economic bonuses still do not pay

I posted hard proof of it working, and why start a second thread? Now anyone who wants to follow this topic has to read both.

Vorlin: Thanks for your effort in reporting your experimentation. It may have convinced yourself, but it did not convince me.

Why? Because I tried a configuration with +10% morale and +50% economy, and another with only +10% morale. Result: no difference. I tried with setting gov. expenditures to 0%, and perceived the amount of money I got per turn. And I measured turns it took to build a colony ship, no difference.

As to why I started a second thread: the original became a mess of everything related to economics instead of discussing this very "feature".

You know. I like the idea that alot of Gal Civ is a black box...because thats how real life is. The Fed doesn't REALLY know what's going to happen when the change interest rates. Analysts don't really know what effect a drop in oil prices will have on corporate earnings. You make estimates, you try stuff, you see what happens. The game works this way too, and to me that's a very good thing.

However, sometimes I wish that there was an explicit way to get under the hood and identify exactly what effect every little niggling thing has...because then maybe we wouldn't get so many ridiculous threads like this.

Bonkku, just because you can't see it, doesn't mean its not working.

I KNOW all I need to know to be confident that its working...5 years into a major game with a big econ bonus I'm rolling in money. 5 years into a major game where I put the bonus into research instead, I'm flat broke and barely able to do anything. Every time, playing the same basic strategy there are HUGE effects.

That you can't identify the effects on turn 1 doesn't concern me in the least. I consider that a feature. Try less analysis and more play...you'll be happier. Or at least the rest of us will.

I think you are confusing 'not working' with 'not working the way you think it should'. The bonuses quite clearly work, they just don't apply to the numbers you think they ought to. This is much different from the bug that used to be with the military/social production bonuses (which never worked at any time under any situation that I could find).

To quote from that thread: "Interesting to note though that the +50% economy plus +20% military beats +40% military (12% faster), and also interesting to see how much faster +50% economy combined with +20% research is than the +20% research bonus alone (37% faster). "

Clearly the bonus works, and in an impressive fashion as well. The bonus works on the values being fed into the economic model, not on the values being output by it, which is why you don't see +50% income with a +50% economy pick. You don't see the bonus much until you have a significant population to feed it with. My tests were done on a planet that had soil/hab/entertainment and was allowed to reach full population with those improvements with a 40% tax rate (about 10800M population).

Also note that to test this bonus you have to have comparable situations. This means both tests have to have the same tax rate, same planet size, same population, same improvements, no trade routes established (yours or AIs), and have to have the Spending slider adjusted so that net income is as close to the same number as possible for both games (I used 0 since that is what I usually shoot for when balancing the Spending slider after the initial boom is over).

Well. . . I decided to "test" this also. I restarted a bunch of games and tried the different starting parties and bonuses. All I checked was the starting tax incomes from the different class planets, at 33%. I didn't actually play into any of the games to see how much of a bonus shows up later on in the game. Anyways. . .

No Econ bonuses:
Class 16 - 8BC
Class 17 - 8BC
Class 18 - 10BC
Class 19 - 10BC
Class 20 - 12BC

Federalists (+20%), no other econ bonus:
Class 16 - 8BC
Class 17 - 8BC
Class 18 - 10BC
Class 19 - 10BC
Class 20 - 12BC

Federalists (+20%), and +30% picks (+50% total)
Class 16 - 9BC
Class 17 - 9BC
Class 18 - 11BC
Class 19 - 11BC
Class 20 - 13BC

So the bonus definatly is working, though not how I expected. I didn't see the full 50% income bonus at the beginning of the game, so it's clear that it's not purely a total tax income bonus. Maybe it is just for the popluation, maybe it's truncating, I don't know.

On a related point, I also tested the bonus's for production and research and found some really interesting results, but that is for another post.

And finally, is it "bonuses" or "bonus's" ???

Just to be irrelevant, I say "bonuses". It's a common american fault to use the apostrophe for, well, just about anything, but it's meant for contractions (i.e. "I will" -> "I'll") or possession (i.e. "the house of Mike" -> "Mike's house").

From my tests http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=85148

base income from PQ
15 = 0
16-17 = 2
18-19 = 4
20-22 = 6
24 = 7

It's for a population of 0, it's not affected by taxes (tested) and econ. bonuses (AFAIK)

Income from 1000 population with taxes 50% is equal to 9, so it will be 6 for 33% taxes.

Just some tips to testers:
1) I'm using transports to change planetary population. Note that in some cases (maybe 1/2 probability) you'll gain up to 1% of planetary population if you load population to transport and then unload it. So don't be surprized by possible change in taxes (because of the population changes) as i was surprized.

2) It's useful to change data files. Say, banking center -> +100 Econ bonus.

