Is there too much money in this game?

[Lihnit23]

ORIGINAL: Kadrush

The problem is that the AI is stupid, it always get out of steel, gold and/or caslon and poorly uses it fleets...

Without resources the AI creates huge build quees with hundres of ships and cant spend all the money...shame for late game.

Interesting. I adjusted every races' mining extraction rate using the races file (except the naxxilians whom I play) to 100. Maybe this will help with the AI's recource problems. I'll see what happens.

I just did some testing on extraction for my unadjusted race (the Naxxilians) vs. a couple adjusted races using a standardized continental planet for my control. After 1 year, the Nax mined about 3500 gold while the other 2 races mined about 6000 gold.

So the mining adjustment seems to work. Cool beans.

[Philo]

No! Don't do it man, don't adjust anything! you'll ruin the developers' grand vision (which is in perfect balance already) of the game!

Just filling for Registered55 till he comes back.

[Tophat1815]

ORIGINAL: Philo

No! Don't do it man, don't adjust anything! you'll ruin the developers' grand vision (which is in perfect balance already) of the game!

Just filling for Registered55 till he comes back.

Yea I was in withdrawal,its been what 24 hrs since the last batch of sarcasm?[8|]

[Beag]

Since I´m new to the game (got it 5 days ago) but not the genre, I´ll give my 2 cents.

Every strategy game has a snowball effect, and it has been like that since the first Civilization and Master of Orion. Eventually you had so many colonies/cities that losing became almost impossible.

To try to make it a bit harder, concepts like corruption and random events were added, which helped brake the snowball effect, to an extent. Ultimatedly however, if the AI is bad, that will feel like an artificial challenge, and not fun. 3 points.

1- If cash is too abundant for the player, is it for the AI as well? How exactly it uses its cash in this game? Does it activelly buy tech, for example? I´d like some input from more experienced gamers - does the AI build insufficient ammounts? Or is the problem HOW it uses its ships?
2- How often people reload? It´s a common issue that some people reload often if something unexpected, fix or prevent the problem, then forget about it. Obivously this WILL make the game feel easy, because the challenge was erased... it´s one reason why multiplayer games are more interesting - because you can´t reload. If AI sends a invasion fleet where people don´t expect, some will reload. And if to prevent that you build defense bases in every single location, suddenly cash won´t be as abundant.
3- How the AI uses intelligence? Because honestly, intelligence in the game is pretty potent. I had a Ikkuro agent with very decent stats and I stole technology every 3 months. In other game, I had an agent with psyops bnnus, and created one revolt per year. If the AI, with Ketarovs, was agressive with agents, it could be hell for the player hehe.

[Cauldyth]

I'm no expert player, but I'll give my own observations.

If cash is too abundant for the player, is it for the AI as well?

It doesn't seem to be, which raises the question of why. I don't micromanage my economy, I generally let the automation take care of it. Leaving my economy on automation, I still end up with piles of money. You can spy on the AI's cash reserves via the diplomacy trade window, so you can see how much cash they have on hand. More often than not, they're pretty short on money.

They aren't fielding larger fleets than me, so it's not maintenance. Their tech doesn't seem more advanced than mine, so it's not crash research.

To be honest, I don't know what they're doing with their money, or if they're just not getting the money in the first place.

How often people reload?

Virtually never. While I've been known to give into that temptation in other games, I essentially never do it with DW.

[jpwrunyan]

Since this got necroed I might as well pull out my horse beating stick again.


As for reloading, I never do it. I either win or lose and if I have to reload I have lost. In a game where it is so easy to get so much money already and where the challenges are otherwise lacking, this is how I keep the game interesting.

Since building your economy still has so few interesting choices... Dont tell me this horse is dead. The horse is dead only when I say it is!

[onomastikon]

The horse is not dead until Eliott says so!

[Beag]

Since when a thread from one month ago which is totally relevant even in the latest beta is necro?

Some other observations:

1- Pirates giving information is an unfair advantage for the player. Who wouldn´t pay 30k credits to know the location of 2 capitals ships and other 4 smaller ships that can be retired for lots of tech? Such information should be worth 50k, and be much less available. It certainly is a huge advantage when someone begins the game with a young civilization. The AI does send construction ships to abandoned ships in systems, at least - just much slower than the player.
2- The game is probably not tuned to be played on normal difficulty. "Normal difficulty" is very subjective, in some games the learning curve to beat a "normal" A is short (like 3, 4 games), in the others longer. in this one I´d consider it to be relatively short, so I´d consider "normal" to be easy and a setting for begginers. Playing or harder difficulties will make cash more valuable. Same about AI agressiveness - more agressive AI = more wars = more cash spent to replace ships and bases.
3- The economy model is simple for a reason, not to burden the player. If someone here played games like Victoria 2 from Paradox, they should recall that it unecessary to micro how much coffee, coal etc they have to buy; all that matters is programming trade and conquest to get the necessary goods. And that is the right decision, because as empires becomes larger such details get very tedious very fast. The other option would be to make the economy dependant on very few goods, or make playing on galaxies with few colonies and more difficult expansion the standard, so that micro´ing all the assets is manageable.

