farms, morale buildings, influence, espionage, trade ... all suck at the highest levels of play.

While #1 is in fact my REAL beef and I nearly wrote the post entirely about that, I feel that these collectively form what I call the "forgotten features" which intuitively should be FAR more meaningful than they ultimately end up being. I mean this game still has a tile improvement named "food distribution center" (or whatever) ... which is nigh-worthless. Clearly game balancing had been in overdrive and we are left with some artifacts of outmoded ideas and again, unforeseen consequences.

Farms: Even with a heavy focus on morale it becomes extremely inefficient to have planets much over 13-16 billion. That pretty much makes the 300% farming tiles completely worthless (and dangerous in higher end governments), and the food distribution centers are really a bad joke. When I first started playing the game I was under the (false) impression that agriculture would be a big part of the game ... and these artifacts seem to tell the story that at one point so did the developers. Now its not. Now a farm is just a required building, kind of like a Starport, something you put one down and forget about. It's a non-factor, so either shoe-horn agriculture into the game or remove it entirely. The basic farm techs are fine as is, but remove the tiles (at least the 300% one) and the food center. Still my opinion is if it doesn't serve a strategic purpose, it's not useful. Right now farms are only useful because smart players can place an agent on an enemy farm right before invasions. That's broken, not strategic.

Influence: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? I like the idea, but much like with farms and espionage, a player can completely ignore the entire concept and still play a successful game. That's broken to me. When I see influence tiles I just shake my head and put down a farm or another factory. I would LIKE to have to care about influence, but there's little point. It doesn't help me make more money (tourism income is a tragic joke), it doesn't help me trade (I've never gotten anything good from trading influence points), it doesn't help me in diplomacy. All it does is allow me to peacefully take planets (would be a good idea if it wasn't so painfully slow and/or expensive), and to win an influence victory. It needs to have a larger role in diplomacy, or have something meaningful. An influence starbase should serve SOME role beyond just trying to flip a planet.

Espionage: I have to admit it's kinda cool, but there needs to be better defensive options. With the scaling of cost things get silly as time goes on and if two or more opponents gang up on you, you can NEVER use espionage offensively. I think you should be able to build a spy network for home ... like CIA buildings. I know the counter espionage buildings effectively do this, but it should be on a larger scale and not have a massive tile requirement. 2-4 buildings across an empire to build up a half-decent defense would be nice (though by no means 100% effective), specially if it helped you with your offensive endeavors. Also more options like allowing spies to go unnoticed but not screw up enemy tiles, or focusing on stealing tech rather than just getting info. There's TONS you can do with this and when I discovered how limited the options were I was kind of sad ... I hate to bring up MOO, but one of my FAVORITE strategies was the super-spy approach ... which just isn't viable here. I'm not saying it has to be, but more options would be nice. And the whole spy on a farm thing is pretty broken as is, not so much because turning off a farm shouldn't hurt, but because no one has more than one farm so with a single spy you're effectively halving their effective ground defense. It wouldn't be an issue if planets routinely had 3-4 farms.

Trade: This just really needs to be looked at. Perhaps have the number of trade routes less limited by tech but more by population size. Like you get an extra trade route every 20 billion folks or something. Trade is brokenly strong early on, and fades into nothingness towards the end. A super trader race would be very fun if it were more viable on a longer-term scale. Perhaps if influence played a strong part of Trade revenue or routes you could kill two birds with one stone.

Basically my issues with all of the above is they're just not super viable, or even necessary. I am all for playing the game any way you like, and in fact I recognize this as the strength of the 4x style ... replayability heavily depends on the various styles of play and I'd hate to see it all diluted into a single generic style by requiring too many things, but honestly all aspects of the game should be necessary to a limited extent, and can be so without having to completely dilute the game. If you want agriculture as a part of the game, MAKE IT SO. Maybe even an agricultural strategy that's viable in some fashion. Trade should be viable. Tourism should be viable. Influence should matter a whole lot more than for flipping planets or whatever. These are some awesome concepts that just need a bit more weight in the game rather than just being a novel concept you play around with on super low difficulty levels.