--
I see that i need to test econ. bonuses better too - i thought that +econ bonuses are more or less straightforward. At least my tests showed that they are with ~20 planets.

~SDC~

Thanks for your test, modemboy. It shows a few facts:
- the economic bonus is taken into account _somewhere_
- the economic bonus does not work solely on PQ or solely on pop. part of the income
- the economic bonus does not work intuitively as one would expect it to

Now, I still consider the economic bonus system as not working. The problem is: if the game tells player that he gets a +50% boost to his economy, and he notices only a +0% to +10% increase in tax income, it's broken. It's an usability problem; if the game tells something as a fact, it should be a fact, too.

The point is, bonuses etc. stated as clear and straightforward should work so, too. ALL the +X% to something lose their credibility if they do not work as one expects.

So:
"I don't understand it" = Broken in you world?

Your problem is being fooled by apparent precision.
It is unneccessary to play the game...even to play the game well to know +50%...from what. What is being increased by 50%? Who cares. Doesn't matter in the least.

The only information you need to know is that +50% is a little bit better than +40% and a whole lot better than +20%.

That's it. Armed with that simple understanding of relative value you can play and win complete games, test new strategies and see how you do.

You apparently want to play the game without actually having to play the game. To "crack the code" so you can min-max your choices right from turn one. If that's what you enjoy, more power to you.

I for one hope Stardock NEVER makes it possible to do that...because its completely unrealistic...beyond unrealistic...into a whole new world of ivory tower wishful thinking nonsense.

To Valamir

1) So you think that any other designers of strategy games are wrong because they give this information to a players?
2) AI using this information, so why players can't use it?
3) This is not an arcade there 'big sword' is better than 'small sword' and this is all that a player need to know. I don't understand how can you make right decisions w/o knowlege of rules.

~SDC~

Isn't the mystery in the gameplay and not in the pure statistics? I don't see why any information about the internal structure of the system shouldn't be available to a resourceful player. Sure, real governments don't have this type of power, but adding a lot of Earth "realism" to this game could make things a bit cumbersome. If you lose an election, you don't get to control your empire until the next election (if you win that one). Or, you have to deal with frequent internal problems with most planets (splinter groups, religious wars, teletubby takeovers, Britney Spears addictions, etc.).

I think that both sides here have good points, but why make it so that people who want the information can't have it? Why not explain it somewhere, such as a FAQ, and let people who couldn't care less avoid it?

Just a thought. Interesting research here though, and I'm still trying to figure out the subtle aspects of econ in this game, personally.

I think what he is trying to say is that mathematical economics doesn't work in reality so its unrealistic to try to portray that it works that way in a game. Correct me if I'm wrong.

To Ellestar:

1) So you think that any other designers of strategy games are wrong because they give this information to a players?
--->Depends on what you're modeling. If you modeling the impact of a bullet with armor...no. That's physics. Its testable and quantifiably knowable. If you're modeling whether or not a computer player will accept a trade or why it makes one choice instead of another...than yes. It would be wrong to give that information to a player. You can't ever really know why another human being prefers red widgets to blue widgets. You have a rough sense that other person must value red widgets more but there is no ESP power where you can see exactly what the threshold is where he would have changed his mind..so there for there shouldn't be in a strategy game either.


2) AI using this information, so why players can't use it?
--->Because AI's can't think. Human's can. When playing a game the best an AI can do is crank numbers to base decisions on...therefor if the AI is going to give the player a good challenge the AI has to know those numbers. Players should be expected to think, to form a hypothesis about what works, to test that hypothesis in actual play, and to then learn from the experience and make adjustments accordingly. THAT is what strategy is about. Learning in advance where all of the break points are defeats the whole point to play.

3) This is not an arcade there 'big sword' is better than 'small sword' and this is all that a player need to know. I don't understand how can you make right decisions w/o knowlege of rules.
--->Do you have a job? Do you know with absolute certainty that you will still be employed there 6 months from now...a year...two years? No. Yet everyday you make a decision about whether or not to start looking for a new job. If you have a sense that your job is secure, you don't even think about it and thus choose not to look. If you have a sense that your job may be in jeopardy, you start to think about checking the want ads or contacting a recruiter. That sense is all you need to base decisions on...you are a human being...its called thinking.
--->You're offered a new job. It has better pay, that's a quantifiable advantage. But will you enjoy it more? Are the opportunities for future advancement as good? Will you like your coworkers? Will you be miserable and live to regret it? You don't know any of these with certainty. You make the best judgement you can and then you make a decision to accept or decline the job.

That's how life works. You are presented with incomplete and possibly conflicting information. You use your experience and skills to make the best judgement you can and you choose a course of action. You then evaluate and reevaluate the consequences of that choice and make adjustments as you are able.

