20000BC limit discussion

I can speak up for the seriously mixed feelings crowd. I learned about the >20k thing because I once asked folks on this forum something like, "Can you have too many economic resource starbases?"

I still think that a hard number doesn't make sense with the scalability of GC2, but I don't hate the rule like I used to. It has forced me to see the value of spending BC steadily as opposed to waiting until some dramatic moment to empty my treasury. Steady infrastructure spending leads to greater long-term discretionary spending, and steady upgrade spending leads to greater long-term military ratings. All the clicking is tedious, but it really pays off in firepower, income, etc.

Or so I thought. This might strike some of y'all as too political for the moment, but today I finished what I'm pretty sure is the longest economic boom event I've ever seen--just shy of 50 turns. I don't remember any booms much near half that long. And at the end of it, with no transitional turn or any other moment to just cuddle a bit, I was thrown from a per-turn surplus of nearly 40k to over 1,200 in the hole. As best I can tell, I built and upgraded such an insane military that I can't keep paying their maintainence without shutting off most starports and dropping the universal spending slider down near 50%.

Booms are good. Booms are bad. I think you have to do some Taoist thing to end up with the strongest kung fu.

Yeah I got the feeling of forcing you to use the money too...

let me quote the Civilization 4 Manual, Section "AfterWords" Page 175

The term “ICS” is a well-known one among our Internet fan
base. It stands for “Infinite City Sprawl,” meaning that the best
strategy in Civ games had always been to build as many cities as
possible. Corruption and waste were meant to discourage city-
building by adding diminishing returns to expansion – your 20th
city would be much less productive than your 10th. In the first
version of Civ III we turned corruption up significantly to – in
our minds – once and for all kill ICS.
We were both right and wrong; the change did put an end to
building as many cities into as tight a space as possible, but it was also
the number one complaint raised against the game. Gamers simply
didn’t like having their production taken away from them – there
was nothing fun about founding a city and then finding out that it
can only ever produce one shield per turn.

Similarly, there is nothing fun in taking away my money behind my back,  just to encourage me(the player) to spend it or perhaps to prevent having such insame amounts of money that you could abuse some game system perhaps ... (like diplomacy)

I guess I'm talking for nothing anyway... it's just too late for galciv2, and too many added features broke things here and there (like some superabilities which don't always update things correctly). Don't mistake me, galciv2 is still a lot of fun...

edit:I just noticed I got a little carried away, sorry about that guys

ho and I wanted to add, that in my example, nothing's really extreme about it, I just got a little less than one third of the galaxy planets, immense size, 4 economic starbases, 3 morale starbases,  Advanced markets(the 10% ones) and interstellar republic ...

GW, it may be a bit too much cheese for your liking, but i have had econ booms last over 5 years. Set your autosave to one turn and if you lose the econ boom, just reload the previous auto save and keep going. The econ boom will still continue.

Just rinse and repeat. I have had to do it say about 10~15 times in a 6 or 7 year game, but retaing that boom is often too much to pass up.

@OP. I do beleieve there is also a treasury penalty at 10,000BC as well. Though i am not 100% sure on that but as i recall it is no where near as severe as the 20K one. Having a gentle penalty at 10K though does make the 20K a bit more understandable in it's severity.

But your certainly not doomed if you continue to incurr the penalty. You are still making BC, albiet at the reduced penalized rate but you can continue to prosper. I have had millions in the treasury in games before, i just simply ignored the penalty.

Where it does hurt you though is in your econ score. Your econ score is based on pure income before all leases and penalties. So in comparison to a under 20K treasury incurring the penalty will hurt you in the long run score wise. If you don't play on the MV though, then this is likely to be not worrisome.

As for modding it out, i seem to recall discussion on this in the past, and IIRC i think it is hard coded. Someone like Zyxplosion or a Dev though would be better equipped to answer that for you 100%

@Neilo

If I remember correctly, at 10,000BC the income from trade is halved, but there is no direct income penalty.  As most players have agreed by this point in time that trade is a negligible source of income at best, it seems less relevant and also obviously felt much more gentle.

My main problem with game-cheese is that I love real cheeses, even some scary-stinky ones, far too much to like the slang. Right after that is the eye of the beholder problem--one player's evil exploit is another's brilliant strategy. So, formally speaking, I don't balk immediately at re-loading your way into an Eternal Boom. But GC2 is the first 4x game that's left me very, very rarely re-loading just because something happened while I was playing, and I really like that. I basically re-load only to hide from a few mega-events, and the idea of doing it to perpetuate a beneficial event is indeed outside my comfort zone.

I'd agree a bit more than halfway here, but even if you don't sweat your score, the lost income can be a horrifying amount once you know what's going on.

p.s. Re save patterns, I strongly recommend *against* making your autosave every turn. If you set it to something larger, say 10-15 turns, *and* remember that CTRL+S is your friend, then the quick save is your immediate ditch option and the autosave gives you some time to figure out that something really, really bad happened.

On the "lower" difficulty settings (Tough and below; possibly up to sub-Maso but I doubt it), the AI will, without fail, redesign its ships every 10 turns.  It also happens to re-evalaute its military standing with regards to everyone else's, once again, every 10 turns.  What this means is your chance to have war declared on you is much, much higher on every tenth turn than it is at any other turn.  I have noticed this particularly with the Drengin-once in a great while they'll declare war on me on a x/10+3 turn or an x/10+5 turn, but most of the time it's directly on an x/10 turn.

Note: The maximal difficulty I've played consistently is Tough, as I had issues with the idea of the player receiving a hidden research bonus beyond those levels.  Although I've since become much more relaxed in my stance towards it, I have not yet had the spare time to get in games of that magnitude-or even my normal difficulty of Tough.