Again I'm not trying to rebuild the game and I offer very few solutions for that reason. My fixes are meaningless as I am not employed by Stardock. Ultimately the problems are there and only become magnified as you play the game on higher difficulty levels. So many awesome aspects of the game boil away as too inefficient and ultimately unnecessary while the few remaining operate on some fundamentally misleading (I won't say broken) concepts. I'm not saying an influence victory should be viable at the hardest difficulty level, but influence should still MATTER. Farms and trade and espionage and whatnot all should too. I think the developers need to decide which of these concepts are strategic, and which are just not working. Clearly some they have already abandoned (farms), while others they seem to keep playing with (espionage) ... while others just seem in limbo (trade/influence). And then back to the first issue ... sliders. Just ... do SOMETHING. I LOVE the idea of the all research or all industry strategies and recognize that they require an abhorrently strong economy to power and are not "insta-win" by any means, but they should not be the ONLY way to get anything even vaguely resembling efficient use of your tiles ... but right now they're ALL YOU GET. Right now any balanced approach is just a waste of tile space. I realize the game is heavily balanced around this inherent "waste", but that's not a terribly good excuse. Balance the game on efficiency, not waste please. It is a great game as is, but it really could be a whole lot more. You could have high influence agrarian super powers who dominate trade contending with military super powers who can't subsist without the trade from the farm nations ... or whatever. The fundamentals are there.

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I agree if everything you said above, except for the 300% farm tile being useless. There are some limited circumstances under which it is useful.

I, clearly, love this game and I have become very good at manipulating the current economic setup. That being said, I do think it needs a change for the very reasons you stated above. I have seen, a long time ago, a direct response on the whole slider issue from Frogboy. In it, he basically stated that he wanted players to be forced into making a decision between research and production. The sliders represent the methodology for doing this. I do think the idea of planetary builds representing your choice between research and production is a valid way of dealing with this though...But one way or another it probably deserves a fresh look.

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Excellent post my friend, you pretty well summed up the majority of the issues I have with the game. Like you said though, its still a great game and you can work around these problems.

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Well, thanks for the nod in your post. I agree with much of what you have said, but as you mentioned it was my own research along with several others that led me to the conclusions.

Like Purge, I'm very familiar with the current system and how to manipulate it for maximum advantage. Almost none of what I do in a game at this point is an "intuitive" approach. From defending planets with tiny hulls with no weapons, to building all of one kind of building, to ignoring morale completely, to building suicide ships to knock down enemy fleets, to actually selling all of my good tech for the juicy credits so that I can kill everyone, etc. etc. etc. I take full advantage of the game mechanics, but the mechanics really serve to "punish" a traditional approach.

The one you only briefly mentioned, which is a sad loss IMO, is the complete loss of morale buildings - at least at the top level. In earlier builds of GC2 morale buildings mattered - sometimes a lot. But changes to the economy model have pushed them out of the curve of being efficient. That is a whole line of buildings that are just a waste, and yet seem to a new player like they should be part of the development of a planet.

I think part of the problem is that the tiles are new. The production sliders WERE the way that you had to choose between research and technology in the days of yore. However, once you could start to build buildings on planetary tiles, suddenly there were two ways to choose between research and technology. Not only did this end up being redundant, but as you correctly point out, ended up splitting resources TWICE, so that you end up with a 25%/25% split. The only way to go to 100% is to choose all of the same thing twice in a row (all labs/facs - 100% in just one slider) - and that REALLY isn't intuitive.

I also agree that the basic unit of production is the bc, and that is what you need to focus on. This is not apparent when you start your first game.

Anyway, all good points. But of course I agree, you appear to have used a lot of my source material

I'm curious to see if you get a reaction.

Good luck out there,
- Wyndstar

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I disagree with your conclusion about production. I think there are good strategy decisions in the sliders, and in building a combination of factories and labs. By building factories and labs, you can set your civ's overall bias towards production or research. And you can change this slowly by upgrading factories or labs, or replacing one with the other. The sliders let you quickly change between production or research based on your immediate needs, such as an unexpected war. This gives you an important decision to make every turn. You get to decide whether to use 100% production, or 100% research, or something in between. I've found that switching quickly is very useful in creating an advantage, and then capitalizing on it quickly.

