Getting Rid of Planet Production Wheel Is Going to Make Game More Repetitive

Great.  Then maybe they'll make the building buildings part of the game fun instead of hiding behind sliders to make the economy work.  The production wheel was nothing but a massive crutch that the AI could endlessly exploit and humans could not (without it becoming a terrible game).

no the next thing they will do is to get rid of building buildings, because....

its tedious and the AI is bad at it.  Ahh also its against the spirit of the game!

Quoting mortili, reply 2

no the next thing they will do is to get rid of building buildings, because....

its tedious and the AI is bad at it.  Ahh also its against the spirit of the game!

 

 

End of mortili's quote

This is pretty darn close to a strawman argument since building things on planets has long been part of the spirit of GC III.  I get the winky smilie.  But that doesn't stop the argument from being on a bad foundation.

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For all the bitching and kvetching, I would remind one and all that GC II was perfectly fine with the three focus buttons and a global slider.  Still had specialization.  Still had money worlds and manufacturing behemoths.

The only thing I am worried about is HOW GC III will implement the focusing system.  If it works as well as GC II, IN PRACTICE (and I say "in practice" because there are some fundamental differences to how production works in GC II and GC III), it'll be fine.

If not?  It'll need to be tweaked further/

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BTW, marigoldran, is it REALLY necessary to spam out so many different threads on the exact same subject?  Asking for a friend.

the problem is that in gc2 the best thing to do was to NOT specialise at planet scale but globally,

you were running mostly labs or factorys, no planet was special at all wich made the planetbuilding pretty boring since you would do the same on all of them.

GC3 was promising in that area, but without a way (and it doesnt have to be the production-wheel) to put production in one direction, it will be the same as in GC2.

*shrug*

Worked well enough for me.  And from what I saw of a couple AAR Suicidal games, others did the same.

Uh.... what?

The AI can't use the wheel and never has been able to... and the proposed solution of locking the player out  of using the wheel through the UI will have no effect on the AI whatsoever. Are you really familiar with how the game actually works, and what they're intending to do in 1.4? Because most of your posts on this suggest that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Yes, but the economies work so differently that you really can't draw an equivalence. Unless and until SD tell us that they're re-working the entire economic system and moving away from pop=prod, we should pretty much assume that they aren't, and all their doing is crippling the user interface. 

Pretty much said as much in the next paragraph, if not quite in as much detail.

Anyway, that was my hope.  Doesn't mean that is what I EXPECT.  What I expect to happen is something will be made that is almost, but not quite, usable, and with some VERY glaring flaws.  Then whatever this new system is will be refined and tuned over the next couple of patches.

This is a pretty radical change, whether SD realizes it or not (and I suspect they don't if they mostly use the Global Wheel when playing).  The pop=prod paradigm  causes a lot of dominoes to fall that one might not notice if one only plays around with the global slider.  

Time will tell just how useful the alternative is and how much it can be refined.

Quoting BuckGodot, reply 7

Anyway, that was my hope.  Doesn't mean that is what I EXPECT.  What I expect to happen is something will be made that is almost, but not quite, usable, and with some VERY glaring flaws.  Then whatever this new system is will be refined and tuned over the next couple of patches.

This is a pretty radical change, whether SD realizes it or not (and I suspect they don't if they mostly use the Global Wheel when playing).  The pop=prod paradigm  causes a lot of dominoes to fall that one might not notice if one only plays around with the global slider.  

Time will tell just how useful the alternative is and how much it can be refined.

 

End of BuckGodot's quote

I'm dubious that there's even much of a new system, tbh. Most of what we're hearing from SD strongly suggests that all that's happening is the UI is being taken out - or, indeed, probably just being locked out but being left in, just with no tech unlocking it anymore. I'd hopeful that the second is the case, so we can at least mod it back in.

So has anyone considered overhauling the production system to use buildings instead of pop?

It would be alot of work but we could turn off pop = prod entirely and convert buildings from +% to +points.

