Version .52 really does turn racial growth rates into an abstraction?

[pasty11]

Devs should definitely try and fix exploits, but you can still choose not to use it.

Is the option to not allow tech trading a fix? It is in my book.

[Icemania]

pasty, I play most games without Exploits, but it's become a very, very long list.

Disallowing Tech Trading is not a fix because it involves removing a feature from the game.

As shown in the Extreme Game of the Month, Diplomacy can still be milked for stunning amounts of cash even with Tech Trading disallowed. So according to your logic Matrix should add the ability to turn off Diplomacy and then we consider it a fix? No.

Matrix have simply not invested enough time in the AI or Exploits. But there is hope with plenty of patches to follow hopefully. The more we can align as a community the more likely it is that Matrix will fix some of these issues.

I'm happy to see the last patch helped a little, just didn't want to slow the game down.

[Spidey]

@ Cauldyth

That's nice, except for two things.

1) Nobody has so far presented the tiniest argument why this actually *is* an exploit. We're talking about seeing the same growth rate as is specified in the actual race files. That's an exploit about as much as seeing weapons do the same damage you specify in the components file, as far as I'm concerned. The single issue here wasn't that the growth rate was too high but rather that the AI was being moronic in its application of tax rates, causing the AI to block off its population growth at a level where the tax income was still rather minimal.

2) You never had to worry about it. Just like you don't have to use tech selling. Just like you don't have to do ship design. And yet here we are, with the growth mechanics rather messed up and all of us railroaded into a single approach to the early game. Isn't that nice? Instead of having more options, we have less options. Is that really what you want?

@ Tcby

They added the manual retrofit button in Shadows, yes. But I'm pretty sure you actually lost money when doing it back then. At least I never noticed making money off of ordering retrofits.

And it really doesn't sit well with me when the state can simply order civilians to fess up with an "upgrade payment" whenever the state damn well wants, and as often as the state wants.

@ Tehlongone

Explain how it's an exploit, please. Can you do that? And yes, I believe the worse exploits should be fixed before the stuff that's arguably not even an exploit. The issue here is AI stupidity and a mechanic that never really made too much sense in the first place. The AI is no less stupid and the mechanic makes no more sense now than it did before the patch, so what exactly has been gained?

This "fix" has simply nerfed the hell out of rushing. It hasn't done anything else whatsoever, aside from screwing over players who wanted to rush grow their population. If you didn't do that before, you're *not* better off now. If you liked having the option before, you're just shit out of luck. One less approach to the early game. But hey, why shouldn't we all play exactly the same way? isn't that what strategy games are all about? Railroading players into doing the same things?

@ Ozone

Yes, in reality human growth rate isn't actually the 18% stated in the Human race file bit how does that make any difference whatsoever? Are you, by any chance, being dense on purpose? Yes, the galactopedia is often wrong, but I'm mentioning the race files for a reason. You could try checking them, in case you don't believe me.

[Spidey]

@ Ice
You're messing with the page width. Could you please limit your plus one gazilion to maybe a quadrilion? I'm sure that'll still get the point across. That said, I do agree about fixing the AI and taking out all the actual exploits. I just don't think the growth mess they've implemented did that.

@ Pasty
I'm still not seeing why having a 14% growth rate with a race for which the rate specified by the race file was 14% is in any way an "exploit". It's what you get when you take away all the penalties. It's what you should get when you take away everything that might inhibit growth. How else would you interpret the meaning of "14% growth rate"? How does "14% growth rate" mean "this race will actually grow with 10% per year under the very best of circumstances"?

You're quite right that the relationship between taxation and racial growth isn't obvious, but it can be interpreted as an abstraction of letting colonies reinvest their money into things that would improve growth or having colonies give their money to the state and not reinvest the money. And suddenly it does make sense that colonies with no taxation grow faster. Even if we reject this abstraction, I'm absolutely stunned at how you get to the conclusion that not hindering your growth is actually an exploit.

