I feel the same, in GC2 you wouldn't even take more than a few colonies early game because your treasury would get negative in 5 turns. Early game right now is too easy in GC3 and requires almost no thinking, spam colony ships and take all the planets asap. This makes all the economy buildings and tech trees nearly useless as well. Right now i'm playing a game with Iridium where i have luxury trade routes and 1 colony dedicated for econ, my income per turn is +250 and i can't do anything with it.

I remember trying to get economic capital in GC2 asap, because i would get -100 per turn, those were the times This game really needs to have a more difficult economy.

I think it's a bit unfair to describe the adjecency system as 'silly', but I find it hard to disagree about how the results of that system force you to hyper-specialise otherwise you lose so much of that placed potential.  To me this is another example of how the maths behind the various bonus mechanisms in this game haven't been fully thought through or tested to breaking point (which, alas, happens for too early in the game for GC3; given that nearly all 4X games eventually start to fall apart at the seams when pushed to the limits of exploitation).

In addition, the need/benefits of having super-specialized worlds means that you will almost always outperform the AI civs. The AI just doesn't know how to build efficient, highly specialized worlds in a way that can compete with any human player with even low level strategies (such as building your factory next to a durantium refinery).

The Yor AI is particularly bad at utilizing its specialty building that gives +3 adjacency bonuses. Usually places it in a hex with only 1 adjecent building. Duh!

I actually like the general economic system in Gal Civ III than II.  More intuitive in Gal Civ III.  In Gal Civ II, most buildings DON'T generate economy.  For example, factories CONVERT econ into ships.  In other words, building too many factories will destroy your economy, which I thought was really stupid.

The problem with Gal Civ III I think is that maintenance costs are WAY TOO LOW.  Once they can tweak that, the game will re-balance itself out.  They should make it so that each colony beyond a certain point costs increasingly more upkeep to maintain up to a certain maximum level depending on map size.  That's what they did for Civilization IV and it worked.  

This tweak will force players to build up their worlds instead of just spamming colony ships for the first 40 turns or so.  

50:1 wouldn't be a conservative guess, it would be a complete guess - and is unsurprisingly also completely wrong. Financial services make up around 15% of world GDP, according to the OECD. You might be surprised to hear that manufacturing's share of world GDP is around 16% - nearly identical to finance. So the ratio you're actually looking for is 1:1.

Besides, in the game finance buildings are market centres... that implies it's rather more important to measure services (i.e., retail, call centres, offices, banks, insurance companies, accountants)  against production here. Services make up around 60% of the global economy. So, in fact, the 'correct' number is actually 1:4 in market centre's favour. This is actually more or less how you had to balance your economy in GC2 - 50% markets with the remainder shared between research and factories. So tell me, how many retail centres are there on Earth compared to production?

So yeah, that's why not. A healthy manufacturing economy is largely run on credit. If you don't have the banking sector to manage that credit, then you can't run a manufacturing economy properly (this is also exactly what happened in 2008 when the banks stopped lending - hence why it was referred to as 'the credit crunch').

Your figure of 16% is quite interesting, since I have generally settled on specializing about one colony in 6 or 7 on finance.  Just about right then!   That's what I find works for my empires.

+1 for the suggestion to go back to the Galciv2 approach, or at least rebalance the economy so it presents the same expansion constraints that Galciv2's economy did.  In GC1 and 2 your economy started out broken and in deficit, and the early game was a race against time to get it up and running before you ran out of your starting credits.  It was a fun and interesting approach that was unique to Galciv.  Now the early game is a pure expansion rush.  That's fine and all, but it's not as interesting as the old system.  The end result, as people have said here, is that money feels very pointless.  In my first complete game I do not recall ever even using it or worrying about it, which is a sure sign of a broken system. 

i found th GC2 economy system (which had some parallels to the civ 4 system) more interesting than the GC3 system. GC3 empires are constrained by approval (similar to Civ 5 happiness system), but the penalties are barely visible until you get very very large. i didn't like the happiness systems in civ 5 - the civ 4 economy based constraint felt much less gamey. 

i vote for high maintenance colony capitals and high(er) maintenance manufacuting and research structures. don't really care if they keep the 3 way dial or change it to a res vs. production slider with an added "tax" slider. that distinction doesn't mak a big difference to me. the real difference should be that you can't just mindlessly expand without going broke. that will tone down the colony spam and the problem of hitting the end of the tech tree after ~1/4th of the time limit (and that's a conservative guess. if you really go for it, you can probably get a research victory in year 3 or 4)

It wasn't even the gamey-ness which was the issue - Civ 5's happiness-based empire size limit mechanic, combined with re-introducing maintenance on buildings rater than a scaling per-city+distance measure, encourages  building lots of small cities/planets and not developing them to their full potential. It re-introduced the 'Infinite City Sprawl' problem which Civ IV's maintenance mechanics had eliminated; the game actively punished you for building 'up' rather than 'out'. The punishment in GC3 is much less, because maintenance is very low... but you're still punished more for having a big population on a planet than you are for having multiple planets. 

For example, say I have 20 population and a base morale of 4. If they're concentrated on 1 world (so one that's built 3 farms) then I have 4/20 morale. If I have them on 4 worlds, then I have 3.2/5 on each - about 70%. Mechanically, this is just as bad as the Civ 5 method; you should ALWAYS colonize another planet if you can, because the benefits of the additional research, manufacturing and money always outweigh the negatives of LEP.

I'm against putting maintenance on the research and factory buildings, for the same up-not-out reasons as above - but I wouldn't object to a fairly substantial maintenance hike on the colony capitals so they tend to lose a meaningful amount of money.

