Looking for a space 4x

[Jealous Deva]

I'm really enjoying this now too, the only things I have noticed are mainly due to my lack of knowledge rather than faults with the game, but I wish they were better explained:

1. I'm not sure how exactly to guage influence yet, I haven't noticed my inf. starbases or embassies really having much of an effect.
2. I'm not sure what the benefit of having high pop is other than taxes, it seems to only effect that and not production.  So there are basically 2 types of planets I build: 

Production/research:  1 Farm, all others manufacturing or labs based on need

Cash cow:  3+ farms, econ buildings, morale buildings

3.  Is there any point in not just spamming colony buildings like crazy in the first few turns with your starting cash?  I had a really hard time with normal or better AI until I figured out to do this.  It sort of seems lame to just send out random colony ships with no escorts in the early game.

4.  There seems to be a point where I build all the buildings I want and social production is wasted, if I could just automatically kill all social producion on a planet at that point it would be nice.  I can focus research or military but usually I just want to kill social and have the other two functioning.

[Trippy]

2. I'm not sure what the benefit of having high pop is other than taxes, it seems to only effect that and not production.

You need income to convert your manufacturing and research capacity into usable "points" (1 BC -> 1 MP/RP) so it doesn't help to build lots of manufacturing and research buildings if you don't have the income to "power" them.

3.  Is there any point in not just spamming colony buildings like crazy in the first few turns with your starting cash?  I had a really hard time with normal or better AI until I figured out to do this.  It sort of seems lame to just send out random colony ships with no escorts in the early game.

That's pretty much the standard strategy in these 4x games (including games like Civilization) -- colonize as many planets as you can afford to and reasonably defend as quickly as possible. Getting a head start over your opponents gives you a big advantage throughout the rest of the game.

4.  There seems to be a point where I build all the buildings I want and social production is wasted, if I could just automatically kill all social producion on a planet at that point it would be nice.  I can focus research or military but usually I just want to kill social and have the other two functioning.

If you aren't building any social buildings it's supposed to not spend any BC converting your social manfacturing capacity into social points on that planet (as documented in the manual) but the planet overview doesn't show your social points in parens like it does your military points if you aren't building any ships. I'm not sure if that's just a display bug or if it's actually wasting your BCs. Unfortunately Stardock has the obnoxious requirement that you have to create an account just to download patches and their stupid account creation system won't send me an account verfiy email even though I tried three different email accounts so I can't test out the patch to see if that fixes this bug.

[Jealous Deva]

Well even though it's not taking BC it's still taking production capacity isn't it?  I could be using those on research or military instead if I have plenty of money? Basically what I've been doing is just putting the social slider to 0 when all my planets are full, but I'd like to be able to do this more on a planet by pllanet basis so my first 2 or 3 don't have industrial capacity going to waste while the others are developing.


Or am I just misunderstanding things and the sliders on the screen just affect how much money goes into things rather than industrial capacity devoted to those things?   If I'm at 100% funding does that mean that everything is fully funded and the bottom 3 sliders don't matter, or do the bottom 3 refer to industrial capacity and so putting 100% funding and 100% to research means my whole civ production capacity iis completely dedicated to research?

[Tebonas]

What you can do on per planet basis is to devote the planets resources mainly to research by highlighting it on the colony screen. Research goes up. Social and Military production both go down.

And yes, the way you described it is how the slider works. 100% research on the slider means no more social and military production galaxywide (I regulary put it at 98%/1%/1% in the research victory endgame).

Spamming colony ships is pretty much the beginning strategy to go. Everybody is still in exploration mode and usually the AI doesn't crank up Troop transports to attack your colonies. Grab all you can and consolidate the borders.

[Trippy]

Or am I just misunderstanding things and the sliders on the screen just affect how much money goes into things rather than industrial capacity devoted to those things?   If I'm at 100% funding does that mean that everything is fully funded and the bottom 3 sliders don't matter, or do the bottom 3 refer to industrial capacity and so putting 100% funding and 100% to research means my whole civ production capacity iis completely dedicated to research?

The later which is totally counter-intutitive given the upper funding bar. You would think at 100% funding all your manfacturing and researching points were being "spent" but they aren't. It's also extremely counter-intutitive that the research funding slider affects the military and social sliders/spending amounts since the research points come from a completely separate pool. Not one of the better designed features, IMO.

[Tebonas]

Hmm, am I missing something here?

Tax rate: How much of your citizens money is given to you.

Second slider: How much of that money is used to channel into Social/Military/Research. The rest is given to you as cold hard cash.

Subsliders: How those funds are distributed among those three areas.


Where is the counterintuivity?

[Trippy]

Hmm, am I missing something here?

Tax rate: How much of your citizens money is given to you.

Second slider: How much of that money is used to channel into Social/Military/Research. The rest is given to you as cold hard cash.

Subsliders: How those funds are distributed among those three areas.

Where is the counterintuivity?

Because the vast majority of your research points come from entirely seperate structures than military/social points (structures like your capital being the rare exceptions). If you max out the research slider that means all your manufacturing structures are idle which makes absolutely no sense when you have a separate funding slider. Why can't I increase the funding slider to max out both my manufacturing and research buildings (and then split the manufacturing between military and social)? In other words at any given time you always have excess capacity that you can't use even with the Industry funding at 100% which is a stupid way to build an economy.

