+50% military = +0% military ?

from Stardock Forums
Noticed a strange thing. I don't know whether it is a bug or a feature, but I can't see how it could be a latter one.

I chose +50% military ability for 6 points. Then I start a game, and look for the shields in the planet view => they are all the same! Using the economic sliders 1/3 each yields as many military and social prod. units - shouldn't it be +50% in the military shields? In the planet view it reads 3 + 0, no bonus shields! Putting the economic sliders to 100% mil. yields total as many mil. shields as did previously mil, soc and rec combined. Where's my bonus?

I repeat the experiment by choosing +50% social production, and it didn't seem to have any effect on anything either.

Now it is either (a) I haven't got the idea behind those bonuses or (b) GalCiv is a bowl of spaghetti.
503 views 9 replies
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
This is a known bug. The Social and Military production bonus picks don't work.

Pick something else for your abilities, but don't worry about production bonuses that you get from social projects/starbases....they work fine.
Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
@bonkku. Have you compared the build time for military projects with 50% bonus and without? I personally never look at the beaker itself but have the impression that the bonuses work nontheless.


Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Tried the build times. The bonus doesn't work, having 18 shields/turn and +50% military takes 3 turns to build a colony ship. With +50% the real production would be 27 shields, and it should take only 2 turns.

I also tried the research bonus +50%. It seems to work, but not as quite as I expected. GalCiv calculates that 50% of 18 is 7. I don't quite see how.

I'm beginning to be rather tired of all these non-working or incorrectly-working bonuses or whatever bugs or crashes. They say that GC had an extensive beta test. It can't be seen by looking at the result. Every time I take a feature and look at it, there is a bug. At least I feel so :-(
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
From "The Economics of Galactic Civilizations" (in the Encyclopedia, lots of good info there, check the link at the top of the page):

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How your civilization’s abilities affect production

Your civilization has specific abilities for military and social production. These abilities go into how much additional production you get over the base amount. But none of this is given “free”. It just increases your civilization’s industrial capacity.
---

What this means is that if you have +50% Military Bonus you could spend +50% more on that planet and not have any wasted.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
What do you mean, by saying
"What this means is that if you have +50% Military Bonus you could spend +50% more on that planet and not have any wasted." ?

From the encyclopedia entry you cited, I understand that given a base production of say 18, my actual production is 27, and of the 9 bonus production units 3 are given free, so you have to pay only 24 bc per turn of the 27.

The problem is, I don't get any "additional production over the base amount", as said in the encyclopedia.
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
Sorry for the odd phrasing on that.

My understanding is that if you have a colony with a base military production of 20, you can spend up to 20bc to fully fund milltary production on that planet. Thus generating 20 military production points.

If you have a +50% military production bonus due to racial ability, on that same planet you can spend up to 30bc to fully fund military production. Thus generating 30 military production points.

With racial abilities you get no free production points, it does not give you any free production points. This means that if you are only spending 15bc on military production you will only get 15 military production points on that planet no matter what your racial bonus.

Getting 1/3 free production points is only from add on structures that you have built on the planet. That is the number expressed as the +X. (You also get free production points from Starbase enhancements.)

If this still doesn't make sense, let me know.

If someone notices something in my explanation is flawed, please point it out (still learning the game myself).
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
Please ignore the repeat of "racial abilities give you no free production points". That's what happens when you get interrupted 2 times while trying to edit a post :p
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
Nope Robl you're spot on as far as I know.

A 20 production planet lets you spend $20 on production. With a 50% bonus you have a 30 production planet that lets you spend $30 on production.

However, if you're only actually spending $15 on production any way (due to lowering your Social Slider frex)you're not going to see any difference in time to complete.

This is why your total expenditures will change even if your tax rate and spending rate stay the same.

If you have just that one 30 production planet, you are gettin $40 in taxes and spending 100% and you're spending 100% on Social production...you'll actually make $10 a turn, because you can only spend $30/turn on social production (due to your production limit). If you switch to 100% research and you have a 50 point research limit, than all of the money can be spent on research (you haven't reached the limit) and so you'll not save any money per turn.

If you get enough bonuses so that your production on the planet is 40+5 and you spend only $15 towards production you won't get anywhere near the 40 cap but at least the +5 is kicking you up to the equivelent of spending $20 due to efficiency gains (although I think you need to still spend something before you get the bonus.)

I have not exhaustively tested this (because I find that sort of thing tedious) but it seems to be what's happened in my games.