I agree.  Colony capitals should cost a lot more maintenance to discourage never ending colony spam.  Players should be discouraged from doing what I'm doing (which is too effective).  

What I'm doing is getting close to 100 colonies by turn 30, with an average population of 2 on each.  

It's nothing to do with the map size. People should quit thinking of it like that. 

You have 200 credits/turn surplus, yeah? What % of your total income is that? How much is being spent on maintenance? How many ships are you keeping active (you mentioned that your fleet is competitive with the Drengins, who have nearly 3 times as many planets as you...). 

THESE are the measures that actually matter, not the absolute numbers. Of course I should make 5-6 times as much surplus from an empire 5-6 times as big - but as a proportion of my empire's total budget, it should be roughly the same as long as the % of our planets dedicated to cash are the same.

Colony maintenance might be too low, but I find that ship maintenance is very high.  I suppose that if you were forced into a war early game, you might be glad of the cheap colony maintenance.

It's all a combined issue if you ask me. IMHO:

Maintenance needs to be higher, so that it's harder to cover.

Buyout needs to be cheaper, so that it's worth doing more than just covering your maintenance.

THEN and only then will wealth become an "equal ground" part of economy along with production an research.

And I guess it wouldn't hurt to have even more uses for money, as long as those new (and old but redone) uses are done right.

EL allowed to upgrade any unit inside your own borders. They had reasonable upgrade costs and reasonable rushing costs. It all worked. Of cause CGIII can't just mirror that. GCIII's tech and progressions aren't tiered as much. AND the design is more complex. EL's upgrade 99% of the time was exactly that - an upgrade. GCIII's upgrade, more often then not is either a "getting the ship 2 turns more up to date" or a complete refit. (Or even an exploit, but that's a different matter).

IF we could separate refitting from updating that'd be a boon, imho.

I believe that adding a module or swapping a module for a more advanced one SHOULD be cheap and available everywhere inside the borders. But removal of any amount of any kinds of modules that actually decreases the total of any of the ships stats should actually cost you EXTRA and ONLY work at the shipyard.

In other words:

- swapping 2 T1 engines for 1 T3 engine on a colony ship while also adding range module - cheap and anywhere. You're just making use of more advanced tech here.

- swapping construction module for a colony module - costly an on shipyard. You're obviously re-purposing a ship. (and ACTUALLY fill it with population)

- swapping 3 T1 engines for one T2 engine and doing anything else - costly and on shipyard. You're still re-purposing a ship which is obvious because you've made it slower than it was.

You call that a choice, I call that a guess. The factors are too unpredicatable to make any resemblance of an educated decision. The only thing you're choosing here is your "favorite" approach. You can almost never say which one is more likely going to play out better.

Also, ship buyout scaling already WORKS. Just don't do it from ship management screen, do it on the selection panel when you select the shipyard on the map. In there it'll list the right amount of credits and deduce that right amount as well. I did that on several occasions and once again - IT WORKS.

Quoting BuckGodot,

reply 16

And yet, if Stardock makes money much harder to get, there will be complaints from a whole other set of people who aren't as good at generating revenue. . 

Since when is stupidity a viable excuse for a failure?

I'm sorry if that sounded rough, but that's how it is.

Shaping the mechanics of the game to the standards of those who can't properly use those mechanics is among the worst things you can do to a game. (from the "art" perspective that is... sure, it's a smooth commercial move but let's not go THERE...)

If the majority is wrong there's nothing wrong in not listening to it. As long as it IS wrong.

Complete and utter nonsense.

First - nothing FORCES you to specialise. It's only a matter of efficiency.

A friend of mine barely does it and he's still struggling to find a challenge.

With that out of the way, it's efficient to specialise for two reasons.

Namely:

1. You can freely move your output distribution in any position and swap any type of BASE output for another at 1:1 ratio.

2. Your planets can have DIFFERENT multipliers to different types base outputs.

As long as that works the only third component that we need to make the complete specialisation efficient is MATH.

( A + B ) * (C + D ) > A * C + B * D

So long as the statement above holds it'll be inefficient to split your base output into A and B and split your "multiplying might" into C and D.

The reason it works differently in some other 4x games is because they DON'T give you 1:1 rate of base output exchange. And quite a number of them doesn't give a damn about managing your "multiplying might".

Take C5 for example.

1. You don't get to chose what the tiles with the best yields actually yield.

2. Almost every damn city improvement that can be made is worth making.

These two points are exactly why specialisation in C5 doesn't work all that well. (Well, there are exceptions even there, but that'd be too much detail for a concept example)

Remove the adjacency bonuses from GCIII and all you'll accomplish is that it'd be easier to choose the planets specialisation, since you now have less factors to consider when determining the best 1 out of all possible, nothing else really.

I followed C5's history of changes pretty closely, and I have to voice a partial disagreement.

At one point their system was working. But then they went and broke it again.

The primary factor in it's workings was... economy. Maintenance namely. Once upon a time building those happiness improvements REALLY costed you. It was actually in favour of tall empires a bit. But then they had to go and rebalance the numbers. THEN building those now MANDATORY happiness improvements stoped being such a notable detriment, and it all inevitably went down the drain.

The biggest part of their "tall vs wide" balance was the combined effect of "per city" improvements and "per empire" factors (such as luxuries).

It's a working concept and with the numbers set right it works right. But for some reason that eludes me to this day (ok, let's be honest, I suspect that it's something along the lines of BuckGodot's comment quoted earlier in the post), they went and ruined their own math...