Comparing the old mechanic with a bug, by the way, also doesn't make sense to me. It was not a bug at all. Bugs are unintentional problems with an application. What we had was simply a simplisic mechanic. And I'm very much in favor of having a better mechanic, but that's not what we got. You still maximise growth by setting taxes to zero and you're still hurting growth by increasing taxes, only now it simply doesn't do all that much dfference either way, which means you're now stuck with barely any growth and some money or a tiny bit of growth and no money.

What does that mean? My guess is that there's no feasible rushing anymore unless you're playing a science-heavy race that can get to the growth wonder in a reasonable amount of time. That single wonder is the only way to rush without using a high growth race. With every other race, it's just going to be slow as hell to reach max pop anywhere. It was already hard to get new colonies to a good population before near the end of the game. Now it's practically impossible unless you intentionally drag things out.

By the way, I'm having "fun" with a test game and I added five colonized moons around my homeworld. I have all tech but no wonders. All colonies have max rec and med facilities. The race I'm using is Quameno. There are no nearby aliens who can immigrate. The moons have quality 80, 85, 90, 95, and 100. Taxes are at 0% in my entire empire. Can you, from that information, deduce the growth rates I'm seeing?

[Tcby]

You got the money in shadows. You probably didn't notice because it is generally a tiny amount until your game has progressed a quite a bit...or unless you order ridiculous retrofits. What's interesting is that it wont let you order the manual retrofit if the state doesn't have the money for it, even though they don't pay. Presumably a bug.

[Spidey]

Holy crap. You're right, it was in Shadows too. And sure, it's not insane money if you use it sanely, but I just loaded up a game and made 70 grand on fitting 19 mining stations with more guns, better armor, and more shields.

So if I want to take advantage, I simply build "mini stations" and then retrofit them to the proper version. A cheap design costs 1200-1500, while a 2115 design might cost 6000 or more. But through forced retrofitting, the private sector contributes with 75% of the construction costs and they cover the maintenance. Suddenly there's no reason not to upgrade to mega mines once you're out of the early game.

So would you say this isn't an exploit at all?

[vmxa_slith]

I am not opposed to your position. However, lower taxes could lead to higher birth rate. People often delay having kids, till they have a little bit of savings.

I do think the game should not deal with that as it seems to just be a free boost to the human player.

[Tcby]

It can be exploited, for sure. But I don't view the base mechanic as an exploit. Assuming the game mechanics aren't changed, how would you suggest changing things to make it fairer? Reduce the amount the state receives for retrofits? Cap it somehow (probably not possible..)?

As I said previously, with sensible (normal) usage it isn't really a problem, and makes sense within the game economy. How to remove the exploit without removing the entire mechanic...?

Hmmmmmmmmmm

[Spidey]

The way I see it, the simple abuse remover is to have the state lose money instead of gain money when manually retrofitting. Just multiply by -1 when it's a forced retrofit. Late game empires where it makes sense to do large scale retrofitting can afford the cost anyway and during the period where money are more scarce, it creates a trade-off between getting your upgrades now but paying for it or letting the AI decide when in return for actually gaining money.

[Tcby]

Makes sense to me. That'd be quite good.

[Sithuk]

@Spidey: can you point me to the post number in the master wishlist thread where you have summarised your proposed solutions?

[Tehlongone]

ORIGINAL: Spidey
@ Tehlongone

Explain how it's an exploit, please. Can you do that? And yes, I believe the worse exploits should be fixed before the stuff that's arguably not even an exploit. The issue here is AI stupidity and a mechanic that never really made too much sense in the first place. The AI is no less stupid and the mechanic makes no more sense now than it did before the patch, so what exactly has been gained?

This "fix" has simply nerfed the hell out of rushing. It hasn't done anything else whatsoever, aside from screwing over players who wanted to rush grow their population. If you didn't do that before, you're *not* better off now. If you liked having the option before, you're just shit out of luck. One less approach to the early game. But hey, why shouldn't we all play exactly the same way? isn't that what strategy games are all about? Railroading players into doing the same things?