[jpwrunyan]

As an asside re necroing:
I like how you both asked and answered your question in the same sentence.

I guess necromancy is in the eye of the beholder.

[jpwrunyan]

Re #3 above
Since when does a supply-demand model with dozens of unique resources qualify as "simple"?

The economy of the game is not simple. The problem is that it is not challenging and the decisions are not interesting. The ONE economic strategy solution in DW is to just build mining stations. Which one and where doesnt really matter because the answer is always: build them all why not? Not enough time/constructors? Just build constructors and merrily click away on every planet in range, who cares? Since you have so much money at your disposal this simple solution is just as simple to implement. Yawn.

The strategy is the same whether you are at war or at peace. Have trade agreements or no. Are boskaran or teekan. Etc.

[MartialDoctor]

I haven't read all of the posts but, for the time being, doing something similar to what Abraxis states is pretty spot on for making a challenging game where you don't accumulate too much money. If you make the game challenging, you won't have too much money... Unless you sell research around, which I also consider an exploit (since they are priced far too high now).

Basically, there are a few problems with the economy, as I've seen it:

1) A big problem is there's nothing, save for military, that really costs you anything. Industry and research cost next to nothing. It's too easy to get your research up to full speed right at the beginning. The maintenance on Manufacturing Plants and Research, specifically, need to be higher. This would make it so that your industry maintenance costs are high and a part of the game. Currently, they are so insignificant that they can be ignored.

If you're paying, say, 1K in maintenance for each research plant that generates 20 research points, then that starts adding up. Do something similar with Manufacturing Plants and your industry also starts getting expensive.

In this way, industry and research also starts costing money to maintain. It will also make the research and manufacturing techs more worthwhile as you could save a lot of money if you increase your manufacturing and research plant's effectiveness.

2) Ships, Stations, and Space Ports are too cheap. I'm talking initial cost, not maintenance cost. The maintenance cost should not be 1/6 of the initial cost. The initial cost needs to be about 2.5x higher than it is now.

3) Disputed stations, techs, and the cost of wars all need to be greatly reduced in diplomacy. They are worth far too much as is.

4) And that gets me to another big part of the problem... the AI saves a ton of money. Which is why a lot of you also save a ton of money. If the AI spent more on military, players would have to do the same in order to keep up.

Unfortunately, these things aren't moddable. I really hope in the future these are either changed or made moddable, as I'd really like to change the ways these above things work; it would create a different economic model for the game.

Until then, just create a challenge, as Abraxis stated.

[Beag]

ORIGINAL: jpwrunyan

Re #3 above
Since when does a supply-demand model with dozens of unique resources qualify as "simple"?

The economy of the game is not simple. The problem is that it is not challenging and the decisions are not interesting. The ONE economic strategy solution in DW is to just build mining stations. Which one and where doesnt really matter because the answer is always: build them all why not? Not enough time/constructors? Just build constructors and merrily click away on every planet in range, who cares? Since you have so much money at your disposal this simple solution is just as simple to implement. Yawn.

Well it´s simple in the sense that as you said, the decision process is simple: have cash -> build mining station, don´t have >- wait a bit more or sell galaxy maps or other stuff (it´s very funny, getting 60k cash for each galaxy map you sell makes building Wonders early pretty easy). And by the fact that the AI sends resources automatically, imagine if the player had to micro all those transports...

But honestly which 4X game wasn´t like that? MOO 2 was like that too: got cash, build stuff. Some critical wars here and there, and the snowball begins to roll. Civilization series? Same. Paradox´s games? Same.

So the real question is, how to stop the snowball from forming too early and in an interesting way. Depending on the settings of the game, race and government the snowball can begin to roll early (Zenox) or later (insectoids, Mortalen...) One way I´ve found to make the game much harder is getting races and governments with bad research. Good luck getting decent research with Mortalen and despotism... and with all that crash research going on cash will go fast too.

[Beag]

As for the obvious exploits, simple: don´t use them. Don´t sell techs and maps. No one forces the player to do that.