By definition the path you take will be very unlikely to be the absolute best, most optimised, perfect set of choices you could have taken. You do the best you can, you learn from it. That's strategy.

GalCiv excels at this. You can take a player whose never read the manual, never "tested" different options, never studied the math behind the numbers and if they play long enough and are a good strategist they can become the best GalCiv player ever.

Heck...looking too close under the hood is not all that different than cheating.

--GalCiv excels at this. You can take a player whose never read the manual, never "tested" different options, never studied the math behind the numbers and if they play long enough and are a good strategist they can become the best GalCiv player ever.--

I can say: "No way!". It's just impossible. I know how top players play. In Heroes of Might and Magic 3 competition (best Moscow vs best St. Petersburg players) several months ago i saw how played Moscow player 'Imp' (he's also playing Magic: The Gathering). He calculated every turn of his game (both on strategic map and tactical battles, games was on fixed maps - St. Petersburg rule). He won 2 duels 2-0 w/o any chances - both games was on the same map, just swapped sides. (Moscow team lose with a score 3,5-6,5). After end of tournament, St. Petersburg was amazed by this - game was on St. Peterburg tournament map and they didn't think that this is possible. They even wasn't able to won a tactical battle (they loaded from a save) that Imp won in his game.

Everyone who thinks that he can win w/o math just don't knows reality of a TBS. Did you saw how best players playing? Did you played in tournaments with top players?

~SDC~

I didn't say you didn't need to think and plan. I didn't say you didn't need to know what combination of factors works best.

I said you don't need to have the data from the game handed to you to reach that point. Play enough and you will learn what works and what doesn't work. Studying a spreadsheet with all of the variables mapped out will just get you there quicker...and in my opinion as I said, is the equivelent of cheese.

Great generals study the battles of history and learn from them...playing by proxy so to speak. They don't study spreadsheets that tells them that their soldiers have a melee of 2 and the enemy soldiers have armor of 3 so it will take exactly 2 swings to kill each enemy soldier. There may well be data that has been compiled that suggests that but in the real world numbers are never so cut and dry and reproduceable as they are in a game.

They study battles and the results of those battles and they build rules of thumb (like attackers should strive for 3:1 odds to have the best chance for victory). They learn what works when from practice and experience and training.

They don't study all the niggling math that these types of threads seek answers to, because in the real world the data isn't available and the formulae aren't that simple.

If you cruch the numbers in order to beat the AI than you are basically taking away the one thing that an AI can do better than a human. As I said...cheese. You might as well be playing with cheat codes on for all the strategy that's left.

The economic model is based on more than population, the +economic bonus is based on population, that seems to pretty much sum it up. I just can't see much controversy here. *shrug*

Ellestar: I completely agree on your views.

Valamir,

to be honest, I cannot understand your point. GalCiv is a strategy game. In strategy games it must be possible to use your brains to something more than _guessing_ best tactics.

The player must have knowledge of how the game world functions. I don't mean breaking code, but if the player is allowed to know the bonuses he has, what's the point in it if he cannot make deductions based on them? If one doesn't know how the bonuses are applied, even in a simple and straightforward case like this, +50% economy, it's a blind-guessing game. How can I decide between +morale or +economy or anything? One can't make _any_ decisions in the game on any basis but guess.

As for your great generals and learning by history analogies, they are just not for me. I have no interest in reverse engineering the game world mechanics, and least of all have I interest in doing it _by_playing_, the slowest possible method.

I'm interested in playing a strategy game in which I'm able to make reasonable decisions. In the real world I could use common sense and learn by history, but GalCiv is not real world. It lives only according to the rules the game developers have set. Now IF I would _really_ live in the GalCiv universe, I would of course know a lot better how it works. But I don't happen to live there, and game mechanics are the only way for the developers to communicate the characteristics of that world to us players.

Vorlin:

the +economic bonus is _not_ based on income by population. If it was, we should see totally different numbers in the experiment made by modemboy earlier on this thread. You get +50% to a fraction of your income, the fraction being quite small and unknown to everybody.:-/

As for the controversies: the biggest one seems to be between those who want to know how the game works and those who don't care. It applies to a broader field than just economics.

bonkku -- Needing to have everything handed to you says a lot about your ability to plan. Hell, GalCiv as it is gives you far TOO MUCH information to be realistic, and too much power to act on that information. Does any leader *know* exactly what technologies can be developed? No; research is a risky business where "negative results" aren't unusual. Does any leader have precise information on the location and state of all his assets, or the fine control over him that GC gives you? No. If it were "reasonable", there wouldn't be ANY numbers like morale. Oh, you might have random polls that cluster in a region, but that'd be about it. Sheesh. If you can't play the game well without having it specced out for you, you're not a player, but a mere optimization program.

