I write this piece with the avowed goal that Stardock realizes that wasting social production breaks the economy. I will go at some length to try and do that. So far the official response from Stardock has been: we can’t do it, otherwise the income and expense report is wrong as new upgrades come along. I propose a (IMO better) solution to this problem: TURN OFF AUTO-UPGRADE BY DEFAULT. That’s it. No more no less. People who activate it manually will know what it does and "suffer" the consequences.
If Stardock you won’t fix it in the main release stream, then please, please, please, I’m begging on both knees for you to at least let out a patch that will change the behaviour so that non-used hammers are not wasted. If it’s at all possible to mod some data file somewhere that will do this, please let us know (I don’t think so it since it’s behaviour were talking about, not data). You may think I’m crazy to beg like this, I hope my explanation later on makes sense to you. I specifically don’t care if the modded game can’t submit score in Metaverse, etc.
BTW I don’t think I’m over-reacting and I’ll try to explain why here. When I say the game is broken, I don’t mean that it can’t be played or that you can’t have fun for a while. On the contrary, I’ve been doing so for the past few days. What I mean is that a large part of the strategic element of the game is broken (i.e. the economy) - and that basically means the game itself is broken when you’re talking about a strategy game. Obviously, whether I’m over-reacting or not is largely a matter of opinion… After a few days getting comfortable with the various aspect of the game I delved a little deeper to optimise my strategy and found this monstrosity of wasted resources. That killed my fun then and there. Note that "optimising" here doesn’t mean: "knowing all the formulas in detail"; it means "understanding the relationship between concepts (money, production, morale, etc.) to plan accordingly". So please don’t dismiss this as "another min-maxer going overboard".
Don’t get me wrong: I WANT to love this game. I really do. The fact that I’m writing this now is proof enough. If I didn’t care, I would have moved to something else already. I love many things about the game (in fact nearly everything) and I think developers have put a lot of really nice touches. People have complained about the UI, the exploits, etc., but I honestly think that’s not that big of a deal. (The fact that I don’t care about Metaverse scores is the reason behind this; other players wanting to rank themselves will obviously have a different opinion.)
To explain why wasting hammers is bad, consider the following example. It’s a bit contrived, but you’ll get the idea.
-You have 6 planets.
-Five of them are in a corner/behind/sharing a border with allies and each have an initial colony module (whatever it’s called) producing 12 mp. You want to produce defense ships on these planets.
-One of them is at an enemy’s border. You want to produce attack ships there, lots of them.
-So, you build (there) many factories to crank the ships as fast as possible. You end up with 140 mp on that planet and the rest of your planets have a total of 60 mp.
-Suppose you have 200 bc available to spend.
-You want to allocate social/military production 50-50. You do so with the slider and set the manufacturing output to have a 0 net profit.
How is the money allocated?
-The factory planet ends up with 140 bc/mp: 70 shields and 70 hammers.
-The other planets share the remaining 60 bc/mp. Each one of them gets 6 hammers and 6 shields.
What happens if the factory planet has no more social projects to build (this will happen quite fast given the speed at which it builds them in the first place)? The hammers are wasted. This means that 70 bc are wasted. A little less given that you can set the focus to military, but given the conversion loss and the fact that not all the hammers can be converted, a lot is still wasted. Say, 50 bc.
Let this sink in: with a total budget of 200 bc, 50 bc are wasted. 25% of your empire income goes to waste (less if you consider maintenance, but you get the gist). This is particularly painful considering that each one of your factory-less planets only get 12 shields and hammers in total. Would they get the wasted bc, they would have almost 100% more resources and finish projects in half the time.
Ok, but it makes sense, no? I mean, the workers and mortgages must still be paid while the factory floor is empty, right? Not so, given that the extra production capacity could be fully used to build ships. In fact, that’s precisely what would happen if the social production slider were set to 0%.
This in itself is bad, but not game-breaking bad. What is game breaking is the combined hammer wasting and the way the sliders work. Building factories doesn’t strictly mean: "produce more here". It means that, yes, but it also, more subtly (and more importantly) means: "allocate a larger % of the money spent on production here." I may not be a good player, but I’ve found that having enough production capacity to eat through your income is not hard. It’s actually very easy to have excess production capacity. Building a few factories in a row on a few planets will usually change the situation from excess income to excess production. So, the latter meaning is actually more important in games than the former.
So what if in our example above we actually wanted to crank up social production on the factory-less planets? We could build factories there too. One disadvantage is that additional slots are now taken on the planet. Moreover, this wouldn’t bring more production capacity (mp) per se (since we wouldn’t get more cash), but the allocation percentages would change so that less mp would be wasted and more would be put to actual use. Another way to accomplish the same would be to demolish some factories on the factory planet, thus rendering it less apt at building ships. If you had built ship-improving projects there (like hyperion shipyard), and thus wanted most of your fleets to come from that planet, though luck.
So, factories are not a way to increase production, but a way to change the % of allocated resources.
When you realize that, you have two choices:
1. You don’t bother about vast inefficiencies in your empire and take on far less of a challenge than would otherwise be possible because of the waste.
2. You micro-manage you factories and the focus of your planets to minimize the waste (it’s not possible to completely eliminate it, but you can minimize it).
Most people playing TBS games will not naturally fall in category #1, IMNSHO. This is so simply by virtue of the fact that a strategy game is, by definition, a kind of puzzle where you try to optimize/maximize something. How far you go in that maximizing is obviously a matter of personal taste, but if there is nothing to optimize, it’s simply not a strategy game (this holds from chess to warcraft). People looking for a game not involving thinking/planning/optimizing will typically not play a 4x game.
But once you understand these concepts about factories and waste, you can optimize it right? Ah! So there’s your strategy after all, no?
No. Some optimizing is simply too tedious/boring/unbelievable to be fun. And that is really the heart of the matter and what I’ve been aiming to all those lines. When I play GalCiv (or any 4x games), I want to be a galactic emperor mustering forces against other emperors. I want to believe it. Building and scrapping factories in order to change various production percentages is unbelievable: I have to suspend belief. I’m not an emperor building a great civilization anymore: I’m a gamer in front of his PC working around serious design issues. I’m so obtuse that I find a game requiring such belief suspension is just not fun for me. The fact that the AI works under the same conditions doesn’t alleviate the issue for me, sorry.
…
This is pretty much all I can say to make my case. If this is not enough, nothing I say will be and I’ll give up on the game. However, I still hope Stardock will fix it. They can’t NOT do it! It would be such a shame to let a simple matter like that ruin an otherwise great game.
Again, the solution is extremely simple:
-Don’t waste bc on non-used hammers.
-Optional: Disable auto-upgrade by default (allowing players to set it back on)
Again, at least please offer a patch even if it’s not in the main release development stream.
*** If there is anything wrong in the above example and if my understanding of the game is wrong, by all means let me know. I would like nothing more than be proved wrong and be shown that my example is not possible / not as bad as I think.
