redshirt4life

Join Date 05/2024

Multiplicative values needed

Every percent value in the game is addictive, but several are balanced as if they are multiplicative and end up being a fraction of the value advertised.

Let's take warrior for example. 10% more damage on all weapons. That's not a terrible for a civ that wants to be aggressive. But, reading this I'd expect it to be 10% of the final value, not an additional 10% added to a surprisingly large list of other percent bonuses.

Ultimately, a race with warrior isn't doing 10% more damage. As the game progresses this gets watered down to 5% or even lower. The additive value isn't giving the oomph I'd expect from an ability that's supposed to be defining a civs play style.

The economic trait "rich" is another example even more pronounced. You are not making 10-15% more income from this civ trait. It's more like...1%. There are a myriad of percent bonuses that this gets added onto, and ultimately the ability just isn't working as advertised.

Economic Starbases are another. The base production of a planet is not very high. The final value is derived from many many sources of percent-based bonuses. Building a Starbases and paying upkeep to add 10-15% more production does almost nothing. But if we make that 10-15% multiply the final value instead, suddenly they mean something.

Using multiplicative values in these instances, and likely others, would make certain bonuses more consistent throughout the game, rather then being strong early and falling off into a footnote once the game gets going.

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This problem has existed throughout the Galciv series to be fair. It's one of the biggest gripes I have. So many numbers everywhere, but so many don't actually mean anything. It doesn't have to be like this! Make racial bonuses good. Make Planet bonuses good. Add some fun, dynamic math. Too many values mean nothing in this game when you actually go under the hood.

Imagine this scenario: I'm playing a rich race (+10% gross income). I have 2 planets being boosted by an economic space station (+15% income).

Planet A: Has 5 gross income and 600% income bonuses from buildings and citizens.
Planet B: Also has 5 gross income, but it's completely undeveloped and has no bonuses.

Using Galciv's current math:

Planet B: gets 25% more value going from 5 income to 6.25. Awesome.
Planet A: gets only 4.16% more value going from 30 to 31.25. Not awesome. Very lame!

Instead of the lame math above, we should introduce layers. The space stations multiply the final output of every planet in their influence, and racial bonuses multiply the final value of everything. This way, no matter how developed a planet is, or how far we are in the game, a race with a 10% bonus will always have an actual 10% bonus, not 10% bonus that quickly becomes worthless as your planets develop.

We want to see the civilization choices we make actually make a significant impact at every stage of the game. But how?

Multiplicative values

Lets take the same scenario. But instead the bonuses are layered. Space stations are multiplying the final value of the planets they are over, and the racial bonus is multiplying everything on top of that. We got three layers here.

Planet B gets 26.5% more value. Not much has changed.
Planet A gets 26.5% more value. Awesome!

Planet A is actually getting something from that expensive race trait now, and my space station impacts all planets the same regardless of their development. That's just good math right there folks!

Conclusions:

Simplicity

Your first reaction may be "Yo, redshirt. If we make the math 'fancier' your average player will be more confused."

To that I say, No! Every player already thinks this is how the math works intuitively

Everyone expects 10% more income to mean 10% more income. They expect all their markets to be 10% better. They expect their trade to be 10% better. Everything. No one is intuitively thinking 10% more income means "I have a free marketplace worth of value on every planet."

The games current math is deceptive and misleading. It always has been.

Diversity

This math makes sure that races will always have the same diversity they started the game with, and that planets are more unique. We make all these cool choices to make our races better at production, or research, or trade, or anything. But as the game goes on all these choices become increasingly meaningless and everyone is just kinda the same, at least in terms on production.

Consistency

It's nice to have the bonuses always work as advertised from the start of the game right up until the end.

Anyway, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

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I think the problem is not with the current system in itself, it works and works fine - you gradually add all those little bonuses on planets\starbases etc. and eventually they all give substantial results. That's why, e.g., the whole district system exists, I think. If you change those bonuses to be multiplicative, numbers would just skyrocket and require adjusting the costs of basically everything in the game.
In my opinion (as you also described that) the main problem is that the same additive little bonuses are used when it comes to things that are unique and supposed to feel very impactful: abilities (any race can have only 2 of them) are the most unique aspects that distinguish one race from another, allow role-playing and what not. You've mentioned "warrior" ability, but there are many examples. Paranoid ability, to use another example, gives access to 2 techs (industrial replication and molecular fabrication, IIRC) that give +5% and + 10 % to manufacturing on all planets. Even combined that's just 15 % in total, which roughly equals to one well-developed industrial district. In practice that would translate to ~1-3 production output depending on how good is production input on a planet. That hardly qualifies as something unique and impactful, I think.