Nothing will ever make the AI less stupid only give it better behavior in one issue at a time. The mechanic has been changed so that it's previous behavior is no longer a retarded strategy.

It's not really an exploit excepting that the AI weren't making use of it which gave you an unfair advantage, but as it was really just utilizing game mechanics normally I didn't so much consider it an exploit as a stupid mechanic that the AI was blind to.

I guess everyone wants different things but what I want most is immersion and this improves it. You still can increase your population pretty fast I don't see the problem, if you think it's too slow I guess you can mod population growth faster. Low tax rate was just overpowered before.

The manual refit thing is certainly an exploit if you make use of it for making money and it'd probably be better if you made zero profit from ordering refits. It's really a separate issue though, maybe a thread should be made to discuss the possibility of a fix? Anyway, it's irrelevant to the growth change.

[Cauldyth]

I like Spidey's proposed solution, and it makes logical sense. If the government is going to mandate that a private firm
upgrade their hardware, then the government should pony up the cash!

[Cauldyth]

On the other hand, when Codeforce releases an expansion to flesh out the private sector (*hope* *hope*), you could let governments enforce such mandates, but abuse a corporation too much and it moves its operations to a different empire!

Hmm, we could have high tax rates do the same thing! Two problems solved!

[buglepong]

No, that doesnt even happen in real life. The government sets the rules and private companies must folow

Thing is right now the private sector is completely automatic and independent. They spin money out of nowhere yet have zero need for it other than expanding the civvy fleet. That doesnt cost much, so they have tons of capital that the player can tax or otherwise try to get. It seems legitimate idea to tax or get money out of civilians so actually it isnt particularly immersion breaking.

Whats questionable is how civvies get their revenues. It just seems to generate cash on its own without very much player intervention. The player just builds mines and ports and thats it. The better solution is to have the player actively help the private sector make money instead of it acting completely on its own. In this way the empire economy model follows that of real life economies that take actice roles in supporting private development, and naturally how well you can develop that economy the more money you can tax out of it

[SirFinbar]

Being able to raise the tax from 0 to 50% regularly is unrealistic anyway. This has removed much of the need to do so.

I just leave it automated now, and no longer have to worry about gimping myself as much. I like the change. I'm really new to the game though.

[BlueTemplar]

And so you fix that by turning growth rates into theoretical numbers that can't actually be attained in the game? What's the reasoning here, Elliot and Erik?

Why are all growth rates universally slowed down?

- IMHO it's because of this : as you said :

And instead of making the AI smarter, Erik and Elliot decided to nerf the players for no particularly obvious reason.

The reason is obvious, actually. It's much harder to make the AI play the game better than to nerf the strategies that the AI doesn't know how to use.

Why do the growth rates seen in the game no longer match the growth rates in the race files?

Another simple explanation I can think of : it's much easier for the dev(s) to program in a hidden scaling factor, and then to tweak it when game balance needs to be changed, than to scale every single instance of growth rate in racial files (and galactopedia).
You can see examples of this everywhere in the game : construction rates, manufacturing rates, extraction rates (and hidden extraction caps), collector potential energy, ship costs...

BTW, haven't slowed growth rates made the strategy of invading planets for population much stronger?

The whole wonder concept is massively skewed towards the player.

Probably only because the AI doesn't really know how to play the game.

I asked for the option to mod the current wonders to national wonders.
That way the supertech races wont be able to make themselves into hypertech races forever.

I'm not sure that's a good idea. If you nerf all the powerful strategies, you will make the game boring.

The entire notion that low taxes leads to higher birth rates is ridiculous and should be taken out of the game.

Not more ridiculous that population*development somehow generating money out of thin air.

High taxes should always lead to an eventual rebellion on planet if not scaled back after time.

IRL rebellions are usually caused by food scarcity, though very high taxes can certainly lead to that. However, if I'm not mistaken 50% tax is still quite low historically.