Another silly thing that happened in a game was a race I was friendly with offering 3 techs for a disputed mining station that I had in their territory (that didn´t produce anything special at all)... disputed bases are WAY more overpriced than tech.

[Kayoz]

ORIGINAL: jpwrunyan
And yes, i would allow the ai to "cheat". It is preferable to me having to make deliberately sub-optimal decisions, which was my whole point. Notably, no one has disputed it. Thank you everyone for agreeing with me.

I seem to remember an interview with Sid Meyer when he was asked about AI development in the Civ games, in which he said that the AI does indeed "cheat" - as does the AI in every strategy game. How much is a matter of game balancing. But his position was that every game does it. I wish I could find the interview...

ORIGINAL: jpwrunyan
About modding the game to uh... Fix it. That is such a wrong headed answer to these issues i dont know where to begin. Perhaps with inventing a time machine and then using it to travel to the past to sterilize your grandpa so you would never be born. In those days gov sterilization was legal.

If you accept the parallel universes theory, going back in time to sterilize one's grandfather may just put the time-traveller in a different branch. But the whole parallel universe theory is rather hard to prove. Not to mention time travel itself (backwards - forwards is quite simple).

That said, Arizona has a pretty weird idea of time in that something has happened two weeks before it actually has indeed happened. Who am I to question the wisdom of the elected leaders of Arizona?

Not to mention the dubious veracity of your statement that sterilization was legal. Laws vary greatly from state to state- saying "sterilization was legal" is akin to stating that it rained - without specifying when and where.

ORIGINAL: jpwrunyan
Wtf? Modding is not about fixing problems in a game. If your game requires user modification to fix issues, that *is* the problem. Stop telling people they can fix the game by modding it. Do you know how crappy that makes the game sound to an outside observer? Please. Stop. I want to spend time playing the game, not fixing it--just like the 99.9% of the game-playing community. Not modding aka fixing it!

I don't think I've heard anyone claim that mods "fix" the game, but are rather seen as methods to mitigate the perceived deficiencies.

But you're correct - Elliot needs to address these issues. Unfortunately, I suspect tweaking economics is rather far down his list of defects. Perhaps he will see the acceptance problems in hard coding these, and allow players to tweak a configuration file in the next version of DW.

ORIGINAL: jpwrunyan
At least say something that makes sense like: "the economy balance is not an issue imo, but you can mod it yourself if you have the time or ask someone if you dont". Some people on this thread are seem to be saying such. I applaud them. They are sensible.
I dont have a prob with the people who are saying this. I have a problem with people saying modding *is* the solution. Those people are wrong.
And to people who think the econ is fine the way it is: well, thats your opinion but you are wrong. The econ sucks.

I hope you never consider going into the legal professions. Asserting that your interpretation is right and everyone else's is wrong is a questionable mental state to take.

ORIGINAL: jpwrunyan
Tl;dr: as usual, I am right

Right and wrong are as subjective as good and bad. Cressida Dick got a promotion and a medal for her incompetence - which goes to show that "right" and "wrong" are largely determined by who holds the biggest stick.

[Shark7]

I hadn't been following this thread but took a look today.

A few comments:

1. Comparing the in game economy of DW to any other game is probably not a valid argument. The way the games are coded would be different which would likely have a significant effect on how the in game economies work. It is comparing apples to oranges since the code isn't the same when you 'look under the hood'.

2. Modding the game to fix it...the game is working as intended, there is nothing to fix. I mod the game...not to fix it since nothing is broken, but rather the change it and make it even more challenging for me. I also like to use other people's mods as a different way to play through the game.

3. Too make it more challenging, I go in and tweak the races. Give them more income, or bigger/faster ship building capacity, or greatly reduced maintainence. It is not that hard, since all you are doing is modding a text file that can be opened with Notepad.

[Kayoz]

ORIGINAL: Shark7
1. Comparing the in game economy of DW to any other game is probably not a valid argument. The way the games are coded would be different which would likely have a significant effect on how the in game economies work. It is comparing apples to oranges since the code isn't the same when you 'look under the hood'.

I think what jpwrunyan was trying to express, is that Caesar 3 had increased costs and infrastructure to counter increased income, so that a city with twice as many citizens won't simply provide you with twice as much spending power. Bigger city requires bigger roads, more entertainment. More advanced units (in some games - I honestly don't really remember it well) require bigger, more expensive infrastructure. This aspect is lacking in DW - there is no corresponding infrastructure cost (aside from corruption, which has little effect in most cases) to offset the "twice as big, twice as rich" effect. Your starting medium port is probably more than capable of churning out all the military ships you require for an entire game if you play wisely.