There are 2 options here, basically:

1. make those unique modifiers (coming from abilities, etc.) multiplicative

2. let them stay additive but increase them dramatically.

In addition, in order for unique techs\abilities to feel more interesting, I'd like to see more ships\starbases\planetary buildings that are enabled by such techs\abilities and unavailable to other races who don't have them. So as in the above example with 2 industrial techs given by paranoid ability, they could grant the ability to construct special building(s) on planets with powerful production bonuses. That would feel more interesting than a mere +5\10 % to production.

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Thank you for sharing this feedback with details and examples, I'll run it by the team to confirm if its something they can address in a future update or if there's a more technical reason why things are as they currently stand

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Quoting Jaia,

reply 2

There are 2 options here, basically:

1. make those unique modifiers (coming from abilities, etc.) multiplicative

2. let them stay additive but increase them dramatically.

In addition, in order for unique techs\abilities to feel more interesting, I'd like to see more ships\starbases\planetary buildings that are enabled by such techs\abilities and unavailable to other races who don't have them. So as in the above example with 2 industrial techs given by paranoid ability, they could grant the ability to construct special building(s) on planets with powerful production bonuses. That would feel more interesting than a mere +5\10 % to production.

Increasing the additive multipliers to make them more significant late game makes them too OP early game. If you check out the bonuses I listed, by the numbers, they are already designed around being multiplicative, and are worthless in their current state. On a economic starbase you may pay +1 maintenance for a 4% production bonus. You only get a 10% income bonus as a racial trait from rich. These bonuses are already balanced as if they were multiplicative. The math is just wrong.

They are more or less useless in their current state. One of the biggest losers is nocturnal, which sounds really interesting until you see the bonus is about equal to a good manufacturing center or research center, and largely becomes a drop in the bucket past early game. It needs to be multiplicative to function as a mechanic. We can buff the numbers, but we'd need to double or triple them to make them impactful, and then they'd be grossly OP early game. They are fine as-is IF they were applied multiplicatively.

Nocturnal has a shot at being a really cool game mechanic if racial bonuses worked multiplicatively. A player could change professions on a planet to match the cycles if the bonus persisted.

We can add more bonuses, but we'd run into the same problem. Once my planets are in the mid game and I have stuff like +300% production, or +600% income mods on planets, adding more additive bonuses no longer feels impactful. While adding entire unique buildings and such would be nice, it's not mutually exclusive. There's no reason why I can't just have +10% income from rich on top of my own unique building tree. These bonuses also come from different parts of the civ builder.

This even carries onto issues with AI difficulties. Godlike is obscene early game, and tapers off late game. The inconsistency doesn't feel great.

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This is a long-standing Galciv series problem; not just a Galciv4 problem. If it were just Galciv4, I wouldn't even bother to say anything. You have to play and figure out how exactly all the bonuses stack, exactly. No strategy guides from others really explain it. And even if they did, it's constantly changing, which invalidates the strategy guides. Then, when you do figure it out, it's clear that several traits, techs, etc. don't even matter. Their effect is miniscule.

That, in turn, hurts the game's replayability, because--like I said elsewhere--I always pick the same racial traits. There is no "tradeoff"--only useful traits and non-useful ones. That happened in Galciv3, and it never changed.

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I wholeheartedly agree with redshirt that mulitpliers are needed.

A prime example is the research speed when creating a new game. If you select very low, you get a -90% research penalty. Sounds fine at first glance, but since it's just another additive penalty you end up with 410% increased research on your homeworld instead of 500% or something along those lines. Big deal, NOT.

Also, in this case it hurts the AI way more than a human player. A decent player will know how to focus resource generation on a few key worlds so that the penalties will become largely irrelevant. The AI does not.

Clearly, the research and production modifiers at game creation do not work how they are supposed to. And this is due to the lack of multipliers.

There were multipliers in GC3 (for example, the weather control improvements gave a multiplier to a planet's raw production), so I wonder why you got rid of them?

The civ traits (when customizing your civilization) are another example where multipliers would be appropriate.

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