bureaucracy

[Tom_Holsinger]

Armada works out of the box, and is fun to play. MOO3 could run, but wasn't fun and plain did not work right until a Canadian programmer whose on-line handle is Bhruic fixed most of the broken parts out of sheer genius in the 6-12 month period after it was released. I believe he has helped with many other games too. MOO3 is now great fun for me because I've customized it so much, but is still micromanagement city compared to Armada 2526.

OTOH, you can play the really big MOO3 empires in really big galaxies in less than real time. I suspect few will have the patience to play really big Armada empires in really big galaxies.

ORIGINAL: rosseau

"Emrich's in MOO3 is IMO much preferable to Bob Smith's in Armada."

No offense, but Armada is much preferable to MOO3 as a game! I've been playing them since Chris Crawford's Eastern Front in '82, and MOO3 lasted a few hours on my hard drive. However, the background story written for MOO3 was awesome. Just my opinion, of course.

[Rosseau]

I should add that I was late to the party with MOO3. When I finally loaded it, I was fortunate to find this website with these dedicated guys--it may have been you, Tom--who fixed all the glaring errors and even had a patch installer. I was so appreciative of that. But when I played the game, it didn't grab me. Armada has me hooked, however.

[siRkid]

I for one like the unrest and how you have to deal with captured aliens. Having said that, I don’t want it to be the larger part of the game. By the way, I have found that building marines on all the planets keeps revolts down and allows me to keep the taxes up.

[Klahn]

I'm all for the unrest. I'm all for the regional governors who might try to overthrow you. What I am against is the fact that the game seems to be completely and utterly unplayable as humans attempting conquest on a huge map. No matter what I try to do, after I expand so far all of my planets seem to automatically end up in a state of rebellion. The only way forward is to purposefully slaughter my own population and give the AI worlds for free that are no longer required to expand my borders. I consider the game to be completely unplayable for eXtermination purposes on huge maps for all but 2 races at this point. It only works if you are playing for points. I don't want to play for points. I want to be able to eXplore and eXterminate.

The gameplay in this respect is so awful, while the rest of the game is so good, I can't help but feel I'm doing something wrong. Stationing troops on the planet doesn't seem to increase stability. I've built absolutely every single happiness increasing structure. I've removed all pollution-causing buildings. Nothing seems to work at all. Eventually my bureaucracy simply overcomes the ability to cope.

[siRkid]

Why not bring in characters like they did in MOO II that we could assign to different planets as regional governors. They would each have their on set of stats that would affect the management of the planet.

[Rosseau]

Ryvan,

You probably know this, but you can change the race attributes of the Humans to make them more playable. Of course, this is cheating, and some may be looking for a less artificial means to do so.

[Ntronium]

For those people complaining about bureaucracy, how many colonies do you have, and how many do you think would be fun to have before it becomes too much of a management chore.

The huge maps are really there to accomodate a lot of races, rather than to allow enormous empires. I didn't really think the game would be fun with 100 + colonies to manage. Still if people want to play huge empires, I'll add some means to adjust it.

[Flaviusx]

Bureaucracy most certainly affects production. Production in this game ultimately depends on cash flow, and having up to a third of your cash flow diverted to bureaucratic overhead over and above your ordinary upkeep costs definitely restricts production.
 
Now the question here is whether or not the effect is too pronounced, both on the production and unrest ends. Possibly it is, and I've yet to find a hard cap for bureaucracy. It's bad enough dealing with this as the Klurgu in my current game, but they can manage it, just, as they get an orderliness bonus. (Which still doesn't quite offset the -3 buro penalty in this game, note.)
 
For the humans, who are already -2 in the hole...yeah. It's a show stopper. But then, I don't like playing the humans anyways.
 
I like the basic idea here. The implementation of it, well, is questionable.

[Janster]

Hear hear, options is what we want, not total rulechange, I agree, 100 + planets can be just too much, and I don't mind having an interresting playing field to be on...however atm I just feel I can't even field a decent amount of ships...I mean 20-30 planets and all I can have is 20-30 ships?

[Klahn]

ORIGINAL: rosseau

Ryvan,

You probably know this, but you can change the race attributes of the Humans to make them more playable. Of course, this is cheating, and some may be looking for a less artificial means to do so.

My problem with doing that is it would make the humans, (or whatever other race was adjusted in this manner,) too easy at the start of the game. I like the idea of not being able to go hog wild with building everything you want on every planet without consequence. That's why I'm complaining about the bureaucracy issue as opposed to population happiness in general. The happiness penalty for humans stops them from being able to go crazy with mining on rich worlds with bad habitats. It's an interesting and perfectly valid penalty to have.

A hard-to-implement solution would be to have some type of bureaucractic building that lowers the bureaucracy unhappiness hit for a particular planet. These buildings would need to be upgraded as your bureaucracy penalty grows. They should be expensive enough to upgrade that they would serve as a limiting device against uncontrolled expansion. They should only reduce the bureaucracy penalty on the planet on which they are built. They should not increase general happiness outside of the extent that they cancel bureaucracy. (In other words, they wouldn't save you from rioting caused by overpollution of an already bad habitat.)