But jpwrunyan isn't terribly articulate in his arguments (or maybe terrible is the correct adjective), so I could be wrong. Perhaps he can tell you what he meant.

ORIGINAL: Shark7
2. ...the game is working as intended, there is nothing to fix.

I think that's a wobbly position to take, without a direct quote from Elliot.

Did he intend for players to be drowning in cash in the mid-to-late game? Did he intend that AI would be willing to sell all it's technology and go into penury to acquire a single mining station? By your statement, that was his intent because that's how DW works.

ORIGINAL: Shark7
3. Too make it more challenging, I go in and tweak the races. Give them more income, or bigger/faster ship building capacity, or greatly reduced maintainence. It is not that hard, since all you are doing is modding a text file that can be opened with Notepad.

Exactly the purpose of mods, I say. Customize your experience to make it more enjoyable for you.

But I think jpwrunyan's position is that he's dissatisfied with the game and feels that he shouldn't have to turn to modding to mitigate the problems; rather that they should be addressed by Code Force. In this I disagree with him. This is an indy game, appealing to a niche market, made on a shoestring budget. If Elliot had the financial backing of Halo or SW:ToR, then I'd be on his side. That is not the case, so I'm quite happy to support the game and tolerate DW's problems. It sucks less than the other 4X games out there.

[Shark7]

You have to base it on whether you think the game is too easy, etc, which is completely subjective. What is easy to you may be just right or even too hard for me. Imperium Galactica II comes to mind...a lot of people can probably beat it on hard, I've never once managed to win on normal difficulty. Again, subjective. [;)]

Remember I never said it was perfect, but as it stands (until a patch that changes how it works) it is working as currently intended. Now in the future, Elliot can (and like will) make changes to make it more challenging but for the current build, it is not broken...in that the game is playable.

I can play the game as it stands...if it were really broken, then I could not. That's the difference.

[Beag]

Agree 100%. And again as I said before, as long as the player handicaps himself in research by choosing a bad race and a bad government the game is certainly a challenge. Research trumps everything in 4x games, I always recall people saying MOO 2 was easy, and when asked what race they played or which trait they chose: "I play Psilon/use Creative trait"...

[Kayoz]

ORIGINAL: Shark7
Remember I never said it was perfect, but as it stands (until a patch that changes how it works) it is working as currently intended. Now in the future, Elliot can (and like will) make changes to make it more challenging but for the current build, it is not broken...in that the game is playable.

There's that word again. Intent.

intent - "mental desire and will to act in a particular way, including wishing not to participate. Intent is a crucial element in determining if certain acts were criminal. Occasionally a judge or jury may find that "there was no criminal intent." Example: lack of intent may reduce a charge of manslaughter to a finding of reckless homicide or other lesser crime"

I think the use of intent is where I disagree with you. As I read your statement, DW is as it is because Elliot intended for it to be that way. I disagree with your use of intent. What Elliot intended is unclear - all we have to go on is the game as it is and the successive changes since it's release. He has no blog and damned few interviews where he comments on his vision for the game.

A person intends a consequence when he or she foresees that it will happen if the given series of acts or omissions continue and desires it to happen.

I contend that Elliot's intention is unknown. There is nothing to say that economics are "working as intended". Though there are indications that they are "working as designed".

[lancer]

G'day,

Whether the economy is working as intended is hard to tell but I strongly suspect that is the way it is for purely commercial reasons.

I'm guessing but I think that Elliot and Eric are taking the line that the last thing they want is the forums filling up with new players complaining that the game is too hard. It tends to frighten away potential customers. The, 'make it easy for them to play' approach is prevalent in many new games these days.

Hence the economy and the resource model have been adjusted to a model of over abundance.

Nothing wrong with doing this and I'm sure, that if this is the case, there are compelling 'volume of sales' reasons for doing so.

It's interesting that the players complaining about the excess of money and resources are those, like myself, who have played the game for a while. These aren't a group of people who you will make most of your money from. You can sell them expansions by dangling new features (who can resist?) but your main earner would be from bringing new customers into the franchise.

Having a small number of experienced players complaining probably isn't going to make much difference, hence the lack of any action on these issues despite many patches. If anything, the direction, with the expansions, has been to make the game even easier with regards to the economy and resources.

You can't blame Elliot and Eric for wanting to maximise their return from their hard work and marketing dollars. If I was in either of their shoes I'd probably be doing the same.

Still, it would be nice to have an option where both resources and money could become meaningful, if only for the long term players amongst us.

Cheers,
Lancer