Buildings

Um....... Are you talking GalCiv 2 or 3? Because this sounds like a common complaint on GalCiv 2 that is now addressed in GalCiv 3. Just curious.

Galciv 3, latest beta patch.

How has it been addressed?

To qualify - by auto upgrade, I don't mean auto queue an upgrade. I mean instantly upgrade all your buildings to the latest tech standard upon successfully researching the required tech. With no investment of production or time required. 

this would obviously need to be balanced by increasing build times and costs for the initial building. As it stands, I can buy my first factory within 2 turns upon starting a new planet, which just seems broken to me. Should take far longer.

Also, if I have the stage 2 factory tech, I should be able to build a stage 2 factories immediately on a fresh tile with no building on it - rather than having to build a stage 1 factory and then upgrade.

I did a little analysis based on my understanding of the way the gc3 economy system works as described in the economy 101 post. Based on a planet with 40 pop and 18 available hexes (no capital to simplify things) - and with only a choice of factories or labs that give a 50% bonus...

It appears that the best way to build a research specialised planet currentoy is to split hexs evenly between factories and labs (9 each), set the slider all the way to production (0% research) then build a research project. This outperforms the slider set to 100% research and 18 labs by a factor of just over 3.

Is this intentional? It seems like the research project is currently very OP, since I believe it adds base research rather than final research?

I mean, that would seem inherently broken to me. A research specialised world losing substantially to a diversified world just seems wrong - because in the event of an emergency the diversified world can easily start pumping out military units instantly. While the specialised world would spend many turns retooling

this has been discussed a few times in the dev stream

atm the thought process is

you can build a stage 1 factory in a few turns and then put that production towards a stage 2 and then put that to stage 3

however while that is useful in the early game after a few dozen planets have been colonized it is far easier to quick build a few buildings which would save many turns getting a new planet set up. but if this is the case why should we have to quick build the 1st and 2nd stage just to get to the third it would make much more sense to just quick build the third 

this doesent make any sense to me it should take time and manpower to upgrade a building from 1 stage to another its not like the guys who built it are sitting around going;

hey we can see the tech tree and when the player researches stage 2 factorys we can build them,

we have the specs for the stage 2 factorys why dont we just build the stage 2 around the stage one and when the time comes we press this button and the stage one just disappears.

Also, to be specific, to build the ultimate research world currently, the best way is to build your buildings such that your bonuses even out between production and tech, pump the slider all the way towards construction, then build research project?

the same with economic project and apparently it is intentional or at least it was in the early betas

https://forums.galciv3.com/458781/page/1/#3503121

Ah cool thanks for the link. From what I understood from the star dock poster there, they do view it as a bug. The key issue is that the bonus gets added on as base (gross), when to be balanced it should be added as net. Otherwise you get a compounded exponential effect that completely negates the benefits of specialising and screws over game balance for the aforementioned reason.

he said that at first yet 2 posts later apologized and stated it was intentional and should be that way

To be fair, you need hexes for farms and approval buildings, and with a capital, you'd need like a quality 24 planet to get to that point. most decent planets fall into the 8-12 range, where it is very difficult to get to the point where you are better off with research project. Which isn't to say I don't think projects should be changed.

So the stardock rep confirmed they want a diversified planet to be many times better than a specialised planet at its own game? That makes literally no sense and will screw up the economy of the game.

I hope they come to their senses about this. There should always be a concious choice based on risk/reward for specialisation vs generalisation. 

Ie, creating too many research or money specialised planets and getting a tech advantage should leave you vulnerable to a surprise attack - as those planets are generally practically useless at producing ships. But if the optimum research planet is 50% factories, then there is no real choices - just do that each and every time

You even get the added bonus that when it comes building upgrade time, a planet with the 50% factories will do the upgrades much faster than one with 100% tech or wealth, which makes the decision even more of a no brainer. 

I really hope they overhaul this before release.

With benevolent ideology + research, a quality 14 planet gets 19 use able hexes. I will go and do the math again, but I'm fairly sure the two strategies break even fairly quickly - and the effects just get amplified further as you add additional bonuses such as star bases, which give you free tech and production which disproportionately benefit the diversification strategy. 

