The Dreaded Social Production Bonus

Poll: Are you resigned to it?

from GalCiv2 Forums
It's widely known by now that bonuses to social production have no effect. So it's no use playing the Industrialist party, for example, or taking social production bonuses during race creation, or building galactic wonders that increase social production. There's also the matter of the population growth cap; I played my first game with the huge pop.growth bonus (the one that's labelled "Don't ask") and in the process I unwittingly flushed most of my custom race design points down the toilet. But now I know.

So let's have a show of hands:

A) Stardock is going to fix these things. I'm trying not to get too used to the game as it is, because I'll have to radically adjust my strategies once the players can build and grow faster.

B) This is the way the game works, and this is the way it's going to stay. I'm getting used to it and learning to play as well as I can. Watch me ignore all the techs and abilities that give bonuses to production and population, sucker!

Edit: it occurs to me that there's an important third possibility:
C) The game's fun now, so I'm playing it now. It'll still be fun if it changes, and I'll get used to the change if it comes. What are you so worked up about?
20,214 views 15 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Option A. History tells us that Stardock is always on the ball, unlike some other developers (cough Moo3 cough).

The outcome is assured.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Stardock will fix it. I have immense faith in this company.

That said, option C. It's fun now, it'll be even more fun after it's fixed .Where's the catch?
Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top

A) It's going to get fixed.

 

BUT you should enjoy it as it is and think of it as a new wrinkle in strategy when it does.

The game is going to continue to evolve over time. So your strategy today will change over time. 

Otherwise, the game would be boring in a couple months.

Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
The catch for me is that I'm leery at the prospect of getting myself all accustomed to a style of play that will (at some indeterminate time in the future) no longer be viable. At this moment for example, a heavily militaristic approach to industry is ideal, because you can rack up all those bonuses to military production and crank out ships like there's no tomorrow. A more domestic approach that focuses on constantly upgrading your ecomomic, research and influence buildings will get you killed because production is just too slow and there's no way to accelerate it. The only way to play a "builder" strategy is to use those military production points to churn out constructors and build a ton of economic starbases.
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
Given the serious nature of this bug, I'd expect it to be fixed very quickly, who knows- it might even be fixed by Tuesday.

SD is pretty good about getting the critical flaws fixed fairly quickly.
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
Hi, Frogboy. Thanks for posting; it's really good to hear it from on high. Now we can all stop bugging you about it!

Your comment is interesting too; it reminds me of collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering. The reason they're constantly introducing new card sets (and phasing out old ones) is to make sure the game evolves and stays interesting over time. And since people are still playing M:tG after over twelve years, it would seem that they're on to something. Yet other games like Chess and Go have remained virtually unchanged for centuries (though both have gone through the occasional evolution during that time) and people are still playing those.

I wonder if GC2 would be better served by the Magic approach or the Go approach? Time will tell, no doubt. But either way, I expect to get a lot of enjoyment out of this game. Thank you for creating it!

-Jonathan
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
So, how exactly do these things happen in the first place? Issues of this magnitude are akin to walking out of the receiving transporter node without your unmentionables.
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
With M:tG, I thought it was to make sure the suckers kept buying cards...

Then again, CCG's have a higher profit margin then making chess/go sets.

As for GC2, the first thing I'd want to see is the bugs ironed out, which will happen. In fact, part of the reason the game seems buggy now is because of the popularity of it- the more people playing, the quicker bugs will be discovered. I guess it just means more OT for Stardock (you guys still working OT or back to the normal schedule- I know it was mentioned you're one of the few dev companies that employees work a 40 hr week on average)
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
Bradylama,
This is only speculation, but bugs like this are usually a result of something working just fine in the past, but then getting accidentally messed up right at the end.
A video game is a lot like a car. There's a ton of moving parts, and changing one part often can have a knock on effect further down the line. It's very very possible that in fixing one thing, you might accidentally change something that breaks something else. That's why games get intense periods of testing before release.

Now couple that with the fact that Stardock is a comparitively tiny, tiny company and you really don't have a ton of people that are testing. Even big companies miss things before ship date given the insanely quick development cycles present in this industry now.

So things are going to slip through. There's no doubt in my mind social production worked at one point in time, but then some piece of code got overwritten or changed or .... in the process of fixing something else that put it out of commission. It's not like they went through the trouble of adding all of these techs in the game that affect social production and just never bothered to add the code to support it. heh

As things are identified, they'll get fixed. Have no fear. It might take some time, because you want to be sure that the new fix doesn't create any new problems somewhere else, but things will steadily get more and more refined and more and more polished.

Given the fact that good strategy games are played for years, a few weeks isn't going to make that much difference in the grand scheme of things.

In the meantime, i'll raise my hand for c), it's still fun to play, just work around the boggled social prod bonuses. (research is a bit screwy too, imho, but we'll wait to see)
Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
Frogboy,

"you should enjoy it as it is and think of it as a new wrinkle in strategy when it does."

With all due respect, as a programmer and game player, I will not accept that the way social production bonuses are working as of right now is a /feature/ and not a /bug/.

Evolving is one thing, but this is just broken. While we all love your game... I'm not happy, nor expected to be, with anyone else's programs when they don't work. I'd appreciate it if Stardock would not act like serious gameplay / metagame issues aren't 'so bad' while you're busy fixing how long it takes people to alt-tab and how long games take to load. I would wait for 10 minutes for the game to load so long as it did was it was supposed to.

Thank you.
Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top
Research bonuses don't work either (they give only 1/2 of what they should). But they know about that too.
Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top
oh get a grip aecian. the number of people who care about social production ability not doing what it doesn't do is about the same as the number of people who cared that Pirates didn't let you trade Tobacco. what's important to you isn't important to everyone else automatically.

you sound like the type of guy who was on the civ4 forums screaming that automated workers would undo what the player had built on their land while tens of thousands of players couldn't even play it because it didn't run on their ati cards. get some perspective.
Reply #13 from Stardock Forums Top
Research bonuses don't work either (they give only 1/2 of what they should). But they know about that too.

Well, you get FREE research while you PAY for using your military bonus. So I wouldn't say it doesn't work. More you get 1/6 of the bonus in paid research. I can hapilly live with that. Is your general spending slider always set at 100% ?
Reply #14 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Is your general spending slider always set at 100% ?


Yes. If it says you're getting a 50% bonus you should get what it says, not a 25% bonus with 1/6 of that free. That's just dumb and I'm sure it's not intended.
Reply #15 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Guys, it doesn't matter how important it is to each of us individually or whether we get a different "nice" effect... it's broken, so it should be fixed. And the social production stuff affects every planet in every game and makes a whole line of bonuses worthless so I'd say it's a pretty serious bug. Same with research, of course.
The number of people not being able to play is pretty low (look at other forums after release... this here is nothing in comparison), but of course that doesn't mean Stardock shouldn't do everything to make it possible for those people to be able to play. I agree with Aecian, though, that load times or alt-tabbing do not belong in this category.
I guess it wasn't a matter of deciding "do we fix alt-tabbing or social production bonus", though, so I don't mind. As long as all this stuff does get fixed eventually.