I don't think that it should be expected to be able to use 100% of everything at the same time. Would it help if 100% were relabeled as 200%, and 50% were changed to 100%? Everything would work exactly the same, but would it feel more intuitive like that? Also, I don't think that it is unintuitive that production and research cost money. It's also clearly explained in the manual and on the expenses screen. Divorcing production from income allows unusual strategies like running at a deficit while selling tech for money, or making large profits and spending it on upgrades.

The all-factories strategy is probably too powerful. But it's the only problem I have with the production system. This strategy could be nerfed in any number of ways without totally reworking production.

However I do agree that that population is too heavily penalized. It makes horizontal expansion (by "acquiring" more planets) much more powerful than growing and building your planets in vertical expansion.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2419

Somewhere there are some notes on how the economic system in GalCiv III would be done and it's very different.

First off, I don't think that factories, as they are upgraded, should increase production per se but rather reduce the COST of production.

Right now, it's backwards IMO. I build a manufacturing plant and now I am spending more money (I'm producing more) so I have to go monkey around with my spending sliders.

In my view, the experience players should have when improving their infrastructure is one of gradual overall improvement -- they gradually are able to keep increasing their spending slider due to improving their infrastructure.

I also think that social spending shouldn't be in there in the sense it currently is. Instead, it should be a building that maintains your infrastructure and provides services which includes constructing planetary improvements.

If we did that, then we would just two sliders: Industry and Research (eliminating social and the generic "spending" sliders).

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And this is why you guys are such an awesome company, because you give a damn. I really like the ideas and the one thing I forgot to touch on was how "hinky" it felt with the whole military/social split ... because in many ways it kind of was a bit false (social just became military most of the time). Regardless I concur, making something should cost a fixed amount and better factories make it cheaper/faster ... that's the right way to approach it intuitively (even though mathematically just making factories amp production can in theory resolve the same ... it's probably always good to go with intuitive concepts just for ease of play/learning). It was definitely eye opening for me when I realized making a bigger better factory cost my economy in a crushing way ... you REALLY have to be economically ready for the upgrade if you choose to leave auto-upgrades on, which isn't how it should be. The auto-upgrader should be a feature (boy do I ever love it), not economic suicide.

Thanks a bunch for the responses guys. Again I am absolutely bonkers about this game and have already gotten three other people buy it (I let them borrow it for a couple days and they wanted their own accounts). I still have a huge box full of random race/strategy combos I just am dying to try and I'm quickly working my way up the difficulty levels. I'm also very excited about the other stardock projects. This is the kind of company where once you buy one product and realize what you get, you just have to look around at what else they're making. It's been a while for me to find that. I'm also glad nobody tore my head off for a little bit of public light on things I consider weaknesses. Thanks all.

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Interesting Frogboy. That would definitely shake things up and has a pretty good chance of addressing the current weaknesses. Thanks for the continued effort to make the game better....And it's a good thing that you already have GC III notes building up somewhere!

I agree with Wyndstars observations on morale buildings, and I no longer build them either. Any thoughts on unsteepening the morale penalty for higher populations, increasing the economic value of high populations, or some third way that makes morale buildings economically viable again?

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Philocthetes

Join Date 10/2003

+153

The only search hit I get for "GalCiv III" and "economic sysem" is in the Official Tactical Combat thread, and that seems to be a bum hit. A pointer from some of you volunteer scholars would be appreciated. I find this subject quite interesting in terms of helping me consider my choices in the current game system.

But I have what I think of as higher hopes for GalCiv III. For me, the fundamental flaw is that BC are the fundamental unit. An economic system for a multi-species galactic game needs to include cultures that have no use for currency. The next version should have an entirely new economic model that enables some species to operate entirely on material resources, e.g. water, deuterium, carbonaceous chondrites, heavy metals, and radioactives. Adopting a money economy should be a strategy option, not a fundamental assumption of how the universe works.

