My thoughts on a rather simple fix on the balance of the game....

from GalCiv3 Forums

It seems to me that the game is balanced for smaller maps.  This balance breaks down fairly quickly on the larger maps and does not scale at all into the insane or super large maps.

 

First things first.  1 pop = 1 production.        This should be true only for the Capitol planets or with Civ Unique or Galaxy unique improvements.     Or perhaps something that can be purchased as a racial trait.

Otherwise I think there should be a scaling drop off in production as population increases.

Pop 1 to 8         1 to 1
Pop 8.1 to 12     80% efficiant,  then 70%  then 60%  then 50%   as population increases...   or make it scale so that you always get 1 to 1 for first 8 pop but then the additional pop is less and less and less and less efficient.  

Perhaps efficiency centers can be built that increases the efficiency of the population, but as population increases the infrastructure to support it automatically increases so the population should become less efficient.

 

Make Happiness/morale more damaging/important.     Give bigger benifits for having happy people, and much more drastic impacts to having unhappy people.  
Other games have riots, or strikes or shutdowns....  perhaps total production needs to be impacted severely by having unhappy people.

Change the large empire penalty from a static moral hit to a scaling income or income and moral  hit that scales with the map size.    If I am on a small map with 20 planets that is a totally different game than an immense map with 2000 planets    The thresholds of when your empire is large should scale.  My thought is that is should ALWAYS be based on math such as this:  Number of Planets in My empire /Number of Planets I am ABLE to Habitat in Galaxy.   Anything over .10 should be large at the beginning of the game...   give us techs that offset this so that by the end of the game we are looking at .50 or .75 before it hits.


My point is when playing on smaller maps with fewer AI players the game is actually surprisingly balanced.


It just utterly fails at the things is SHOULD be best at and are the focus and bragging rights of the whole 64bit move.... HUGE maps with HUGE numbers of opponents.

 



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Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top


First things first.  1 pop = 1 production.        This should be true only for the Capitol planets or with Civ Unique or Galaxy unique improvements.     Or perhaps something that can be purchased as a racial trait.

Otherwise I think there should be a scaling drop off in production as population increases.

Pop 1 to 8         1 to 1
Pop 8.1 to 12     80% efficiant,  then 70%  then 60%  then 50%   as population increases...   or make it scale so that you always get 1 to 1 for first 8 pop but then the additional pop is less and less and less and less efficient.  

Perhaps efficiency centers can be built that increases the efficiency of the population, but as population increases the infrastructure to support it automatically increases so the population should become less efficient.

End of quote

We had something like that in Beta, not sure why they took it out but i think it had to do with many people reporting bugs since they just didnt understand it ...
 


Make Happiness/morale more damaging/important.     Give bigger benifits for having happy people, and much more drastic impacts to having unhappy people.  
Other games have riots, or strikes or shutdowns....  perhaps total production needs to be impacted severely by having unhappy people.

End of quote

i would think something like -200% Production on 0% Moral, or even better make it like GC2 where you would lose population when your moral was too low

 


Change the large empire penalty from a static moral hit to a scaling income or income and moral  hit that scales with the map size.    If I am on a small map with 20 planets that is a totally different game than an immense map with 2000 planets    The thresholds of when your empire is large should scale.  My thought is that is should ALWAYS be based on math such as this:  Number of Planets in My empire /Number of Planets I am ABLE to Habitat in Galaxy.   Anything over .10 should be large at the beginning of the game...   give us techs that offset this so that by the end of the game we are looking at .50 or .75 before it hits.


My point is when playing on smaller maps with fewer AI players the game is actually surprisingly balanced.


It just utterly fails at the things is SHOULD be best at and are the focus and bragging rights of the whole 64bit move.... HUGE maps with HUGE numbers of opponents.

End of quote

scaling is already planned as far as i know

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Diminishing returns from population aren't really needed tbh - tall empires are already hugely disadvantaged compared to wide empires. The other stuff is good ideas, which is largely why I already modded them in.

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Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I prefer to run an unmodded game.     I agree diminishing returns for high population are really not needed.... provided that the "it is too crowded' hit to happiness from GCII were implemented and the moral hits were improved.


The biggest issue I have is that with extra large maps it is nearly impossible to keep my population happy with the current large empire penalty.

 

yet even with a lot of my planets at 0% content...  my production bonuses are such that it doesn't seem to matter at all.     That should not be the case.

 

I should not be rewarded for making planets with nothing but food and factories...    but I can get away with it provided other planets are nothing but food and research  or food and money....

 

 

 

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Yes, LEP's general piss-poorness was debated to death a couple of months ago and is now more or less taken as a given. Most people playing maps where empires will average 30+ planets either remove LEP altogether, or play with patriotic. It manages to be too severe in its stacking and not severe enough in its effects simultaneously. It's one of the biggest design failures in the game right now, since it actually incentivizes the player to just ignore morale altogether, does little to prevent expansion or slow the rate of expansion, and makes very rapid infinite city sprawl the most effective strategy by a long way.

 

This is a big problem really; I don't feel like I'm a fledgling power just starting out into space, because by turn 20 I have 20+ planets. The player can arrange things so that he grows at a genuinely exponential rate, doubling his number of colonies every X turns... and he's not significantly punished for doing so, at least no more than a player who expands much more carefully would be.