I was trying to make it clear that the production ratios and taxation should be separate, yours was the nearest message that mentioned taxation, sorry.



I'm afraid we'll have to agree to differ on that, I feel that the production ratios and what is in the queue are tightly linked.
Examples:
1) A nice fresh planet, governer sets production to be mainly social, queue has basic PQ improvers, production and morale stuff.
2) Long established planet, governer sets social production to zero (nothing left to build so an empty queue) all resources allocated to research and/or military production.

The governer and the sliders could be separate, but I fear that would add more complexity that both the players or the developers would want, linking the sliders to the governors is easier to understand and probably easier to program.

I see the point about the 2 extrems of the developpement of a planet. But this doesn't adress the case of the mid developpement of a planet, where you have plenty projects to build. It is for the mid developpement that I disagree.
Or the governor sliders are only needed for new planet without any improvement (governor with the basic project), planets focusing on wonder and trade goods (governor with nothing to build), and planets with no social project to build (governor with nothing to build).

In this situation you can leave the distribution to the defaults set on the main screen, governor sliders would be an option which would by default be turned off.
Alternatively and for special buildings you just setup a governor with nothing in the queue but the sliders set for wonder/trade good building and select the project manually.
Obviously the number of governors here is critical, so how about if the later forms of government had more available governors.
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My biggest problem is that because of the way the system is now I am forced to continue building on every planet socially in order to get my new planets even mildly happy/effective. Then on top of that all of the social projects have maintenance on top of that "wasted" money. Thus I feel like I should build nothing when all that's left is the 5 BC maintenance virtual reality centers and stuff. Thus no matter what I do I am wasting money, both on the building and then even more on the maintenance.
What most people are suggesting (having the planets who are building nothing not spend money) would not really negatively impact anyones gaming. People who want to "micromanage" will be able to, and people who like to look more at the bigger picture can still play the same way they did before.
This would be a good fix to give players more control over the game and hence a greater feeling of realism. Put it in the next version

Another good solution would be after having researched and build the stock exchange, would be able to set your social production to "investing" or "buy stocks" or something that would give cash or start gathaering interenst on the the money you have in the bank. The more stocks, the higher the interest rate.

I like the ideas of putting wasted spending into research, or "investing", but I think that's only half the problem. If you want to put a few shipyard planets at 100% military spending and the rest at 0, the only way to do this would be to set the sliders to 100% military. However, with this approach, it's hard to see what the real spending levels are across the empire.


The empire-wide sliders should let you set spending levels across the empire AS A WHOLE, and reset those spending levels easily. 10% military doesn't necessarily mean you want every planet spending 10%. You might want a handful of planets spending 50%, or even one shipyard planet spending 100%, while the other planets spend nothing. How's the money divided? Simply by setting build queues.


Say you've got two planets, capable of spending 100bcs each. A's building a ship, B's building nothing. Your total empire-wide spending is 200bcs. (Forget about social spending for now.)

25% empire-wide military -> 50 bcs -> A goes 50% military, and 50% research (as it's got nothing else to do), B just goes 100% research.

Actual military spending: 25% of total budget



50% empire-wide military -> 100 bcs -> A goes 100% military, B goes 100% research

Actual military spending: 50% of total budget



75% empire-wide military -> 150 bcs -> A goes 100% military, the leftover money (50 bcs) gets sent to B for research spending

Actual military spending: 50% of total budget


(If you really wanted to spend 75% of your budget on military, you need to give planet B a ship to build. We could add some marks to the sliders to show how much money's being requested for mil and soc spending empire-wide.)

Note as well, that if setting 10% military spending means you really want every single planet to go to 10%, just give each planet a ship to build and this will happen. Don't tell a planet to build ships and there's no way it can spend military money. Simple, right?

I could write up some more of the maths behind it if anyone's interested - but does this make sense? Do you get it? Or is it just too weird?

The Quack:

The maths make perfect sense, however it's just adding another layer of complexity, certainly all this maths may well go on, but it should be behind the scenes, performed by the computer.