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I concur ... it would be nice to see races that didn't need to build monetary buildings ... and instead subsisted off of something else. That said I know Brad and the crew are likely trying to avoid the terrifying nuances of overcomplicating finances. As much as I would like to see the ability to trade bulk goods with other nations instead of just money, the bottom line is building and AI that could figure out what items to trade to other AI's for maximum profit would be pretty tough. Same goes for the basic production unit. In this game it's money, which is credible as it comes from the perspective of a human. But other races it might be something else. Arcaceans it might be honor. Altarians it very well might be flasks. Regardless the key to remember is that they're trying to keep the game simple under the covers because if you overcomplicate the fundamentals, balancing and AI become a serious bear. Personally I would be quite happy with a more "fair" production/research system (the current double penalties I described above are quite fearsome ... and insidious in that most people never realize it), I would be content with a less exploitable combat system (the one ship must survive rule is icky, and more emphasis put on those forgotten techs/styles/improvements. But hell, it sounds like they have grander plans so lets just see what we get in a few years. Personally I'm looking forward to Master of Magic first

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2419

Question about morale buildings, how would you like the behavior changed? This is something that could be addressed in 1.7.

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i think that the major problem with morale is the captol planet. which now has a very large pop capicity without a farm.

in the current game i have 2 morale buildings, one on a morale booster. no farm. a morale of 56%. so i have the same as three morale buildings and my morale stinks. which means if i want higher morale i have to sacrifice more spaces for morale buildings.

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I was thinking: what if tourism money, instead of being a sort of "bonus income", was actually taken from other civs' tax revenues. After all, if all your citizens are off touring my empire, they are buying my products and paying me taxes, not you. Perhaps this would be more or less effective based off of the proportion of other civs' income/population (richer people buy more souvenirs), and of course, how many tourists you actually attract. This would increase the power of influence buildings.

The math would probably be crazy though.

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Question about morale buildings, how would you like the behavior changed? This is something that could be addressed in 1.7.

Brad, you might find some good insight in the following thread:

The Death of Morale Buildings

I think, from reading that thread, the answer to your question above might be: make morale buildings do what they say they do.

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i think what happened is that when you stopped using the stock market for morale. you forgot to tweak the morale buildings slightly.

besides employment should always adjust morale depending on how many are working.

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you forgot to tweak the morale buildings slightly

Actually, they were heavily tweaked, just in the opposite direction from what you mean; they used to give higher morale bonuses in the original release.

My guess as to why that was done is taxes - high morale planets were allowing players to set taxes unreasonably high while still maintaining healthy population growth and approval ratings.

The downside is that now there is no perceived gain from building more than a single farm on a planet, and populations remain low galaxy-wide. Even the AI with suicidal bonuses can't afford the massive array of VR centers it takes to keep even a moderate population happy.

If the code were mine to play with, I would experiment with setting the morale buildings back to their original levels and then increasing the morale penalty from the tax slider, instead. It would take some testing and tweaking to get the balance right, but probably very little if you have a good mathematical model to start from.

Giving the bonus back to the buildings and increasing the morale hit from the tax slider would give a triple benefit. It would address the initial problem of players being able to set taxes too high; it would give players an incentive to build morale buildings again, because they would need to in order to raise taxes; and it would bring back the feasibility of making a few high-population "paradise" planets, especially in conjunction with the farm bonus tiles and food distribution center that so many people complain about being useless.

I just want to add one more related item: Please change the galactic resort to at least give a higher morale bonus than a common VR center. A bonus of 50% or even 100% for a mega project building that can only be built once and never demolished is not unreasonable.

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I think this is a very complicated issue in that much of the fundamental economy rests on this and if the overall economy shifts significantly you really could upset some careful balances. I'm sure everyone knows that already though

.

Anyhow its quite simple, morale buildings are currently too weak and global bonuses too strong. Anyone can hit 100% global morale quite easily even without Krynn and that's more than enough to build a strong economy without a single morale building. Top that off with the fact that at the level of populations/taxes currently possible with just global bonuses, stock markets FAR out-perform said morale buildings.

I like the idea of increasing the approval penalty of higher taxes, although I'm sure this is a scary endeavor for the devs. Regardless I'm not sure they ever envisioned us all running empires with 69% taxes. I dunno.

I also like the idea of weakening global morale bonuses a tad, as this would make the approval buildings stronger in respect.

Ultimately both of those ideas weaken the overall economy of what is currently possible, which has to be carefully considered. Its the cascade effect. Lower the overall taxes available and force players to use more tiles to achieve similar economies as before, on the whole, weakens the current economies. Again this may not be a big sacrifice to the Developers, but it needs considering.