Tax rate: How much of your citizens money is given to you.

Second slider: How much of that money is used to channel into Social/Military/Research. The rest is given to you as cold hard cash.

No those are independent as it states in the manual:

Your spend rate, however, is not tied to your tax rate in any way.

If you are funding your Industry at 100% that doesn't mean you are spending all your tax as Industry. The 100% means you are spending some fraction (not 100%!!!) of your total Industry on manufacturing and research points.

[Tebonas]

Never read the manual up to now, I'm afraid you might be right. Thats really counterintuitive then.

[Trippy]

Here's an example of what I'm talking about for those of you at home scratching your heads wondering what we're blithering about.

This is what my starting planet summary looks like at the beginning of second scenarino in the campaign: Planet Summary
Notice how my Industry at the bottom is at 24 mp or 24 manufacturing points and my Research is at 24 tp or 24 technology points. It costs 1 BC (billion credits) to convert an mp or tp into something usable. Also note that I'm not building any ships or building any social strutures at the moment (though you can't see that in this screen) since it's the start of the scenario.

Here's what the default Domestic Policy screen looks like: Domestic Policy
My Industry spending is set to 50% and my allocation between military (used to build ships), social (used to build planet structures) and research are each at 1/3. If you look at the Expenses in the upper right you can see that 4 BC is being put into Research which means that planet (since it's the only one I own at the moment) is converting 4 technology points into usable research. How does it know to spend 4 BC on research? That's a very good question which unforunately also reveals that there is a serious bug in the game. Oops. Let's move on to the next example and I'll come back and explain these numbers.

Here's what the Domestic Policy screen looks like with Industry Spending at 100% and Research at 100%: Domestic Policy, Research 100%
As we can see we've maxed our tp production (research production) by spending 24 BC (plus 1 BC for structure maintenance) which sort of makes sense except of course that we now have 24 mp sitting idle even though our Industry Spending bar is maxed. Those of you paying really really close attention may have noticed that in the Planet Summary screen the mps are listed under the "Industry" category so 100% of Industrial spending = 24 mp which is clearly why it's capped 24 BC! (+1 for maintenance) except we're talking about research and tps here not mps so why is the slider called Industrial spending and how come I can't max both?

Here's what the Domestic Policy screen looks like with Industry Spending at 100%, Research at 50% and Military at 50%: Domestic Policy, Military 50%, Research 50%
Hmm...why did our total Industry spending drop down to 13 BC even though the slider is still at 100%? That's because we aren't building any ships so anything we've allocated to Military doesn't get spent converting mp into usable military production (as documented in the manual).

Here's what the Domestic Policy screen looks like with Industry Spending at 100%, Social at 50% and Military at 50%: Domestic Policy, Social 50%, Research 50%
Okay now our Industry spending is back up to 25 BC and is evenly split between Social and Research except...we aren't building any Social buildings. That's a bug (or at least it contradicts the manual).

So going back to the default Policy screen the 8 BC in Industry spending is from the max BC it can spend at 100% (which is 25 BC in this case) divided by 2 (since it's at 50%) times 2/3rds since no BC is being spent on Military which gives us the 8 BC. Make sense?

Finally note how in the domestic policies the amount I'm spending on my Industry at 100% does not match what I'm generating as Income. That's because as I said in my previous post they are not linked even though the placement of the controls in the UI sort of suggests that they are.

Edit: I did a quick test to try and clarify what the Industry capacity spending slider is based on. I built a Basic Lab on my otherwise default starting planet to add 5 tp (+24 tp from capital = 29 tp total). Now if I crank the Industrial spending slider to 100% and set research to 100% it'll spend 30 BC (29 BC for the 29 tp +1 BC for Maintenance). If I split the spending 50% Social, 50 % Research then it'll allocate 12 BC to Social (50% of the max Industry of 24 mp), 14 BC to Research (50% of the max Research rounded down), +1 for Maintenance.

[Jealous Deva]

So then am I right in that there's no way (say if I'm just drowning in money) to fully fund all of my research and industrial capacity to 100%?

That's very strange.


Edit - I just said it a strange way too, what I mean is that I would think there would be a seperate slider for research spending from 0 to 100%, then the bottom two industry sliders would choose between social and military.

[Trippy]

So then am I right in that there's no way (say if I'm just drowning in money) to fully fund all of my research and industrial capacity to 100%?

AFAIK that is correct. I haven't played all that much yet so maybe there's something way down the tech tree that changes this behavior but I doubt it.

That's very strange.

Yes, yes it is.

Edit - I just said it a strange way too, what I mean is that I would think there would be a seperate slider for research spending from 0 to 100%, then the bottom two industry sliders would choose between social and military.

I'm assuming they did it this way for some currently unexplained gameplay reasons but yeah the way I would setup the UI would be to have one slider set the funding for your mps, one slider set the funding for your tps and one slider to split the mps between military and social. That would reduce the number of sliders from 4 to 3 and it would be less confusing in general.