Whilst I can see the merits of the "investment" scheme, again it is adding more compexity, as for diverting money to research this can be done by the method I suggested before of giving the governors the ability (but not the obligation) to set their own distribution sliders.

I realise that for example a 50%/0%/50% split would cost a different amount from a 10%/10%/80% and changing the governor would affect the overall budget, but this is the sort of thing computers are built for!

Well, all the maths does go on behind the scenes, but users should be able to have an idea of what's going on at least - e.g. they should be able to figure out "to get planet X spending more on ships, I need to increase my military funding, OR tell planet Y to stop building ships". The computer should work out all the numbers they need to know.

IMHO, in any good system for spending, users should be able to:

1 - Get an overview of all three current spending levels (BC funding set by the empire sliders, BCs requested by planets, and BCs spent at the end of the day) at a single glance.

2 - Change empire-wide spending very quickly, without being forced to micromanage.

3 - Have the ability to affect an individual planet's spending levels.

4 - Understand all the maths behind the scenes.

(Say, forget about how to change the system for a second - anyone else have something to add to that list about what it should actually DO? I don't care if they conflict or whatever, just chuck some ideas in!)


The real trick is finding a system that meets all of these criteria - but it is possible. The main problem with your governor solution (as I understand it) is the extra micromanagement - will you have to add new buildings to every build queue? If you add it to some, but not others, you'll end up breeding a huge crowd of governors (research guy with building X, research guy without building X, etc), and managing them will be even tougher. The good part about your idea is that it's easy enough to understand, and it does reduce waste. Actually... if you had four governors (defaulting to ship building, basic infrastructure, advanced infrastructure, and research), and used them consistently, (e.g. shipyards only appear in the military gov's queue, most labs only in the research one, and you don't change a planet's purpose from shipyard to lab every few turns) the micro-management wouldn't be so bad.

I think my way feels more natural to use, but that's just me - and the maths does get more complicated as you include social projects, different sized planets, etc. If people can't intuitively see where money goes when using this system, then it's a bad system.

Why I have the impression to hear a strange sound: MOO ... MOO ... MOO ...

Programming issue - When you move ANY slider, the totals should change to reflect the action.




Easy - just change the Tax or Spend rate, these should be set for the whole empire, governors just deal with distribution.



I thought we were trying to avoid this level of micro-management, unless you have one governor per planet which defeats the object of the exercise.



Not convinced about this, while some users have the ability to do this others don't. By hiding the maths behind the scenes, users with less mathematical knowledge are not intimidated.

Basically whatever solution (if any) is adopted has to be a compromise.

As for the number of governors thsy should increase with the type of government, also galaxies with more PQ15 or better planets should get more governors, so a small galaxy with a total of about 25 PQ15 or better planets would have less governors than a massive galaxy with 300 PQ15 or better planets. I regard ALL planets as mine, even if aliens are there now, they won't be there tomorrow.

Agreed, but I was also referring to values that are set indirectly on other screens - right now, some other financial values are also shown on the screen with the sliders (e.g. maint). Both of our solutions add a level of complexity, so some new value outputs might be necessary.



No argument there. Any other solutions should make sure that feature's kept, though.



I just want the ability - I don't want to be forced to do it. For example, if you've got a planet with super-cool shipyards, you might want it to keep churning warships 100% while the rest of your empire does other stuff. With my model, to do this, you'd have to adjust empire-wide spending, and there's no way to say "this planet go 100% military, this planet go 20% military" - it's all divided equally. (But instead of having 1 super-warship planet (100% warship) and five constructor-spawners (20% spending), you could have one 100% warship planet and one 100% constructor planet. Your method would let people have generic governors, and add special ones on critical planets like this one if they wanted to, at the cost of having less flexibility with their other planets.

e.g. 20 planets, 5 govs (using your idea). You could have:
A) 5 govs running 4 planets each,
4 govs running 1 planet each, 1 gov running 16 planets,

or anything in between.

(Just out of curiosity - how many governors would you picture for a Federation govt in those examples you mentioned - 25 good planets, and 300 good planets?)



