GC3 indepth Part 2: The Economy
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This is a continuation of the analysis I started in my previous post. In this topic I'm going to talk about more fundamental areas of the game. Like I said before, I believe that GC2 is one of the best strategy games ever made, but it has some fundamental problems that prevent it from satisfying it's players or from reaching out to new players. The two biggest problems I see in these areas are.
1 – The game's economy is unintuitive and seemingly, almost designed to lure new players into pitfalls
2 – Too many gameplay elements feel tacked on, unincorporated, underdeveloped or immersion breaking. At best this makes them annoying, at worst they can unbalancing, unfair, fun destroying or just make the player guffaw. In this bracket I include the UP, minor races, mega events and alignment screens.
I will deal with the economy in this post. The rest I will touch on in another topic. The only prior experience I have with TBSs is from Civ, Alpha Centauri & the total war games. When I first encountered the economy of GC2, I assumed it was more developed, realistic and dynamic than these games. Now I am certain that it is not. The very existence of a production slider encourages the player to think it is alright to run an inefficient economy, never mind the fact that it starts at a position below 100%. The empire wide tax system is inefficient when governing many different colonies, at the same time as requiring constant tweaking to squeeze out every possible bc.
Although I initially thought it simplistic, in retrospect I believe that the Total War games have a much better economic system than GalCiv's. Each colony (or settlement in that case) is taxed separately, but instead of an 0 to 100% range of levels, there are only 5 levels of taxation. With this sort of system, not only is the player able to get a population growth & loyalty vs. income balance appropriate for each settlement, but he also only has to change taxation occasionally: because it is not an option to tweak taxation by tiny increments, the player is not expected to compete with the computer's level of micro management and therefore has MORE FUN PLAYING THE GAME. Best of all, a governor can be set to automatically tax as much as possible without causing population decrease or dangerously low approval. This is how tax should be done in GalCiv, and it has plenty of historical strategic precedent: new frontiers are taxed less to encourage population growth so that more money can be made in the future from that larger population.
The second aspect of the economy is then how this money is spent. The entire concept of centrally controlled production is both absurd and confusing. It leads to ridiculous scenarios like the strategy of only building either labs or factories, then using the production sliders and production focus to squeeze out some of the other kind of production. The planetary focus tool was added to add a method of trying to squeeze the square peg of centrally controlled production into the round hole of the varying local needs of planets. All it does is highlight the fundamental flaws in the system.
Some have suggested replacing the four sliders with three, which you use to determine the percentage of the potential production of each type individually. This would be an improvement, but it still leaves flaws. It is still too centralised and inefficient. More importantly though, it is still confusing to new players – they can still end up backrupted by the cost of maintaining their own, redundant buildings.
The two basic principles of the new economy should be these
1 – It is never a bad idea to research any technology.
2 – It is rarely, if never a bad idea to build any building.
There are just others it would have been better to choose.
Has no one ever thought about why we pay for production, and then use that production to pay for ships and buildings? Wouldn't it be better if we just paid for the ships in cash in the first place, and cut out the entire concept of production? This is what we already do with upgrading ships. Or to put it another way, did you never find it annoying that you couldn't upgrade your ships for free using your planets production?
How about modelling it this way: Ships cost a certain amount to buy, and can be built anywhere with a ship yard. Buildings can be bought anywhere. The need for industrial buildings should be simply to reduce the time taken for these projects to reasonable durations. A slider on each planet then determines the balance on that world between the ongoing military and social projects. Ie, what do you want done the fastest? A second class of buildings can be added that reduces the cost of projects when they are built on that world.
Maintenance should be scrapped almost across the board (EDIT: building maintenance, sorry guys). Think about the game as is. If the currently optimum system is run at 100% production, then aren't the costs of production and the cost of maintenance basically the same thing, unless you're being an idiot and deliberately being inefficient?
A rethink is also necessary for colony hubs. Does Nasa has to pay maintenance for the flag on the moon? It's ridiculous that one has to pay potentially huge amounts (for the early game) for even the smallest claim on a planet. This is an even better idea when you think that, at present, you are forcing the player to pay for stuff (hub production and research) that they may not even want.
