GalCiv III Economy
GalCiv2 Forums
seeing how much i enjoyed the gal civ three tactical battling thread, and how weird, confusing, complicated and unfun the gal civ 2 economy is generally thought to be, i thought i'd gather peoples thoughts over how they do the economy for gal civ 3 if they were starting from scratch.
personally, i think the whole concept of production (for buildings and ships) is a pointless middleman. currently tracking the pennies as they move through the game's economy is a horribly arcane mess of sliders and percentage bonuses that allows players who are starting out to massively cripple themselves by the midgame. it also makes the best economy in the game the all factories approach (which is ridiculous) and it is impossible for the AI to deal with it effectively.
so why pay for production and then use that to build stuff, when you could just pay for stuff with cash in firstplace?
i'm going to go off on my own rant here. feel free to respond to it, or just post your own ideas on ho you'd design the gal civ 3 economy.
most science fiction authors assume the colonisation of space would be driven by the same forces which colonised the americas, and i think that's a good place to start. essentially, high taxation and overcrowding on earth would drive people out to new worlds where there were more opportunities, and the population of earth would start to outstrip earth's limits, driving companies and governments to mine asteroids
the best economy i have seen in a tbs (in terms of combining how societies actually work with fun gameplay) is actually in the total war games. cities (colonies in gal civ 3) are taxed independently and the amount of money they make is largely proportional to their population. taxation allows higher incomes but reduces population growth and moral. population growth is one of the most important parts of the game. a list of factors including taxation, base quality of the given location, overcrowding, infrastructure etc are all crossed off against other to produce either positive or negative population growth.
buildings are bought up front but cost no maintenance. in total war they allow the recrtuitment of better troops. in gal civ they would reduce the construction time of troops built there to practical levels.
the only outgoings in the game are military maintenance, research spending (which would be the only slider left in the game, and work as a simple % of max potential spending as the production slider does now) and what the player chooses to spend on buying ship and buildings on a turn by turn basis. as all income is local and all expenses are central, the pennies are a lot easier to track.
the elimination of production and building maintenance makes the game a lot more fun because it makes it a lot more difficult for the player to get in the red. but it would also allow us to represent all the same kind of gameplay decisions and scenarios in the game already. the game is more fun because choosing between one building or another, or one planet or another is not about trying to work out what will make a profit and what will not, but choosing which building will make the most profit, so the player can lie back and enjoy the game because all his decisions will be positive ones. building the wrong building will never reduce your income, just improve it less.
what makes the game challenging is resources. while population = income and this should be the most important part of the economy, resources. resources are what space games are all about. it is because of resources that you have cloud city in star wars (they were mining the planet for gas). in gal civ 2, resources are just floating gems in space that give you production bonuses, which is lame. it's stuff like this that makes you feel you are in space.
while population = income and this should remain the most important part of the game economy, resources allow a faction to work efficiently. essentially, say the game had three resources and every planet, asteroid or dyson sphere produced a certain amount of the three (say, energy, minerals and organics). divide your civ production by population and see how the ratio compares to the value defined as optimal by the game. if if was lower, then building things (centrally) becomes more expensive. you don't have to earn and spend resources like in AOE, you just have an indicator at the top of the screen that supply is either good or poor. if you have an excess you can start trade routes to another civ and sell a given amount for cash. you can even trade in more than you need, then trade on to other civs (and this is how the mercantile side of the economy would work, as opposed to population based side).
so the ideal empire ends up being a mixture of heavily populated planets like the homeworld which bring in lots of money and build the ships, and smaller planets/asteroids/moons/dyson spheres that bring in less money due to their lower population, but contribute to the economy by bringing in extra resources and keeping costs down. but crucially, every planet and building is a positive asset instead of a drain. this also improves the game because few planets if any will ever be as habitable (and thus heavily populated as the homeworld), so the a civ with twice as many planets is not twice as powerful.