Another solution would be to have the bureaucracy penalty naturally decrease with time if there is no further increase in the size of the empire. This would also have the effect of limiting the speed of expansion without creating a hard maximum size of an empire. You would be forced to expand at a somewhat controlled rate with pauses to allow your government to settle in for a bit.

An easy and less elegant solution would be to add a "no bureaucracy" switch so players can simply turn it off if they wish. (Call it Galactic Conquest Mode or somesuch.) This would allow players who are happy with the status quo to continue on with the current rules and let those of us who don't like it to change it.

[Wade1000]

Another way to address any potential bureaucracy issues might be to adjust the benefits of current bonus structures and/or add more bonuses or structures throughout the technology tree.

Having a different bureaucracy game setting that scales for larger galaxies is unappealing to me.

[Zakhal]

Overpopulation is another problem. Ten of my planets hit overpopulation last turn and I have no idea what to do with them. It has a big minus happyness and my planets are filled with people.

I wish I would be able to kill them or somthing. Just continiously bombard my own planets populations so that they dont go over. Got to check today if there is som tech that could fix this.

[Wade1000]

Maybe there should be more technology and upgrade bonuses throughout the technology tree to solve any potential problems. For example, over population could be solved with arcologies and further upgrades to happiness structures.
I think that every empire problem should be able to be resolved, to a fair extent, eventually, through the use of technology.

[kafka]

For those people complaining about bureaucracy, how many colonies do you have, and how many do you think would be fun to have before it becomes too much of a management chore.

The huge maps are really there to accomodate a lot of races, rather than to allow enormous empires. I didn't really think the game would be fun with 100 + colonies to manage. Still if people want to play huge empires, I'll add some means to adjust it.

since I've focused my strategy on the race specific victory conditions I don't think I've expanded too much. Anyway I've a long way yet to reach 100 colonies, most AI players do have larger empires (btw I play on a huge map, turn limit set to 500, 12 players). Though I've expanded rather conservatively, colonizing normal and rich systems, building necessary structures only and having the smallest fleet to maintain, the bureaucracy burden has started to increase in a way it almost eats my complete tax income (on high populated systems particularly). I'm past 100 turns now and the map hasn't been fully explored yet, so there are still 'free' systems available. But at this stage each new colonized system seems to disproportionally cause the bureacracy costs to increase. On the other hand, if I understand the game mechanics correctly, I do have to expand to distribute population from the overpopulated sytems to keep them happy. As I wrote before, I didn't focus on expansion but on the race specific victory conditions, technology advance and happiness.

Btw... could you explain which factors are exactly taken into consideration when determining the score, only the race specific ones?
Thanks

[Iceman]

Btw... could you explain which factors are exactly taken into consideration when determining the score, only the race specific ones?

Yep, those listed in the Custom Game screen when the race is chosen, or in the in-game screen with the race's info. Check the tooltips for each VC to see how it is factored.
 
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About Bureaucracy, the way Lost Empire: Immortals deals with it is, Bureaucracy depends on both system count and distance to the homesystem. Whenever you colonize a new system, bureaucracy for all systems increases - of course, at first it's not noticeable. Colonizing a system farther from your homesystem increases it more than a closer one. Some races have bonuses to one of those factors, others to the other. It is capped at 50% by default, but it's moddable (a system with x% bureaucracy loses x% of its resources income). There is no way to contain it.
 
Capping it to a certain % of a system's income could be a way to deal with it. And making it moddable.
The No Bureaucracy trait could be turned into a Level-based trait like most others, in that each race would have +x% reduction on bureaucracy. The Walden would have Bureacracy Level 10 (100% reduction).

[Flaviusx]

Increasingly, it seems to me, there are only 3 important racial traits:
 
1. The bureacracy trait.
 
2. Orderliness.
 
3. Low pop growth. Yes, you read that correctly. Given the Malthusian population model of the game, pop growth rate restrictions are actually a benefit in the long run.
 
Races lacking these traits need not apply. The humans obviously fare badly here, but the actual worst race is the Toyes. They don't have bureacracy, they are disorderly, and have a runaway growth rate for pop. Their victory conditions might make up for this I suppose, but they won't be very fun to play since they fail at every level to compete with the game's economic/demographic model.
 
I suggest some tweaks here. We need more tech options to address the buro penalty. And the unhappiness resulting from overpopulation. "Overpopulation" indeed needs to be rethought from scratch and either made irrelevant or offset by tech.

[Aroddo]

you can always build entertainment centers to increase happiness.

ok, they are expensive and have a fairly high upkeep, but most of the time it's worth the increase in revenue when you can switch from low to normal taxation.

and the teyes should get a new race trait: no overpopulation penalty.
they love it crowded.

[Flaviusx]

That's a pretty darn good idea about the Teyes, actually. They'd go from zero to hero right there as a choice to play and join the big leagues with the Walden and Hun Yoon.
 

[Iceman]

I always thought growth rate was overrated. I never really cared for it, and never "played" it.
Also, growth rate kind of dilutes with all the mods over it.

[solops]

ORIGINAL: Ntronium

The huge maps are really there to accomodate a lot of races, rather than to allow enormous empires. I didn't really think the game would be fun with 100 + colonies to manage. Still if people want to play huge empires, I'll add some means to adjust it.

Please do.