Thoughts?

Wouldn't take long to actually do, and yes, I'm now seriously considering it; Paul just confirmed that:

a) there's no major change to the economy - they're just swapping the wheel for 'focuses'

and

b ) we won't be able to mod the wheel back in.

So yeah, if you like the wheel, go play another game basically.

I haven't seen anywhere that said that the AI never used the planetary wheel.  Perhaps you know more on that than me.

But you can use the planetary wheel to micromanage your planets in a way that gets you small gains (get that ship/research one turn early with no noticeable decrease elsewhere).  It's annoying to do, as a human.  Especially if you're dealing with dozens of planets.  But as an AI?  It's easy.  It's the sort of easy bread and butter that AIs are very good at.  

If the planetary wheel *isn't* being used by the AI, it's because it's a known easy exploit.

That said, if there's such a vocal contingent of wheel love, putting a game option in to have a wheel or no wheel seems like a pretty easy thing to do considering it's implemented already.

The per planet wheel as implemented at release needed changing. It wasted too much time and effort for those of us who enjoy the specialization mini-game. I would have preferred a solution that allowed high specialization without so much micro. However I am not disappointed with their decision to get rid of it altogether. They are essentially going back to the GalCiv2 style, where you can "focus" a planet's production with a single click, while controlling overall production with the global wheel. The adjacency bonuses add enough newness to specialization that I can still enjoy the specialization mini-game. And the amount of micro potential goes way down, at least for my playstyle, where specialization is not optional.

Two possible issues come to mind:

1. When you can focus production in a particular area, how does that impact usefulness of the research and wealth projects?

2. I'd really want the ability to choose to focus on social or military manufacturing for planets sponsoring a shipyard, so I hope they are thinking about that. Without this, all planets are subject to the settings of the global slider, which often doesn't make sense for the situation.

I think that population and production should still be linked, but the insane bonuses should be reduced especially in the late game. All Manufacturing buildings ought to carry major fixed costs, but each unit of manufacturing output should transform into (1 + wealth bonus on that planet + global wealth bonus) wealth. Research buildings likewise should carry a similar cost but their output should not create revenue. "Wealth" as a category should not exist as it is merely a token that accounts for production in the real economy.

This would have the added advantage of making expansion linear rather than exponential.

Clearly I do, yes, since it's been mentioned a lot by both Stardock and the community over the past four months. Also, notice how badly the AI plays; it's terrible research, econ and manufacturing scores. That's because it can't specialize for toffee. It uses global wheel settings that are set in the strategy definition files, and it makes no effort to min-max these in the short term either - they're just fixed values that are used for 30+ turns at a time.

Yes, it's exactly the sort of thing that allows an AI to compensate for being otherwise not very good at the game. As in, precisely what the AI really, desperately needs right now if it's going to challenge experienced players. As I've written elsewhere on these forums, you can even adjust the difficulty settings so that it micros on set numbers of worlds to increase with difficulty level.

See, personally I don't bother to micro the wheel that much - I have like 3 basic settings, 100% manu, 90%research 10%manu, and 90%econ 10% manu. I can't be bothered to micro more than that, and I never really need to. The AI can't even do that, and so by about turn 200 I massively outnumber AND outclass it. The AI's never going to be able to match my ships pound-for-pound, so it really needs to be able to out-produce me to stand a chance. The fact that it cannot do so, even when my total sum micromanagement involves visiting a planet twice in the whole game (first time to set 100% manu and queue up buildings, second time to set it to whatever it ought to be doing) makes it pretty obvious that the AI isn't doing any micro on that level whatsoever.

As outlined above, the wheel isn't used by the AI, and it has nothing to do with it being an easy exploit. It's because it's much quicker and easier to not bother coding the AI to do so. 

Yes, you'd think just leaving it in but deactivated so we can mod it back in (as it was in 1.3 opt-in 1) would be easy. I'm not sure why Stardock are so militantly against that, tbh.