Economic Fix idea that I'd like to see as the core of the 2nd Expansion Pack.

I've been complaining about things, and well, given what I saw somewhere else about Brad's original idea for GalCiv3, I think I can suggest an idea finally.   I'm saying 2nd XP because the 1st is in development, and resources are limited.   Idea for this comes a bit from Endless Legend

 

You would have five pops.  Every time you gain 1 pop point (1 billion people in current parlance, you would place them in one of five population groups)  Each time you gain a pop, you will have a popup to pick what type of pop (unless you want the governor to pick for you)

 

Farmers: increase overall population gain.  Provide a inefficient amount of base research/wealth/manufacturing if more farmers than farms.  Can be converted to other pops without penalty.  

Soldiers: Spent on invasion.   Soldiering has an overall quality.  Converting other pops to soldiers causes both a morale and quality penalty.  Drengin pops do not receive this penalty (via a racial trait)


Workers/Researchers/Servicers; handle manufacturing/research/wealth.   Converting a pop to one of these pops causes a minor morale and efficiency penalty.   Coercive trait would remove the morale penalty.   Ideology/buildings can reduce the length of the efficiency penalty

colony ships and transports can move pop from one planet to another.  Transports would be required to invade planets. 

Buildings: Buildings would improve the effeciency of an individual pop.  Capitals/major buildings would provide "free" base pop.  (an elerium research building might provide +1 free researcher at full efficiency)- excess of a given pop without the infrastructure will start providing diminishing returns.  Higher level buildings can service more of a given pop. (encourages building tall)  

 

Morale buildings improve morale which improves efficiency and pop growth

Starbases provide global efficiency bonuses

 

Such a system could also provide immigrant/captured pops, which could be handled however Stardock thinks best.  In addition, you could also crib from Alpha Centauri and have certain techs for certain races unlock "superior" pops (I could see this for Altarians especially)

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Reply #1 Top

I enjoy complex games but complexity for the sake of complexity just adds tedium.  Adding even more micro to the planets when you already have all the tile management and juggling seems excessive to me.  In my current game my planets have 20b+ pops and if I had to fiddle with them every time they gained a pop I'd go even more insane.

 

I *would* like to see an economic overhaul in this game and was hoping it would be less wonky than GC2 but thus far that hasn't really happened.

 

IMO the global sliders/wheels should have little impact, and if there is any ability to wheel/focus/whatever per planet it should have very little impact and/or be woefully inefficient (to say, pull production out of farms or labs for ex).

 

In this game where the planets have tiles and a big part of planet development is managing those tiles and trying to work out adjacency optimizations, then what you actually BUILD on the planets should dictate what they do.  If you build 20 markets on a planet, it should be a money world and setting a global/local slider shouldn't magically make it more productive or produce research.

 

In GC you could build all factories or all labs and then use sliders to shift around with minimal efficiency loss.  GC3 isn't as woefully bad for this but I still think there's too much emphasis on the effect of global sliders and/or local focuses when the main thing that should matter is what you're build on the planets.

 

The population thing wouldn't really matter as much then, because obviously if you have a world full of factories, the population needs to be workers - setting all your population to be scientists wouldn't make much sense when they have nowhere to do science.  The tiles would govern what "jobs" the populace has available.

Reply #2 Top

Quoting Voqar, reply 1

In this game where the planets have tiles and a big part of planet development is managing those tiles and trying to work out adjacency optimizations, then what you actually BUILD on the planets should dictate what they do.  If you build 20 markets on a planet, it should be a money world and setting a global/local slider shouldn't magically make it more productive or produce research.

 

In GC you could build all factories or all labs and then use sliders to shift around with minimal efficiency loss.  GC3 isn't as woefully bad for this but I still think there's too much emphasis on the effect of global sliders and/or local focuses when the main thing that should matter is what you're build on the planets.

 

The population thing wouldn't really matter as much then, because obviously if you have a world full of factories, the population needs to be workers - setting all your population to be scientists wouldn't make much sense when they have nowhere to do science.  The tiles would govern what "jobs" the populace has available.

 

A simple way to get something like this is if you had every factory/lab/market generate a small flat amount of resource in addition to the % bonus. Like, there's an 'invisible', fixed part of the population who will keep working in the factory, even if you direct the population away from industry. 

 

You could even have it reduce production by the same amount as the flat bonus - so, a factory gives -1 production but +1 manu and +15% manu. There's now 1 production worth of workers permanently assigned to the factory until you knock it down. You can 'overstaff' it by putting more workers into industry, but you can't remove everyone and send them off to play at being scientists.

 

Not sure what the game would do if production turned negative, mind - though hopefully, it's pass the negative along to the rest of the production cycle, so you had to decide where the unemployment was worst.