A thing I don't get about tax is this :
Why if my colony GDP is 20K, and tax is 10% (100% compliance), I only get 1K in taxes, and not 2K?
Why if my colony GDP is 20K, and tax is 25% (90% compliance), I only get 3.5K in taxes, and not 4.5K?
Why if my colony GDP is 19K, and tax is 50% (65% compliance), I only get 3K in taxes, and not 6K?
Looks like there are hidden factors here too...

I think that a good balance could be achieved by making it so that on the global scale you would get the same overall growth rate ragardless of where the taxes are being collected. So having two planets with 10% taxes gets you the same total growth as having those planets with 0% and roughly 20%. This way the choice of taxes would be about local resource allocation and the total cash you need.

I'm not sure that's a good idea, and it probably wouldn't work anyway, considering that growth rate is exponential (it is, right?).

Just to be clear, I'd like the AI to set a world's tax rate to zero to maximise the growth rate until the world's population capacity is achieved. Then to set the tax rate to the highest level which achieves a positive happiness. The issue with hardcoded population bands for setting tax level is that a world's population capacity varies depending on a number of factors. Better to have the tax band adjusted by how full a world is.

For example,
[Population/Maximum population] [tax level]
0-50% zero tax
50%-95% low tax
95%-100% high tax

I'll go further : why not just having it to be a continuous function, with the growth rate being too a continuous function depending on planet "fill rate"?

Its not logical AT ALL that low tax rate should maximise growth rate, if the game has had that relationship in the past and it has been changed that is entirely positive. If now there is no way to achieve maximum growth rate, then that means there must be progressive moves going forward to implement systems that logically relate to growth rate, not demands to a return to a completely illogical and broken system.

It hasn't been changed. It just has been rebalanced. That's one of the core game mechanics. I don't see why it would be changed to something else completely different.

I manage to play with automation, but...

- Can't manual tax, too much benefit
- Can't trade, too easy to exploit
- Can't beam for wonders, too powerful
- Can't explore manually, boo much benefit
- Can't optimize ship designs, too powerful
- Can't research manually, must take the AI detours for a level playing field.
- Better not aim for the enemy good colones early, too good.
- Better not abuse strong troop transport beneath space defenses, too cheap.

pasty, I play most games without Exploits, but it's become a very, very long list.

Disallowing Tech Trading is not a fix because it involves removing a feature from the game.

The traditional 4X solution to lack of AI smarts is either giving huge bonuses to the AI or to play multiplayer. Sadly, the second option isn't present for DW.

Growth rate being linked to tax was never really logical.It's the poor masses with less money that breed like rabbits.

Less tax making the planet good for migration is logical.

What I find logical (within the game paradigm), is if taxes and overpopulation affected happiness and happiness affected growth rate and emigration rate. Though if I'm not mistaken it already works that way?

And by the way, as I also specified initially, this really isn't the biggest exploit in the game at all. Try ordering a manual retrofit of your 50 civilian mining stations and see what happens. THAT is an exploit. Try selling a tech the AI doesn't have much use of for every last dime the AI opponent has. THAT is an exploit.

Those aren't exploits either, nor bugs. They're, like the "0% tax "exploit"", game mechanics that the AI doesn't know how to use properly. Building (instead of retrofitting) mining stations has the same effect, by the way.

And you can do it over and over, milking money out of the private sector, which was harder before when it wasn't something that happened instantly.

You can achieve a similar effect by scrapping civilian ships. If I'm not mistaken, the private sector will happily start rebuilding ships. Obviously, in this case you lose all the resources that were used to make those ships, as well as their cargo and fuel storage contents.

In some ways i think what it does is remove a layer of inconvenience. Those mining stations don't have plants to construct the parts they utilize in the retrofit. To prevent distribution of parts (ie freighters picking up built parts from spaceports and taking then to the stations) taking forever, the stations build immediately and the spaceport still gets paid.

Mining stations not having plants and yards is meaningless to the discussion, since if I'm not mistaken the private sector transfers you the money as soon as you order the mining station retrofit, regardless of whether it has the parts to retrofit or not. And freighters DO pick up resources and distribute them to station cargo (625 per station it would seem), and I'm pretty sure the stations then need those resources for retrofits.