The point I'm trying to make here is that you don't want to set your autosaves to either 10 or 15 turns.  While it's obvious that at some point your autosaves will line up with an AI's decision-making turn (for lack of a better way to put it), I've found that 9 works a lot better than 10.

This is particularly helpful when the Altarians declare war on your ally and then your ally asks you to get your ass kicked by the entire rest of the galaxy.  It doesn't happen often, but at the same time, it happens too often, if you know what I mean.

That said, quicksaves are definitely your friend.

Well, what I was really trying to talk about was finding a good balance between having a game that's engagingly surprising but doesn't drive you insane with "too-random" things. My autosave is at 12, so 12-15 seemed a natural range to suggest. The x/10 breakdown you give is interesting, but given my play tastes, it's the kind of math that I'd rather not know and will likely forget while I'm playing.

However, I like you mentioning it here b/c, if it is really that simply hard-coded, it is another good example of why I think more things should be arrays and formulae, not fixed numbers. We should not be able to find and use that many one-liner rules to share about how the computer players work. The fact that we still can is a major reason why I try to avoid calling them AIs--they're good, but they are a long way from being a Turing-test mystery to me, and I'm not even a real scoremonster like Magnumaniac, KseAli, or Neilo.

Right.  I would tend to agree on that as well.

It only applies to the lower difficulties, though-on Maso and up, and possibly even on those above Tough (haven't done that much testing or research), it's an every turn thing.

Good info guys. I had not actually heard the numbers before about the AI attacking you based on X number of turns. i do recall discussion about this not being randomly based but to nail it down to 10 turns is interesting.

I couldn't agree more though GW that it's something that should never have been hardcoded, or at least hardcoded at such a set time.

It's fine for the AI to evaluate and re-evaluate their Mil against yours, but i'd rather see the AI do that every turn no matter the difficulty instead of every 10 turns. This explains why when you are slaughtering the AI and offer them peace they will not budges and look at you as if they just droped the bomb on ya.

On suicidal if you wait around for the AI to even think about being able to attack you on even terms, then you have lost the game already.

As for the autosaves. On the giga abundant alls i used to get quite alot of OOM's so having the autosave set at anything other then every turn was killing me, especailly when you do so much in each turn (over 2 or 3 hours worth of game play at times) and hit turn only for it to OOM on you.

@SSoul. Your quite correct too, it is trade i was thinking of. Thankyou.

The blanket 20k rule is a horrible left over from gc1.  In GC1 having 20k was a feat in and of itself, in GC2 it is quite easy especially on the larger maps.

As everyone has said, it should scale, and it should probably be progressive.

The biggest issue I have with it is that it limits the game play.  Lets see, because of the 20k rule:

1)  building up money to upgrade all, is not a good idea, hence limiting the entire upgrade mechanic.

2)  the limit is so low an expensive ship is higher than it.  The limit should scale to be 2-3x more than a very expensive ship.

3)  there's no concept of stockpiling before a war, and recovering after.  Wars should be expensive, and "normal" income should not be able in general to cover a full blown war.   Along with this, debt should play a larger role in the game.  War is often more about financing than about bullets. 

4)  Late in the game, because of the balance of production vs economy, it gets to be extreamely tedius to spend money.  In general you can fix this with more and more production.  However, the reality is you just don't need it to win the game.  (because the AI doesn't develop it's planets well)

I just don't understand why 10 minutes haven't been spent to fix this anachronism from GC1. 

I had not thought about upgrading ships. The "issue" is worse than I first envisioned.

Thanks for all the comments.

Eh, i'd just like to see it scale a bit depending on Map size, say start out at 20k for tiny/small maps (would you ever reach it?) and scale upwards by 5-10k each map size thereafter. Perhaps if the leaseing options do get revamped at some point, this will help for the massive upgrade all costs on the larger maps.

from there, i would like to see the negitive 500 rule scale as well depending on map size, to perhaps add an additional 500 per map size above small. (so about neg 2.5k at "immense" size). it just seems odd that if the govt can bring in 15k per week.. a cost overrun of -501 shuts the government down for a week. 

I hate the -500 rule.

Deficit spending availability should be based on a galactic 'pool' (Like the Tourism pool), and how far you can deficit spend should be based on the combination of your 'credit rating' and the interest you're willing to pay, and how much of that pool is used up - if the galactic economy is doing well, the pool should shrink (People investing in better things like stocks) if it's doing badly, the pool should expand (exact opposite - investing in 'safe' government bonds)

Go to war, have interest rates go up, if everyone everywhere 'likes' you, you're galactic credit rating may be better (Good press never hurts), if you're making 2,500 bc/week, who cares if you're carrying a 25 bc national debt?

Jonnan

I will say this much:   the 20000bc has done nothing for me but prolong games I have already won.   I end up spending a lot of time buying farms, labs & stuff just to keep my treasury under the 20k limit.   Otherwise I could just hit the Turn button 17 times, get my Technology victory, and be done.   If anyone causes any trouble, I would just upgrade a bunch of ships and take care of it.   But 75% of the time, that doesn't happen.

I think part of why it is there and is OK for many players is that the click overhead we feel "forced" into probably leads to a higher score than you'd get just passing turns on the way to Ascension (via mines or labs) or even filling out your influence territory.

The main thing I end up spending on is ship upgrades (I play long games, often have a hundred or more turns with no infrastructure to build except on newly acquired worlds). If I understand scoring correctly, the late added firepower isn't as valuable as if it had been around a long while, but it still adds points to your total score.