In fact, given star bases are inherently diversified, I'm fairly sure the problem is worse than the basic theory makes it out to be

No, they confirmed that projects are working as intended. Split planets will only outperform specialized planets on very high quality planets, and only late game, and even then not by "Many Times."

i agree that to get the really high bonus's you need to wait till late game im just approaching turn 200 on my game (which unfortunately now crashes whenever i try to save)

and im just about to start putting up buildings on my 40+ tile planet

however the many times i consider to be game breaking last time i tested this -early beta i was rolling over the wealth counter every 3-4 turns

also towards late game nearly every planet can become fairly high class

This is made even worse when farms are taken into account too. Farms + lategame is already broken - there reaches a point where its better to just farm up then specialise, which makes literally no sense.

I think the economy fundamentally just needs a retune / rework. One simple way to do this would be to let factory/lab/market bonuses compound multiplicatively with themselves and other improvements, rather than additively. All other bonuses are added additively at the end. This would cause a big nerf to farms and starbases if tuned correctly, which IMO is really necessary. Because as it stands right now, in mid-lategame it actually pays to despecialise as your planets approach their pop caps and replace with farms.

As is, even on a fully tech specialised world, it still makes sense to have a bunch of factories - since otherwise your specialised world will spend majority of its time upgrading buildings rather than pumping out tech.

TLDR: As it stands right now, there is simply no good reason to pursue the specialisation route beyond earlygame. 

Its worth noting too that simply increasing the bonuses from buildings is not going to help. If a is the number of specialised tiles available, b is the bonus from specialisation improvement (ie factory/lab) and c some constant representing your food, and f is some number representing other bonuses such as starbases, tech bonuses, etc. then a simplified equation for a specialised planet takes the basic form of:

c*(1+ab+f)

While, a planet split 50/50 and running research project has a simplified equation of the form:

(c+(1+ab/2+f)/2)*(1+ab/2+f) = c*(1+ab/2+f)+((1+ab/2+f)^2)/2

It doesnt take large values of a,b and f for the second equation to completely dominate the first. 

It is that latter term that causes the balance issues - you essentially get the square of your starbase bonuses, tile specialisation bonuses, tech bonuses, etc. Assuming you upgrade both factory and lab tech paths - which you need to do anyways. Note I've only included in "f" bonuses that are applied to a planet in an inherantly diversified way. ie, a given starbase provides a bonus to production and tech. Each lab bonus in the tech tree usually has an equivalent. etc.

The problem gets even worse as you apply more bonuses - precurser relics, ideology bonuses, planet bonuses, race bonuses, etc etc. 

In lategame (nearly turn 300) im seeing my unoptimised diversified planets outperform my specialised planets by at LEAST 2:1 - and I spent the whole game focusing on optimising specialised planets. Im fairly sure if I went back and optimised my diversified planets they would outperform by at least 3:1

Uh, that should be:

c*(1+ab/2+f)/2*(1+ab/2+f) = c(1+ab/2+f)^2/2

Doesnt change the conclusion though. 

While I agree that projects are completely broken right now, I don't agree that the building system is bad.  I think it is one of the best parts of the game right now.  How are automatic upgrades micromanagement?  The game manages that for you - you don't have to do anything.  The part that requires some amount of micromanagement is terraforming, but that part is fun for me, I'm always excited to unlock a new terraforming tech and see how I can improve my worlds.

If buildings were more expensive, it would take too long to build the initial buildings on a new colony, and early game especially would suffer as a result. 

While some people want the ability to build upgraded buildings without the lower stages, I think what we have right now is the best simple solution.  It works well and doesn't bring unnecessary complexity to the game.  Also worth noting: we have way too much money in Beta games.  So while it would be easy to buy several max-tech factories on a new planet now, in the future that will likely not be the case.  I think it's best to wait until balance is further along to see how that works out.

You're missing a constant of 0.25 in your equation, representing the intrinsic 4:1 cost of Research Project (4 mp => 1 rp).  Hence your +manuf% must be exactly +300% to break even, and > +300% to make a profit.

