Running a galactic civilization

Sounds interesting, can't wait to see more.

Question, any changes planned for the Large Empire Penalty?

Thanks for this clarification and look into the future, frogboy.

This post in combination with answer #7 in this thread "Why getting rid of the wheel won't fix the problem." really put's my mind to ease. Now I'm not afraid anymore that the death of the planetary wheel is just a cheap way out, but indeed a well thought through decision and hopefully a step towards an even better game. Also I'm glad to hear, that your thoughts about what is missing in GalCiv3 have generally the same direction as mine. I'm especially glad you mentioned the missing immersion stuff like stats etc.

Also thanks for acknowledging the casual gamers, because I consider myself to be one.

I'm surprised to hear that custom races don't get played a lot. I usually play at least one game with each civ and then create a custom civ to pay with. Customisation is so important in GalCiv and we want more. Perhaps allowing complete customisation ( specifying everything from colours to combinations of ship parts) will encourage people to create more custom races?

EDIT: I like the senator idea: if you have 100 planets you can ask a sector with 5-10 planets to focus on manufacturing and another sector on research, etc.

A few points in retort:

The trick with this is to make the power of specialization less impressive. Currently, because every T1 factory is another 25% manu output, heavy specialization is massively more powerful than non-specializing. Every buff is two and a half times as powerful on a specialized world, but that also means every nerf is two and a half times more effective on specialized planets. If you reduce factory output from buildings by 10%/level, then that's anything upto 200% of raw production or more shaved off a manu-specialized world's final output. On a non-specialized world, we're looking more like 60-100% of output. Reducing the difference is important, but the way to go about it is with balance changes targeted at top-end bonuses.

This is a simple balance issue, not a mechanical one. For specialization and non-specialization to be more equal, you just need to trim the bonuses by 50% or so. Artifacts give 10% per level of starbase module! 2% is more than enough. Over and over again, there's exponential increases where linear will do. If you want the economy to balance, you just need a ratio between 'most productive' and 'least productive'. Pick it, and everything else falls into place. Non-specializatrion becomes less awful automatically, because while it only gives a % of the output of the normal world, the absolute difference is never more than 100 output. The way to do that is a substantial nerf to adjacency (which is OP as hell), building output, and general civ-wide bonuses - no one thing should EVER increase my whole civ's output by as much as a single T1 factory. Once again, if we just start working with sensible numbers - numbers where '10' is kind of a big deal - there's nothing actually inherently wrong with the system as it stands now.

[quote]Planetary management: The future = you are the leader of a civilization, not a mayor[/quote]

Yes, I am. But as such, I am the chief executive. I can fire governors at will and assume sole command over planets as I wish. If I want my personal demesne to be 50 planets, who's to stop me? Automation ought to be a choice  I will command as many planets as I can directly, and only once I can handle no more will I let my underlings have a chance at power. Yes, this is the logic of the dictator. You appointed me dictator, though

We all want the capacity to automate; that goes without saying. I would love to be able to dump planet 97b on my sister's fifth son's wife's second cousin. But I don't want him running anything important; those belong to ME. A bureaucracy in a 4X should support me. It should not dictate to me what I can and cannot do. The player wants to be Louis the XIV, not the impotent emperor of China, issuing orders that are scuppered by my bumbling mandarins.

Sounds marvelous, as long as we retain overall control. You know a game which simulated a bureaucratic layer causing problems through UI changes? MOO3. I personally really liked MOO3, but most people didn't. It mostly played itself; the governors were the ones running the show and you made changes and vaguely hoped that they were paying attention to you. Layers of bureaucracy which help ought, but which I can intervene in and fix when the AI inevitably screws up are good. Opaque administrative dead-ends which arbitrarily refuse to use resources sensibly aren't.