This is, more or less the way that the Total War games work in the campaign mode. Units are simply bought with cash and there is no building maintenance. This manages not to be a problem, even though you buy units in TW just as often you build ships in GalCiv.
The only slider that should remain in the game is for research spending. This should be moved into the research screen. There is then no need whatsoever for any economy sliders (taxation has already been moved to a world by world system). Your spending on research will remain the same unless you decide to increase it. You can build all the research buildings you like but your spending will never go up unless you ask it to. Building new buildings just increases the maximum you may spend. Research production may change due to bonuses, but the spending never will, unless the players asks it to.
The end result of this is that it is impossible to end up with a negative income by doing nothing. The player can colonize as many planets and build as many factories as he likes. The only way he can end up with an negative income is if he is paying too much ship upkeep, or spending too much on research. If he wants to build ships and buildings, he must maintain a decent amount at all times in the treasury with which to buy them.
Like I said before, colonizing a planet or constructing a building should never be a bad idea. The strategic depth should come from choosing which planets and which buildings. If you colonize a crappy planet, you will have to keep tax at minimum for that world just to stop the population growth becoming negative.
We now have a system which is completely intuitive and almost impossible for a new player to balls up. At the same time, we have lost absolutely no strategic depth. No aspect of the difference between races and technology that we have already cannot be modelled with this simpler system. It will be easier for the player to use and easier to write AI for. It will free up time time spent micromanaging production and colony focus, and allow that time to be spent on more fun stuff, like moreinteresting fleet dynamics, or dealing with more varied and interesting planets.
Like I said before, if you colonize a bad planet you will make a lot less money because you will be taxing them very little, just to keep the population growth in the black. Population growth and limit should be modeled as it is in the total war games. A list of factors improving and reducing population growth is listed. These include tax, buildings, technology and the planet's natural habitability. The bigger the positives are then the negatives, the faster the population grows. As population grows, new factors appear to model overcrowding. There is thus no artificial cap. Population continues to grow until an equilibrium is reached, as in nature. This makes sense
Questions I foresee:
Q: What if I want to rush build something?
A: You have a slider for each planet that allows you to shift production time from buildings to ships. You can move this. An equivalent to buy it now can be added that reduces the remaining time by half. No amount of money can make a building appear in a week anyway.
Q: What about auto upgrading buildings? Won't this have to be turned off if the player needs to pay from the treasury? Won't doing that all manually be a chore?
A: Yes, auto upgrade must be turned off. A lot of people have told me that they play this way anyway. If you want to reduce the amount of building orders, give the player an option on researching the tech to upgrade all of that type. I foresee a colony system where having many building of the same type on one world is a rarity.
Q: Won't tweaking military/social sliders and the tax level on each world individually be a chore?
Less than it is now. This info can be shown in a convenient colony management screen like we have now. One problem we won't have is the player having to turn off production focus on their colonies once all buildings are finished. There will no longer be a colony focus. If there are no jobs of one type, the slider automatically moves to favor what there is. If there are none of any type, it's not a problem because you're not paying for the production anyway. All it does is reduce the time. There is no way of turning manufacturing points into research points. That was a ridiculous system that ended up in strategies like the all-factory approach.
Q: What about ship upgrades?
A: To upgrade a ship you move it to a planet and select to upgrade it. You pay a fraction of the price. A job is then created on the planet, just like building a new ship. The idea of upgrading ships in the middle of space was stupid anyway.
Q: What if a job reaches the front of the queue but there's no money to pay for it?
A: Then it doesn't start until there is. A warning is sent to the player that he has jobs that can't start. He then has to reduce research, decommission some ships or increase taxes so that he can get more in the treasury next turn.
Q: Won't designing and balancing all this be a huge task?
A: Yes. It is a new game though. If there weren't huge tasks that needed doing, we wouldn't be asking for sequel to GalCiv2. The economy is the biggest thing wrong with this game. I believe this sytem will be easier to design though, than the current one has been.
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