You are correct that a medium-large planet that builds a (nearly-)full ring of manuf, or overlaps 12 economic starbases, can easily exceed +300%.  Then it is more profitable to migrate your research and wealth planets to be some convex combination ( a,b ) of a*manuf + b*specialty.  (N.B. the solution to that optimization problem is not necessarily at 50/50.  Considering that the function ab is maximized when a == b, my guess is that production is maximized when your +manuf% == +rp%, however many hexes of each it costs you to get there.  Solving that incrementally, whenever you have 1 more hex to build, assign it to whichever +% is lower.  But this is a greedy algorithm, i.e. with zero look-ahead, so it surely fails to account for larger adjacency features such as full hex rings.)

This is all (currently) as designed and intended.  Whether it is an emergent bug that was not fully anticipated is ... yet to be admitted

Nobody knows what the final vision of a GC3 endgame looks like.  Very many game features already need to be thoroughly rebalanced:

• non-micro UI help
• planetary invasion viewer
• ideology maxing
• diplomacy trade/treaty valuations
• wealth easy-peasi-ness
• 32-bit overflows: wealth, ship/fleet stats

For now (Beta 4), just verify that the economy game mechanisms work as intended.  So far, all of your calculations are supporting that .  Simply being mathematically ba-roken or overpowered is not, by itself, a design bug.  Keep in mind that all of your enemies will do the same thing, and then they'll come kill you while you're both still in the midgame ... so maybe you need to go kill them first in the early game.  Race!!

so i just tallied up my planets after terraforming they will come out like so,

looking at this my lowest quality planet is 15 and and a majority of planets (35/50) are at least PQ 24 or better

this doesent include the 3 ideology bonus's which grant additional tiles, which im not sure if they work the way they sound

Yeah Gilmoy. My equation was very simplified to just show the presence of a square term without getting into massive detail

You are also right in that the actual solution is not 50/50 - its about making sure the total +manf = total +rp (or close as possible). Then there's the food (c) to factor in... I love optimisation problems! And yep, thats before adjacency etc.

But the key is that im worried the square term will overwhelm the nuances. I personally just think it should be eliminated, as it represents a fundamental flaw in the design - specialised planets should scale better than non-specialised, as they are less flexible and harder to setup (less factories = longer upgrade times). 

If anything, the situation should be reversed - specialisation penalised earlygame and rewarded lategame

And +300 is really easy to get to - even in early-mid game! A nieve 7 xeno-factories and 7 labs with 1 farm on a class 16 planet (these are not usually that rare), combined with a few basic starbases should do the trick

Then once you get terraforming in midgame and also midgame tech etc that planet explodes ahead. Better still, it upgrades much faster, and can easily pump out warships in an emergency. Whats not to like!?

Tedious micromanagement is a problem in all 4X games that gets worse and worse the further you get into the game as you grow.  This is why I would never play a gigantic or immense galaxy.  I actually want to play galciv3 no click fest 3.  I also actaully want to finish a game in less than a month.  Besides, my computer is not that powerful anyway.

Thing is Stanley, I dont see why it has to be that way.

The team at Stardock is generally really innovative, and so I'm hoping they can sort this kind of thing out. Especially given the awesomeness of immense and 64 bit.

Not much you can do about your computer though.

I would point out that it's not as easy to get multiple economic starbases around a single planet as it is theoretically.  First off, other planets might be in the way. or set up in such a way as to break the perfect combo on is trying to set up.  Secondly. one might want to put in mining starbases (or others) and that will definitely play havoc with placement.  And even if one can get the perfect combo for one system, that might interfere with another system.

Plus the tediousness of upgrading all those starbases.  Sure, you might not need to upgrade all of the defense capabilities of a starbase deep within your territory.  But the call of the OCD can be very strong.

MUST... PLACE.... ALL... COMPONENTS!  :D

I don't mind "constructor spam", as my other posts will show,  but even I have my limits.

I honestly will be surprised if most casual or semi-dedicated players will build up the economic starbases out the wazoo like some are talking about here. I consider myself a somewhat dedicated player, and I rarely bother putting more than two  economic bases in my systems.  If I can get an easily overlap for a third or so as I am stringing my systems together, I might.  But I have too many other things to do than to try to build mega death factories by putting perfect placement out there.

i useually try to place 12 Around my home planet and then economic / manufacturing relics and mining rigs