I don't see why zero taxing should have a much better effect than say 10%

Well, from what I understood, there was the issue that going from 1% taxes to 0% taxes gave a MUCH higher population growth boost than going from 2% to 1% or 3% to 2%. Is that right?

Human's growth rate, in reality, is between 1% and 2%.

18% wow... I don't know when human turned into rabbits, but it's quite an amazing orgy down there!

Are you sure that 18% is an annual growth rate? (Any kind of exponential growth that doesn't end up as logistic growth is unsustainable by the way.)

And it really doesn't sit well with me when the state can simply order civilians to fess up with an "upgrade payment" whenever the state damn well wants, and as often as the state wants.

Well, why not? Considering the civilian AI is not that smart either, this seems like a good solution to me.
Honestly, what I would like to see in this game is if everything you chose to be automated became private sector. And you would have the choice of 0% state, 100% state, and everything in-between. Then your race and government might perhaps influence the effectiveness of the state and private sectors.

The way I see it, the simple abuse remover is to have the state lose money instead of gain money when manually retrofitting. Just multiply by -1 when it's a forced retrofit.

That doesn't make sense within the current game mechanics if the mining station is privately owned.

Thing is right now the private sector is completely automatic and independent. They spin money out of nowhere yet have zero need for it other than expanding the civvy fleet. That doesnt cost much, so they have tons of capital that the player can tax or otherwise try to get. It seems legitimate idea to tax or get money out of civilians so actually it isnt particularly immersion breaking.

Whats questionable is how civvies get their revenues. It just seems to generate cash on its own without very much player intervention. The player just builds mines and ports and thats it.

They get the money out of population*development. You don't tax their capital (stock), but that money generation (flow).

The better solution is to have the player actively help the private sector make money instead of it acting completely on its own. In this way the empire economy model follows that of real life economies that take actice roles in supporting private development, and naturally how well you can develop that economy the more money you can tax out of it

This is pretty much already how the game works.

Being able to raise the tax from 0 to 50% regularly is unrealistic anyway. This has removed much of the need to do so.

It's how the game works. Happiness depends on the tax rate, not tax rate change.
By the way, I don't see why there's an arbitrary cap of 50% tax.

P.S.: What IS bugging me is some ways how the economic system is implemented :
When civilians build ships, they pay their cost of resources*scaling_factor to the state. But (if I'm not mistaken) when state builds ships it just destroys the amount of money of resources*scaling_factor? So neither the state nor the private sector actually "owns" the resources? And why is there that scaling_factor?

[Icemania]

ORIGINAL: BlueTemplar

And instead of making the AI smarter, Erik and Elliot decided to nerf the players for no particularly obvious reason.

The reason is obvious, actually. It's much harder to make the AI play the game better than to nerf the strategies that the AI doesn't know how to use.

As I've posted elsewhere for new colonies all the AI needed to do is set the tax rate at 0% until that colony reaches maximum population.

In any case it's great an exploit has finally been nerfed.

[BlueTemplar]

As I already said, I don't think this is an exploit, and might make conquering population much more interesting than growing it yourself.

But after thinking some more about it, there might be a fundamental game design flaw in how the tax rate mechanic is handled :
Why would you NOT run taxes at 0% everywhere if tax rate doesn't change the amount of money your empire generates (state+private), while lower taxes improves your happiness and (therefore?) your population growth rate, while not having any negative impact I'm aware of?

[Icemania]

BlueTemplar, have whatever view you want on what is and is not an exploit, but again the AI could easily have been fixed in this case. You said the "reason is obvious" and it is not.

I agree the population growth rate / migration changes strengthens the importance of homeworld invasions even further. The problem is, if you goal is to dominate the AI, homeworld invasions are already the best strategy by a country mile.

Tax means income for the state. You can't run 0% taxes everywhere (if you aren't exploiting Diplomacy that is) if you want to fund your fleets and troops etc. Typically that means I get my homeworld to maximum population quickly, then tax it, to fund expansion ... and all new colonies have 0% tax until maximum population.