This would have more impact if it weren't for those same players, who play default Terrans on Normal difficulty, keeping popping up on the forum to say they've never really played a 4X before, but they just defeated the AI on Genius on their second go and that the game is no challenge (https://forums.galciv3.com/470138/page/5/#3585010 ; https://forums.galciv3.com/470897/page/1/#3585080). The hardcore edge amongst us don't expect you to counter Marigoldran's average play style, because playing like that is outright absurd; it's gaming the system to an insane degree. It's the sort of play style we expect to be required to defeat the outright-cheating AI on Godlike; you're not supposed to deal with that; that's how we have to do it if we're playing at the very edge, the top 1% of players. The kind of play that will always win is not the type of play we expect you to mitigate against.

That said. We also recognize that the AI will not play well until it achieves equal specialization with the player.The game cannot be balanced properly with one player specializing when the others aren't. The specializer will always have the advantage. But that is, ultimately, one step on the path to progressing to hardcore play. In Civ, you learn to start actually paying attention to what your population are doing on the step from normal to one-up-from-normal. Beating the AI on that level required it. Yes, this level also saw off 80% of the playerbase; but they knew it was there and they knew that, if they could only be bothered to do the extra micro, they could beat it. It gives a natural progression in learning the mechanics to a deeper level.

The human is better at every individual thing than the AI. The AI's advantage is that it can do EVERY individual thing every turn, where as most players won't do that. Most people will pick a set number of worlds to actually look after - probably less than ten for most players, almost always including the capital - and set up reasonably competent automation for the rest. This is how people play a 4X. They pay a lot of attention to X number of cities/colonies/whatever... and then there's some others which essentially produce money and very occasionally a goodie pops out. The concentrated cities are almost always the first 4 or 5 they have; everything else is basically unimportant support, if it exists at all (New players of Civ, for example, rarely have more than 6 cities in their first few games, and build very few workers). 

I'd suggest what would work well would be a semi-limited AI that had the ability to manage a number of planets entirely (full independent wheel) and then relies on global settings. So, say the Gifted AI has a 'Demesne' rating of 20, he can look after 20 planets 'properly' and then for everywhere else just leaves them at civ-wide levels; Genius manages 50 planets directly, Godlike always manages ALL planets directly and min-maxes them every turn (yes, there's a performance impact; guys playing at this level don't care. They'll play for two turns a week quite happily and still be playing the same game in 2018 as long as it's still challenging). This would simulate the human's attention span - so the difficulty matched how long you were spending micromanaging worlds. Beating the AI becomes a matter of 'just enough' micro, which ultimately it always does.

tyvm for the insight Brad, knowing that the opt-in 1.3governors were already changing to -something- but nit even an inkling about how that Was to happen left too large of a cloud to let me maintain any kind of enthusiasm towards making mods that may or may not even be a tiny bit functional/entirely superseded/etc.

are we likely to see any of the senator type changes you talk about _starting_ when/by the time 1.3 goes from opt-in to released?

I'm not much concerned about senators being hard coded rather than xml alterable, just writing the rudimentary Ai used by mobs in ancient muds or simple things like pong homework assignments in the past is far from easy in those trivial systems. I'm more concerned in the long run (as in not right now, but down the road) "will we be able to teach them x works like y now, ask me questions about this new world & watch this" when we mod low level stuff?

While I am opposed to removing the existing planetary management tools, I think that it is a very bad idea to leave the current tools in but have access to them locked behind an RNG roll. It's marginally better if I get to choose what kind of governor I want when I use whatever interface creates the governors, but "current system with more clicks" is not an improvement, and "current system with more clicks and lots of reloading the game to get the right governor" is far worse.

This sounds like you're planning to remove the player's ability to choose what improvements are placed where. There are too many potential tile combinations for weighting matrices or improvement templates to be a reasonable alternative to being able to choose where the improvements are placed as long as adjacency matters. On top of that, a weighting matrix or a template makes it sound as though I'd be reliant on the computer to place improvements for me, and the computer does not seem competent to do this. Having a template of 50% farms and 50% factories for a factory world might conceal the computer's poor ability to take advantage of adjacency to some degree (it'd at least not be building labs and markets to further screw up adjacency and reduce the manufacturing multiplier), but it's not going to make up for mostly taking the player out of the loop.