Also I'd say one of the key weaknesses is the "bump your tax rate down for the vote" exploit. This facilitates VERY powerful economies where people routinely run their economy at 40% approval rate for 50/52 weeks a year. Heck if you addressed that bug alone you might very well set the economy to rights all on it's own because people wouldn't be able to rightfully run such high tax rates which would weaken the overall value of a stockmarket vs a virtual reality center (which I think is the crux of the issue).

Oh and yeah add me to the "fix the Galactic Resort" list please. It is kinda silly right now. It really needs a massive bonus of some kind, a super project that's weaker than a normal tile.

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Mumblefratz

Join Date 07/2006

+139

Here's my 2 cents on morale. Basically the problem as I see it is that base morale has a triple whammy on approval. It's a direct negative on approval while at the same time it reduces the benefit of any morale buildings on the planet and the benefit of any morale abilities or resource mining.

As long as the triple effect of base morale is in place you have a situation where there's a very sharp inflection point in the graph of population versus approval. Basically morale is not much of a concern until a critical level of population is reached. Once that level is reached there's pretty much no amount of morale buildings or morale ability/mining that can make much difference. Pretty much the result of all the morale tweaks that have gone into the game over the last year is to change the level of population at which this inflection point occurs without changing the fact that such an inflection point exists.

The net effect of all this is to basically take morale out of play as a variable. What most everyone does is to essentially control their population at a level below this critical inflection point because they really have no other choice. So as morale changes have been made from rev to rev the real effect has been to change the level of pop that people can have. The game essentially dicates the amount of pop you can reasonably support and everyone is forced to follow along.

My suggestion is to uncouple at least one of the methods in which approval in increased from it's dependancy on base morale. It seems that there is a desire to increase the usage of morale buildings. If that's the case the best way to do this is to make the approval increase of any morale building independent of population. Currently a VRC for example starts out with an assumed 40% approval bonus that ends up at high pop being about 6% (at least these used to be the numbers, the exact numbers may have changed but the effect has remained the same). If instead a VRC gave a straight 20% benefit to approval (not morale) then there would be a true incentive to use these buildings and people could make legitimate tradeoffs between dedicating tiles for morale building for a higher pop versus using the tile for econ/prod/tech.

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I have to disagree with feralminded about the economic system. It's not flawed, in fact it's brilliant. The sliders are the best invention I've seen yet in a game, and here's why.

Reason #1 - The economy slider allows you to produce at a set level of your capacity. This allows you to build factories and research centers and then have the option to use them at whatever capacity you want or can afford. This is much like the real world. Just because a company has a factory doesn't mean it can afford to run it at 100% capacity 24/7. Try keeping your economy slider on 100% all the time, and you'll soon go bankrupt, especially at the beginning of the game when you're building factories and research centers without large taxable populations behind them. Here's an example: Suppose I have a planet with 10 factories and 10 research centers. If I set the economy slider on 100% and the social and research sliders at 50%, I'll be using all my capacity. Suppose each factory and research center uses 1 bc per unit per turn to function. I'll be using 20 bc per turn. If I set the economy to 50% and keep the social and research sliders on 50%, I'll be using 10 bc per turn - 5 on research and 5 on production. Now, suppose I have the economy slider on 100%, and I set the social slider on 75% and the research slider on 25%. My entire capacity is 20 units, 15 of which should be producing and 5 of which should be researching. However, I only have 10 factories. So now I should have all 10 factories producing, 5 centers researching, and a 5 bc surplus. I could achieve the same thing by setting the economy slider on 75%, and setting social to 66% and research to 33%.

My point with this example is that inefficiencies are not caused by the sliders, they're caused by not using the sliders efficiently. The most efficient use of the sliders is to balance factory use (either military or social) with research at the highest expenditure level.

Reason #2 - The sliders allow me to tell where my inefficiencies are. For example, in wartime I may set the economy slider at 100% and set the military slider at 100%. If I have a budget surplus, that means I can either afford to build more factories, or I can set the military slider lower and increase the research slider to achieve maximum efficiency. The same principle applies to the research slider in times of peace.