Peace Phoenix has it dead on:

"MOO ... MOO ... MOO ... "

(Well, I assume he meant MOO3, but saying it exactly three times makes it clear that's what he meant )

I don't think users should have to read through profit and loss statements every turn, and have to work out huge calculations in their head (or, heaven forbid, alt-tab out to calculator just to play a friggin game...). It's a game, not an economic simulator. But they have to understand the basics of the system - "If I push this, that happens."




Agreed. I'd just like to hear from some others on which of those points they feel is most important, and which ones they don't really care about. Of course, if I've forgotten something important on that list, anyone can feel free to add it

[edit: aaaaah! the quotes! the quotes!]
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The Quack


I saw that, it were 'orrible.


Not sure, I think this would require a bit of play testing, but smaller empires should have more govs per PQ15+ so maybe 4 govs for the small one and as many as 16 or even 20 for the humungous one


That's what you think!

I've always felt some of these style of games start off fun but end up more like an accountancy exam than a game. (CariElf - I'm not refering to GalCiv here!)

You are right .

Hmm... an economic simulator would be nice for testing potential gov't treasurers and finance ministers...

but I'd rather take a game home, thank you very much. LOL

Btw, I just thought of another thing for the list:

5 - AI implications. The AI must be able to use the same system as the player (or, perhaps, a slightly different one for efficiency's sake). It shouldn't have any advantage or disadvantage over human players because of this (beyond having a calculator in its brain, of course, but it always had that).

If the AI has to be totally reworked to use a new spending system, that system has a snowball's chance in hell of getting put into the game.

the separate governer sliders would make the game more efficinet as you have pointed out, but could you image a whole planet packed with people only building ships and having no other industry and doing no research? Maybe in a imperial government, but not in a deomcracy where people have free choice. Hoever in the game all governemts are really a empire, i mean who still rules when they aren't elected? If the senators knew you wouldn't leave office why would they vote against your party and penalize the population.

In conclusion i like the idea despite my above run on sentences, and anything that eliminates waste without added more micromanagement is fine with me.

Dirt Craver

Well, the way I figure it, there's always other invisible jobs on every planet (farms, schools, etc), emperors just don't have to worry about them. The only jobs we have to assign are the three "large-scale" jobs (ship building, infrastructure, research). For these jobs, it's fine to have the government say, "Right, we'll build ships here, and only ships." After all, in countries nowadays, there's no obligation for the gov't to set up research labs in every single backwater town. Private companies can do it, of course, and good luck to them.

Um... just imagine that people are migrating behind the scenes. If you set up a shipyard planet, all the scientist and bricklayer wannabees move away and a bunch of ship-builders move in, eager for work. If you set up 100% military on every planet, a few people might be unhappy to work there, but they'll still choose this job over the invisible ones (the fringe benefits are better )

A valid point, but not too hard to overcome, the most simple way to program this would for the AI to have a library of governors from which it could choose the best for any given situation.


No, but the way things are at the moment you can have an entire empire 'just building ships and having no other industry and doing no research'. Is that more probable?

The planetary Governor sliders idea might be a possible solution for the problem of local waste of resources, when no production is taking place, to some extent but for it to become a truly efficient tool then a "distribution network of Funds" for each Governor would be required from the ruling governing body. We call it transfer payments in our country. Not all member(provinces in this case) are treated equally when it come to funding (taxes collected from the whole for distribution to the many) from on High.

Taking this sort of model and expanding it to a planetary based system would require more than just the two levels of gov't the games provides, thus further moving towards the MOO3 syndrome of spreadsheet mayhem.

An example would be:

If the generated taxes on one planet(A) are exponentially greater than on another(B), a newly acquired one with little upgrading done yet, it would seem only reasonable that the planet generating solid revenue for the empire month in and month out should benefit from these accordingly.

Well the only way to allow this would be to have the Gov’t distribute funding based on “some criteria” depending on the times, War/Peace/Unrest.