Besides which, I find laying out a planet's improvements to be one of the more enjoyable aspects of the game; I would be disappointed to see it go, and just creating a bunch of templates or weighting matrices and applying them through governors is unlikely to have the same appeal for me.

Even if all those things sounds very cool, i'm one who think that those feature a more suited for a Grand Strategy and not for a 4X Strategy GC3 is? In one of the threads you posted something like: "We want you to be Galactic Empire Rulers, not Mayors" them debating on per planet Production Wheel. But i never heard any of four "X" in 4X Strategy forbid you from microing you planets. Sure if done wrong, it really hurt the gameplay and we, ofc, don't need the level of planets (or cities) detalization like in Civilization series but in general it's nothing wrong to micro around. I, f.e., like how they reduced micro in Endless Space - star system instead of planets - you do manage improvements, but on larger scale.

If you really want to automate everything we already have a game like this - if i'm not mistaken it's Distant Worlds - build an awesome Empire that works like a clock in automation and stare at it for hours (and it being realtime only improve the overall experience). And if i'm not mistaken not everyone are fans of such gameplay.

And even if even manage to do make governors do a great job that player is left to play with? Right now other gameplay elements are well... lacking. I won't repeat those missing features again, because everybody know them already and you promised to add them later, but right now there is not much to do besides planets management, especially with AI who cannot build and use proper fleets. 

This is exactly what I am looking forward to.

Internal politics of GCIII is very bland so far and this looks extremely promising. Just add more in terms of empires´ instability (i.e. low approval = riots, separatist movement etc.) and you move the game on the entirely new level.

Even Napolen had to correct his military strategy because of "troubles" at home

ETA?

Sounds great , looking forward to seeing these ideas become a reality.

I don't post often , but I do read these forums. just wanted to say I enjoy the game

and it seems like it's only going to get better.

As much as I look forward to an AI that both has solid strategies and is adaptive, at this point, you have to walk before you can run.  I would much rather have a scripted AI that played the game competently than an adaptive AI that selected/shifted between weak strategies.  

Good AI is why I bought the game as an Elite Founder, I knew it would take time, but the current situation with the AI is a shock.  I spent a lot of time banging on about the Gal Civ II AI (well the Dark Avatar AI anyway) in the Distant Worlds Forums to encourage improvements there.  I never expected to look at the Distant Worlds AI as superior to Gal Civ!  The Distant Worlds AI isn't adaptive in any material way but with the AI Mod I can play against AI using my own research orders and basically my own ship designs including late game.  

I hope the AI becomes your competitive advantage once again.

We understand that Brad.  What I worry about is that this reads like almost all of the focus is on newbs ... why couldn't your vision be a game that is both well suited for newbs and also challenging for experienced players?  Please don't forget about us.

With respect to edge cases I don't reasonably expect you can deal with every edge case strategy that we come up with.  However, there are a few areas that could use some balance to make those edge cases less ridiculous without a lot of effort ... per posts from others ... and I had thought you mentioned balance was part of the 1.4 focus?

If you have, you should have made a better interface for first timers If you do not know what the hell is going on, you sure as hell don't want to screw up with customization at the start.

Say, you could have made some sort of "soft" customization for all races at the very start instead of a standard template for everyone, and with that I think more people would experiment with it later on. Think like the 3 choices you get at colonization of a planet. That would be a perfect way to introduce the average player to race customization. Give them like 3-4 questions with choices at the start, like production vs research vs gold etc. and they can pick what they like. (then disable it in the menu, or add some button to get to the detailed part)

Thank you for the post! This certainly clarified things.

So, from the game mechanics point-of-view, basically, "the planetary wheel" will be represented as "choice of governors and maybe adjusting them". I can live with that.

Provided your governor mechanics design is good, of course.

Instead of us all spending 100 pages in arguing about how the functional specification of the governors should be, I'd like to offer a goal based definition for a "good governor system": It lets me do interesting and fun stuff and gives me the illusion of control.