Inefficiences creep up when players don't tailor their sliders to their building mix. If you want to use your economic slider at 100% with your social, military, and research sliders all at 33%, you need a 2 factories to every research center. If you build those buildings at different ratios, you need to adjust your sliders to make it efficient. The sliders are so useful. In times of prosperity when there is no war, and I have plenty of income, I like to set the economic on 70% and the research to 80% and social to 20%. Most of the time this yields good progress, along with a small surplus to save. If I have specific planets I want to improve, I'll focus those planets on social and I'll make everyone else quit improving. Every planet that is not improving I focus on Research.

The fact is, the sliders kinda do this for you. Set military production to 100% and then try and focus planets on social production. Focusing won't change a thing because focusing only allocates your budget- it doesn't change it. In the preceding example, I'm spending 20% on social and 80% on research. I don't want planets that are building to be eating up my researching budget. In the absence of focusing, the slider allocates the budget based on resources. Here's an example. I have two planets.

Planet 1: 10 factories, 10 research centers
Planet 2: 5 factories, 5 research centers

I have 30 possible units, 6 set to social, and 24 set to research (20/80 budget). Without focusing, the computer will use 4 factories on planet 1 and 2 factories on planet 2. This is wasteful because planet 1 can't build anything more. The money just goes back to my treasury. Here's how I optimize.

Set the economic slider to 66%, the research slider to 75% (15/20 units) and the social to 25% (5/20 units). Now, focus Planet 1 on research. Now planet 1 will use all 10 research centers to the exclusio of the factories. The remaining 5 research units will come from planet 2 (unfocused). The 5 factories budgeted will come from planet 2.

I realize this has been a long post, but here's my point. The economic system is not flawed, in fact, it's unbelievably versatile. Using the sliders and focusing, you can achieve any mix of building and research you want, focused wherever you want. If you're inefficient, it's because you're not using the sliders efficiently.

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i never have a problem managing morale on my homeworld. i can get the population of almost every suitable planet (PQ 10 or so, and up) as high as 19B on large maps where there are morale resources aplenty.

Question about morale buildings, how would you like the behavior changed? This is something that could be addressed in 1.7.

personally i feel that the problem with the morale buildings is that they become exponentially less useful in the situations when you need them the most. mumble said it perfectly:

As long as the triple effect of base morale is in place you have a situation where there's a very sharp inflection point in the graph of population versus approval. Basically morale is not much of a concern until a critical level of population is reached. Once that level is reached there's pretty much no amount of morale buildings or morale ability/mining that can make much difference

in the end, it works out to your favor, assuming a large enough percentage of your population are on planets with high levels of unrest - to use your tiles for stock markets and lower your taxes.

i'd be okay with this if it weren't such a sharp difference. most of the time in GC2, the player has several options for achiving the same end; while one isn't always as good as the other, they're still kind of close in many cases. though there are a couple points before 19B when the effect of morale is reduce, it's around that level when it becomes low enough that you're better off building more econ structures. if you try to exceed 19B, it suddenly becomes impossible to keep the planet above 50% approval, and its morale typically falls so so quickly that it stops growing almost entirely.

and last time i checked, the secret police center still wasn't affecting base morale as it claims.

i think it'd be much more intuitive if the approval percentage directly corresponded to how many unhappy people you have on a planet, and morale buildings had a direct, 1-to-1 reduction of unhappy people - so a VRC might be capable of making 5 billion unhappy people happy. i don't mind civ-wide morale bonuses having a lesser effect as population goes up - it makes sense that the same limited resource being spread over more people would have a lower effect - but perhaps the net effect of civ-wide morale bonus should be reduced as civ-wide population increases, rather than on a per-planet basis.

but for a less radical overhaul, it think it'd like a much more graduated curve for morale penalty. in other words, don't have such harsh dividing lines for the effects of population on morale.

it also seems that from time to time certain AIs go crazy building morale buildings - and on planets with pathetically low populations! just a separate but related observation.

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Here's an example: Suppose I have a planet with 10 factories and 10 research centers. If I set the economy slider on 100% and the social and research sliders at 50%, I'll be using all my capacity.

I think you would run at half capacity factories and half capacity labs, not full capacity.