This would means that until planet(A) and (B) both reach the same or maximum performance output (seen as tax revenues vs. expenditures) more money should be invested(sent to) the better producers to further allow them to provide continued maximum output of taxes( or products) that are needed to run the big picture.

So if I can’t give a local governor added funding for his special projects (my War machine, or research etc.) than having the distribution model extended to the local governor(well your measly cut is always the same) serves no real purpose. Waste is still generated by the planet in question.

A sub space call from the President to Gov. Jones.

“Yes Bill, I understand completely. You are trying to fill your Battleship quota as requested but your morale is in the tank because you don’t have extra funds for social programs currently!. Well Bill, my hands are tied. I would love to send you more funding but the law states everyone gets a fair share. Yes even the planets that are sure to fall first when the impending war with the Arceans breaks out. Yes Bill! Why do you think we have you building bloody Battleships for?” Click. “Stupid Governors”

The taxation gathered from most planets does not cover their spending, trade subsidises all the planets anyway.

What's needed here (You Americans are going to love this) is a form of communisum, viz: "From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs"

Now I'm off to hide under a rock or something.

Wait a minute. I think it might be better said that most planets(whatever % fits) do produce more taxes than expenditures or there would be no surplus.
Trade become almost a burden to carry and will not compensate for the loss of it when war breaks out and Trade funding vanishes. Trade is wonderful if mantained long term, but dependancy on it can cripple a Civ rather quickly when lost at a bad time.

Actually, at least as I read it, Trade does do that, but usually (for maximum effect) it happens between those that 'have' and those that 'have'. Those that 'don't' do not factor in the Trade gambit.

Still a poor use a financial resources when the money could be better served if the player could assign distribution 'without equity' and let the local Governor distribute.


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Apologies... OTP. Hey John.. Drop by our thread.

Now back to your regular programming.

Will do Damoose.

Hey, I'm new to this board, so I don't know if people will be annoyed by reviving a post that's been dead for a month, but what if each planet had a "convert all spending from...to..." button? That way, you have a setting for the whole empire, but individual planets can funnel social production into military, or vice versa. It isn't too much micromanagement, because it would only apply to a few extreme cases where you wanted 0% of one kind of production. This could also take a 10% penalty or something, because of reduced efficiency for going against empire standards or something, though that might make it difficult to calculate total spending.

Hi Vroomfondel, welcome on board. I don't think that anyone gets annoyed when you post in an old threat.

Generally all people are very kind here. Sometimes it heats up a bit but no heat no fun

This issue was discussed for a long time now and CariElf told us that they do not plan to change it for GC (:( but they consider a change for GC2.

In the original GC for OS/2 you do not spend money when you do not build anything. Some people complained that this is not realistic. Thus Stardock implemented the other extreme: now you loose all the money :notsure:

But this is not realistic as well. I hope in GC2 it will be something in between 50:50 or 80:20.

I would prefer this simple solution to any others which would add additional micro management to the game (I tent to play with many planets and micro management is very seductive to me. Thus additional possibilities for micro management would slow down my games significantly )

It would be a minor code change but a major balance change. When the AI still builds all these fruitless projects the aliens would have a big disadvantage Maybe we could convince Frogboy to consider it for AP :notsure:

Enjoy the game, it's great.

I know this is a old thread, but


After playing some games with a very short building queues for governor, I was wondering if it wasn't possible (for GC2 for eaxmple) to have 2 special improvements. One will allows to redirect, on a planet, social spending to military spending. It could be named "navy funding". The other will redirect social spending to research spending. It could be named "research funding". The redirection will work when the special improvement is in construction. And since it will redirect social spending, it will never be finished.

If this special improvements could be placed at the end of a governor queue, it could be nice: we will have a militar governor and a research governor.

These special improvements should work like the nothing choice: when a governor (used on the planet) has something added to the queue, the special improvement is canceled and the added thing is build on the planet.

Sure, with a such behavior, these special improvements could only be at the end of a governor queue.

And it will surely help the AI to produce more ships when they have finished building everything on their planets.