Planet Specialization

I really don't see much of a point to specialty worlds in GalCiv, aside from deciding which worlds to place your manufact/eco/political capitals on. Especially since in galciv to a degree all worlds are created equal aside from size and random events.

~SDC~

I really didn't see much point in specialty worlds in MOO2, but if someone found it useful, perhaps his/her strategy was built to take advantage of it. I would be very interested in hearing how John-Paul Riley's attempts work out.

~SDC~

Planets in moo2 had differing ratings for industry, farming, and research.. it only made sense to specialize.. especially if you had captured species you could send to them that has bonuses. I think those of us who specialized planets would tend to play on smaller maps where the tuning an individual planet had more value vs the effort it took to implement it. I could certainly see how on the larger maps one wouldnt bother.. just too many systems to manage. On a tiny map it was critical to success.

This is an aspect I miss in gal-civ, and was surprised that planets didnt have more detailed specifications that would make them more suitable for a given set of improvements.

Regards,

Artuk

~SDC~

It sounds like a strategy you could make work in GalCiv.
In an extremely long game, I think you'd find you'd be running out of "speciality" buildings to fit the planets theme, though, and you can't build "nothing" on a planet, or the money allocated to that planet is wasted. At least at present.
But various social projects do have maintenance costs, so you could probably save a fair few credits every turn to spend elsewhere.

Only oOne way to find out if it works for you!

~SDC~

I think it'd be much more viable if certain planets had, say, a +25% to the *base* production rate, growth rate or economy. Not only would they lend themselves to specialisation, they'd be fairly obvious targets in a war.

~SDC~

'Planets in moo2 had differing ratings for industry, farming, and research.. it only made sense to specialize..'

Actually, only industry and research, AFAICT. Farming only occured through 'specials' which roughly correspond to the colonization morality events here (and provide the means to those same bonuses you mention, although generally in too small of an amount to make a big difference for most planets.

~SDC~

You could get planets that wouldn't allow farming (without terraforming) though, and I believe Gaia worlds offered bonuses to farming. Fairly sure Orion was usually Gaia?

~SDC~

I considered a farming planet to be one with a good environment but poor minerals. I guess it is a farming specialist by lacking anything better to be.

Because you would want to industrialize the rich+ planets, you would want to use your poor worlds that supported farming (and had a lot of farming related infrastructure) in order to feed the workers on the other worlds. The need for farming planets is created by a desire to put all your population on rich+ planets onto production.

It did make one somewhat vulnerable to blockades...

Regards,

Artuk

'You could get planets that wouldn't allow farming (without terraforming) though, and I believe Gaia worlds offered bonuses to farming. Fairly sure Orion was usually Gaia?'

Barren and gaia planets provided bonuses/maluses to everything. The problem was that every standard race's base farming rate was two per population unit, so the penalty from a barren planet meant 0 food production. And yes, Orion is always a gaia planet.

As for specializing in MoO2, I usually found it not worth the time, because I was frequently running abut with the limitations in production/research cause by the use of signed shorts. In one game a long time ago I accidentally forgot to stop a planet from autobuilding transports and ended up with the number of transport ships available rolling over to -32535 (causing a near-permanent loss of income from the replicators being used to create food at half of my planets).

~SDC~

I have been doing this the entire time I've played this game... Basically I specialize my governors and then just asign them to whatever planets I want to do what. All my core worlds usually end up having everything, but it helps to have a couple specialist planets...

~SDC~

Can anyone please confirm the impression that I get, that most of the time the maintenance costs in GC drag your empire down? If this is the case, I think specializing in planets is a good way to bring down those costs, and therefore improve your economy. So, if this is true, specializing would not be, like in MoO, a way to minmax your bonuses, but a way to keep the economy sane.


Astro

i dont think maintenance is a big problem here. From my experience I've had almost all planets installed full load of social projects, however still raising quite a bit of money. The problem for me is to maintain military units. However when that happens I usually sell lower level ships to other AIs for money.

~SDC~

Maintenance from social projects can be countered by building economic boosters on your planet. Works pretty well for me.

Specialisation in GalCiv is of much more limited use than in MoO2.

In MoO2 you could manage your production on a planetary scale (Ultra-rich planets, all production, poor planets, farming & research) meaning that you're money was better spent improving one or two areas exclusively on each planet to boost that without wasting cash on maintenance costs.

In GalCiv you're allocation of resources/labour is at Galactic, not planet level. This means that all planets will be manufacturing & researching, regardless of improvements or even if they're building anything.

This means that you're often better off building one low maintenance, high return building on several planets than a lot of different higher maintenance, medium return buildings on one, especially with research.

As you're economy rating drives your tax returns, you'll probably want to improve this to the max on all planets.

Morale improvements will be built as needed on individual planets.

The only exception is shipbuilding. You're probably better having a number of high production planets with all the shipbuilding improvements building your fleet. On these planets you'll build shipbuilding instead of wonders/trade goods/research.

But overall the lack of control of local priorities reduces the effectiveness of specialisation.

Its worth remembering Econ buildings cost no maintenance as far as im away. Besides, in my current game, one of my trade routes brings in about 90bc a month, and that pays for most of my maintenance alone, admittedly i only have 9 planets, and am only at the battleship level of the game.

Least in the new patch you can click the details tab and see what is costing what maintenance, and you can scrap it if proving too much

~SDC~

I agree mostly with Lord Beefy

In MOO2 I usually ended up having 3 or 4 planets producing the food to support my entire empire. I had to build a lot of transports but the gain was that almost no other planet had to waste anything on food and food buildings and that I could focus on production on miniral rich planets and research on research bonus planets. It also saved in maintenance because I didn't have to build every improvement on everyplanet. Ofcos I had a couple of switchable planets wich could easily switch to food, production of research whenever needed.

Ofcos the effect of specialization in MOO2 depended on how u assigned the atributes of your race.

GalCiv military/production/research allocation is galaxy wide, so the effect of specializing is minimal and I suspect not specialising is better. Except ofcos for the shipbuilding social improvements.

~SDC~

Of course there is one sort of specialisation that is useful:

If you should aim to get all the capitals & wonders on your highest class planet. The stacking effect of the manufacturing/economic/cultural bonuses are best placed in one place.

You then enhance this further with a few space stations.

Once you have the Hyperion Manufacturing Center & Manufacturing Capital in place, getting the rest is relatively easy, and makes grabbing trade goods much easier.

Also, don't forget that the "moral choice" events can confer pretty substantial planet-specific bonuses (though only if you choose the 'evil' choice). In one game I had a planet that had a +49% starship bonus. Obviously, this wouild be a nice place to build a lot of starship and military production upgrades.

I haven't gotten far enough in the tech tree to really comment on having so many things to build that I'm not building some, but I have learned the following...

Building both a military and a social item in every planet just doesn't work. I never have enough production to complete everything and I don't keep up. So I find myself focusing on 3-5 systems building both and the rest building mostly social improvements until they've caught up.

Also, when at war, I have to put an end to social building in general in order to pump out enough ships to stay ahead of the game.

I didn't think production was shared between military and social projects. As far as I know, it isn't and if you don't take advantage of one or both queues, production is simply "wasted" - see the sticky in the main GalCiv forum. I'm pretty sure that stopping social production on a planet will not result in ships being built faster.

~SDC~

I've had a lot of luck controlling my economy in the early stages of the game by having a few good PQ planets focus solely on Manufacturing bonuses, while the rest build up morale and economy bonuses. After a while though I just let them build everything through a single governers build list.

~SDC~