I think that was the point, you are limited by a certain spending amount, which doesn't make sense, because you should be able to spend at 200% (if you can afford it) so both your labs and your factories can operate at 100%.

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I don't believe that's correct though. Somebody please test it, or when I get home from work I'll test it. 100% on the economic slider means 100% of every unit you can produce of social, military, or research. You can impose self-limits by working the sliders wrong, but you should be able to use everything to capacity if you have the sliders set right. Somebody test this out and verify, but I believe it to be correct.

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setting your spending capacity to 100% does not result in 100% of a factory or lab's capcity being reached. you can use labs at 100% by setting spending to 100 and research to 100, but then you have zero industrial capacity without focusing. i don't need to test it because i know that's the way it works, as it has been from the beginning: but if you'd like to test it please feel free.

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For my two cents.

1) Definitely read the link Ghostwes included. It's a tremendously good tear down of why the morale buildings are an issue now and certainly changed/solidified my view and use of morale buildings.

2) I agree with Mumbles assessment that probably the quickest and simplest way to fix this issue is to have the morale buildings affect your base morale instead of your calculated morale. It's what I was going to write before I even saw Mumbles reply! Frankly, this will change the game play, and without playing a few games under a changed environment, I'm not sure exactly how the balance will work out. It would likely need another tweak or to get the balance back in place. It does minimize the inflection point and that is at the heart of the issue.

Less sure about this, but I would probably couple this with a change in the tax slider. Currently there is a cliffing affect at every ending in 9 tax rate (49,59,69). I would probably smooth this out and increase the negative effects at the highest end of tax scale to help balance the positive that would now be obtainable with effectively improved morale buildings. This would take some of the relative strength out of stock markets, which are the real alternative to morale buildings now. I suspect this would result in the optimum strategy being a mix of both again. It would definitely require comparing the total income from an all stock market planet now compared to a mixed planet under the new system, with them, hopefully, coming in with very similar total BC net incomes. It would probably need to be checked at a couple of different tech levels...Or just toss a beta out to us and hear the howls!

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Sadly Millertime335 and dystopic are correct on this point. There is an entire strategy that revolves around building only one time of building (either production or research) and focusing (using the focus option on each planet) on the opposite. This was addressed by Feralminded in the OP, in points and and two and has been confirmed by others such as Wyndstar (and recently, myself, I'm running an all research empire and kicking ass in my current game). Sadly, that strategy (building on type of building and maxing out the slider for it while focusing on the opposite) is more effective numerically then the normal strategy (whether is more effective in practice is entirely a matter of personal opinion, setting up an all research empire from scrach is HARD and building up new planets sucks nuts).

Heres the example the OP uses.

Here's the example. Lets say you put your production at 50% research, 49% social, 1% military, with the master slider at 100% (lets just forget about the master slider from now on, it's really really stupid and needs to go away). That's about as balanced as you can be. But, those sliders don't actually produce anything, they just limit things ... that's the fallacy. Now you have to go to your planets and of your production tiles you have to split them up evenly between industry and research. So lets just say you have 100 free tiles, 50 industrial sectors, 50 discovery spheres. Maximum production of 800, maximum research of 900. Balanced. But now the sliders come in and cut that 800 down to 400 for military or 392 for social, and the research drops to 450. 400 military and 450 research isn't 50/50 ... its actually 25/25. If you took all 100 tiles and put discovery spheres on them you would now have 1800 maximum research, and if you put your slider to 100% research ... you'd get your 1800 flasks. Same goes with the production, if you built all Industrial Sectors you'd have a peak production of 1600 hammers/shields for either social/military if you put 100% to the slider (though you'd probably prefer 1/99, which would give you a max military of 1600, and a max social of 1584. But nope, by going balanced instead of 50/50 ... you get 25/25 (or lower if you don't have the master slider at 100). This is VERY misleading and illustrates the innate problems in the sliders, specially the "pie" nature of the research/social/military sliders.

Oh, and for the record, I always run my slider at 100% and rarely have any issues maintaining my economy.

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To extend my remarks a bit...

While fixing the inflection point would make it possible to build larger populations again (useful in and of itself), I'm not so sure it fixes the tax value of having a large population. It might be necessary to increase the tax value of 15B+ populations a bit too.

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