To that end, please note:

Don't hammer the player into a role. While the concept of "player is the head-of-state" is a good working assumption that's valid for most of the time, remember that people get bored if they are forced to wear the same hat for the entire game. As the game progresses I switch hats now and then. For a while I am the captain of an exploration vessel, or the admiral of a war fleet, or the engineer designing a new colony, or play some other role. This is fun and a big part of enjoying the game. This very flexibility allows you to write a story in your head as you go even if you don't explicitly notice it. Make sure you don't destroy this because it's the very strength of your game.

Pay attention to balance. However you change the game mechanics, don't kill choices. Any choice where one option dominates the others automatically kills that choice. While this is a global principle in design it applies especially strong to the governors if they are going to be a major and important part of the game. Choices related to the governors should matter and have implications to your strategy. Meaningless choices where you get the same thing in different clothes are pointless. Automatic choices where you always pick the best from a group are no choices at all. The aim should be: different but equally good if you play them differently.

Let the player fool around. Even with the governors. Preserve the illusion of control. No sane player is going to act out the roles of all of the 150 of his planetary governors but he very well might want to play pretend one now and then, especially with interesting planets for some value of "interesting". Denying this kills the illusion of control. Having the role assumption give outrageous benefits because of human ingenuity makes the choice of doing it a no choice. Having it make no difference at all makes it a pointless choice. The solution is to find a balance with the moving parts and to make the governors play the planetary specialization game well enough. Most of the current problems arise from compounding bonuses that are simply too big. If you nerf them to a reasonable level most of the incentive to control personally every planet goes away leaving only the "because it's fun" reason. Which you should leave. Exactly because it's fun. The fun part in turn guarantees that the player won't do it more than what's fun and produces the optimal result where the player can play with some planets but where he doesn't want to play with all of them. Which is the exact amount to preserve the illusion of control. He could do it all but he doesn't want to do it.

Wow, I'm also surprised to hear that more people don't play with/make custom races. Ever since I made my first custom race, that's the only one I play with now. I will continue to play this race for many more months to come. Once the game is basically fleshed out and relatively finalized, then I may start to playu around with some of the other stock ones or ones that I've downloaded from the forum when we were fist able to create them. But right now, my favorite mode to play is with an Immense sized map, 35-45 races, rare minors, AI still only on Gifted, and Conquest only victory. Keeps me playing for many hours...

Back to main topic, I was a little disappointed that the Planet Wheel is going away, now that I've gotten its' use down and like to play with it, but having read your post, Brad, I'm more inclined to agree with you and your direction and look forward to seeing what you guys come up with. Now get busy and stop posting on the forum and make it happen!

Side note on custom civs: keep in mind that many players make custom civs to play against, not necessarily with.

If you remove the production wheel, what will you replace it with?

I mean, I understand the idea of colony governors, but I'm curious how you'd give the player an equivalent level of agency over the overall production balance ...

The no. 1 mechanic for dealing with AI governors should be public executions of failed ones 

@OP - this is all good and well, but how much room can the tech tree have for entire new branches of progress?  As I see it while I'm rushing for hyperdrive plusses and terraforming and the 3rd tier of sci/ind buildings, I don't even have time to grab, like, weapons!  For the first 150 turns of each game I'm always "ripe for conquest".  Would Bob the governor make everything groovy again?

And a small point regarding custom races: the industrious / economical / curious bonuses are non-scaling.  They'd make a difference if the only thing one can build is basic factories.  When I'm up to industrial complex, and have > 300% bonus on every world (which is hopefully by turn 150), it won't matter if I'm Thalan, Iridian, Altarian or Yor.  Like, at all.  I don't know if anyone else's gotten that.  The way those bonuses need to be applied is, you have +10% racial advantage, good: that means a factory that would normally grant 45% to your base should be granting 49%; 10% in adjascency should become 11% - that's how you apply a racial bonus.

I gathered that the templates would be a choice to help with micro-management, but you would still have the option to place all improvements yourself.