Twirlip -

I don't need specs. All I want is something that I can use as a basis for my decisions. Now IF even the straightforward bonuses like +50% to economy don't work as expected, then how can I decide anything? I mean, using such general information like "more manufacturing plants gives more production" makes it possible to use your common sense. Well, just about everyone happens to have that much common sense. It does not make it possible to really compete, who has the brains to beat others?

The fact that I'm able to coordinate research and ship movement is the decision of the developers: they have chosen that in GalCiv world, the leader is able to do that. I'm only playing inside the frames set by the developers; if only did we know the frames better, we would be able to use our brain capacity more than the common sense fraction.

Bonkku its not about guessing. Its about judgement and estimation. Its about making decisions in an environment of less than perfect knowlege.

Strategy is the art of managing uncertainty. The more variables become fixed and known the less uncertainty there is to manage, the less strategy is involved to play. The more the underlying formulae becomes known with precision the less uncertainty there is to manage and therefor the less strategy is involved to play.

Gal Civ is great because it is a great strategy game and not just a puzzle or an equation to be solved for.


Twirlip: That essentially sums it up for me. I already find knowing "4 more turns and I'll uncover the secret to 4d space" to be the least enjoyable part of the game.

MUCH better would be if each tech gave a rough indication of "easy, difficult, or hard" and you just picked which ones and how much you wanted to throw money at each turn. After some unknown threshold is reached there begins to be a slowly increasing % chance of getting the tech. Might take 6 turns might take 16. Don't know...its science.

Espionage and trade routes would also get a small amount of tech spending based on whatever tech the other side had based on advantage gained by exposure and such. Gradually over the course of the game discoveries would be made...in largely unpredictable fashion.

Does anyone really think that the CDC can sit down and say "9 more months till we have a cure for SARS"...of course not.

bonkku -- It's not just common sense, it's also about the ability to recognize the circumstances of your situation and adjust accordingly. For instance, there's no recipe that'll work for every game, because of the randomness involved in everything from who your neighbors are to what random events occur. Do you push hard for the trade goods early and risk wasting substantial social production if some wealthy minor pays its way to one first? Do you crank out defenders early, in case the Drengin are next door? If you intend to win by cultural domination, how much do you need to prepare in case an AI recognizes the threat your culture poses? Should you "surprise" it by amassing a large number of constructors and sending them all at once? Should you pay tribute, or is that AI bluffing -- is it really powerful enough to hurt you? There's a lot more than "common sense" here.

Keep in mind that some of the bonuses didn't work at all, to begin with, and others didn't work as advertised. That leads people to wonder if others really work as well.

Myself, I don't think economic bonuses are worth wasting time on. A +50% research has much more measurable effect on my games then a +50% economy. Heck, +50% Morale seems to have a stronger effect then economy... one something is subtle, it is much more difficult to calculate or measure its worth against effects that are more easily observed/measured.

GalCiv is a number's game. It isn't surprising that there would be those that want to know the precise mathematical formuli involved. TBS players do tend to be Min/Max people anyways. That's how you get more bang for your buck, after all.

It's a game. If you have fun running a bunch of math scenarios, more power to you. Play however you have fun. I'll do the same. And it won't matter to the other person's game...

Twirlip - well, it depends on what is common sense. In my opinion making decisions based on guessing what would work best here and there is common sense. If you have a different definition for it, I'm not interested in hearing it.

I think that this debate is going to be an endless one. Let's put it to an end. Keep your opinions and I'm going to keep mine.

BUT - the question remains. Why +50% to economy gives +50% to a small, and unknown fraction of your economy? If nothing else, I suppose that the "+x% to your economy" ability is changed to "+x% to an unknown fraction of your economy" in the game texts.

Two Points:

One, I wanted to add: Bonkku, far be it from me to tell you how to enjoy your games. If those are the types of things that float your boat, more power to you...I just have a big problem with you asserting that the game is broken simply because it doesn't cater to your preferences. You need to start distinguishing between "broken" and "not the way you'd like it to be". They are not the same thing.

Two: Star Pilot's post is a PERFECT example of what Twi and I are saying. MY experience playing the game is about 180d different then his. I would take an Econ boost over a Research boost any day of the week. Its been my experience that adding a +15% starbase module to an econ resource has a welcome and noticeable effect on my monthly income. Adding a +15% starbase module to a reseach resouce doesn't help get the tech that much faster itself, and with the added cash from Econ I get increased tech anyway.

His experience leads him to believe something completely different. This means GalCiv is a GREAT strategy game...just like real life two knowledgeable talented people can look at the same problem and come up with completely different "best" solutions.

If all of the math were known up front to the nth degree than one of us would be provably right and the other provably wrong...and that just ain't realistic.

There ain't no way to know for sure which tax cut plan will boost the economy more...just two competing theories, and you won't know what the result will be until you pick one and find out...good stuff.