A funny thing about making core worlds...

from GalCiv4 Forums

I don't know if this is good or bad or needs to change, but I have noticed a funny quirk of the colony/core-world system. Often, when I convert a colony to a core world, my productivity goes down - in some cases, by a lot. I have noticed this in particular with food, but the same effect will happen with all the "primary" planet products (i.e. research, food, wealth, etc.).

The reason for this is that the primary products which are fed from colonies to core worlds are then multiplied by all of the relevant modifiers on the core world. (This includes improvements, citizens, etc.) So if, for example, I have a class 13 colony ("Bob") supplying 8 food to a core world ("Alice") with tons of ag districts on it, that 8 food might have a 2x multiplier. If I then turn that colony into a core world, then I no longer get that multiplier.

Even more extreme, the new core world also siphons colonies away from the old one. So I don't just lose that 2x modifier for food from that particular colony that I converted. I actually lose the 2x modifier for *all colonies* that switch from Alice to Bob.

I don't know if this is intended. It's certainly unexpected as a player. I don't think we can fundamentally eliminate this effect, though, without totally busting the colony/core-world system.

One thing I think you should consider is *not* automatically reassigning colonies from alice to bob when bob is promoted to core world. Maybe it should work more like shipyards did in GC3, where we can select the colony assignment.

18,038 views 17 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

The Core world is a trade center. Any colony closer to the new Core would automatically deliver there. Lower shipping costs. Maybe it could change over time; they don't all change at once.

Reply #2 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Not necessarily. If I were running a galactic empire and I optimize one entire core world to focus on food production, I would want colonies with high food to send their raw food resources to that core world, even if it were a bit farther away than another core world. The shipping cost is easily offset by the increased food output (represented in this game by the multipliers for districts and farmers).

Similarly, if I had a core world dedicated entirely to research, I probably want a colony with high tech to send it to that core world, even if this colony was sitting right next to the food-production world. What's the food production world going to do with all that tech? It's just going to get squandered there.

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

I think this was mentioned in one of the DDs. When you create a Core World you put the surrounding colonies under its control. This is to lower the need to micro every colony.

Reply #4 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

I find this to be somewhat realistic. If this were to happen in real life, especially if the top level government isn't (can't) micromanage every colony, there would be a huge amount of political realignment that takes place and not all of it would be easily intuited.

Look at what happened in Africa and southeast Asia vis-à-vis the various European colonizers as regions moved from provinces to semi-autonomous states to independent nation-states. The flow of trade, military force, geo-political alignments and alliances all changed. Sometimes, depending on the socio-political and religious characteristics of the former colony/province, the colonizer, and the surrounding nations/colonies/provinces the flow of trade didn't necessarily follow the "shortest path".

On top of that conversion from a colony to a core world is going to increase the administrative overhead by a lot. Perfect 'modern' example of this is as the various CONUS territories elected to become US States, entire governmental institutions sprang into being creating local taxes, cost, expenses, inefficiencies,  measurable loss of production as governments and institutions do not and cannot produce anything and are a net economic drain on a nation, and various other factors. The corporation of the United States and by extension the Federal Government experienced a net negative return as taxes and productions shifted from the FEDUS to the newly created State.

Reply #5 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

You are right.

Early in development, we talked about people feeling like they have to make every world a core world in order to be competitive. Then they still end up having to manage tons of worlds frustrated because they were out of governors, etc.

But the math works out exactly as you say. It's generally better to make all of your worlds colonies and have them feed into one core world where all the bonuses are applied (exactly as you stated).

But this is not always the case. Decay is significant and the "perfect" solution mathematically is going to be to create core worlds in areas where they have lots of local colonies to feed into them. Distance matters but it generally means you don't want a colony more than 2 star systems away from its core world.

The other part of the equation is that more core worlds means more usable tiles for improvements. More places to build player and galactic achievements, as well as access to colonies and trade resources you can't get to on colonies. Colonies are also a lot more vulnerable than core worlds and we will also be making it so your population doesn't grow on colonies.

So it's a complex problem. But it's weighted like it is because we want to incent players to be good with having lots of colonies.

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Reply #6 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

I agree with the op I think it should do the system as s is , but give you an option of reassigning colonies. One thing not taken into account is colonies are not built up. Core worlds are. 

Reply #7 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Thanks for the response @DerekPaxton, that makes sense to me. If we always got a boost by making a core world, it breaks the whole colony/core-world paradigm because you'd always want core worlds. (And @Korwyn I do agree with you that there is a sense of realism in the current system as well.)

After playing around with this more, I really think that the current system is fine, with the exception of the auto-assigned colonies. The ability to reassign colonies does make a lot of sense, because logistically speaking, we would want the ability to direct colonies with a certain type of output to core worlds that prioritize production of that output. That makes sense (in my opinion) both from a realism perspective and a gameplay perspective.

Implementation-wise, this ability could work like the old shipyard UI. Alternatively, it could be a simple point-and-click mode on the main game screen:

  • User clicks on a colony
  • Under "assign governor", there is a new button, "reassign core world"
  • User clicks this button, all core worlds are highlighted on game screen. User clicks on any core world to reassign, or clicks a cancel button to cancel reassignment.

Obviously, implementation of new features takes time and effort, so I understand if this isn't possible for the dev team. I do think it would be a nice enhancement though.

Reply #8 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

I think if Stardock want to allow us to manually assign colonies to a particular Core World because, say it's got great research buffs:

1. That assignment should be permanent. Or at least....

2. You can unlink a colony and send it's resources to another Core Planet, but the Governor the Core Planet who just lost Colony VegaIV to Core World VortexII is going to be one very angry camper with you as his leader and with the Governor of Core World VortexII. Permanent revolution/massive distrust of you as leader will become a serious issue. Which would be realistic. See how residents of Town A react when Big Company/Whoever decides to move their plant employing 120 people to Town B. Their morale take a serious and sometimes permanent hit to the Negatives.

Reply #9 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Quoting jdschw, reply 7

Thanks for the response @DerekPaxton, that makes sense to me. If we always got a boost by making a core world, it breaks the whole colony/core-world paradigm because you'd always want core worlds. (And @Korwyn I do agree with you that there is a sense of realism in the current system as well.)

After playing around with this more, I really think that the current system is fine, with the exception of the auto-assigned colonies. The ability to reassign colonies does make a lot of sense, because logistically speaking, we would want the ability to direct colonies with a certain type of output to core worlds that prioritize production of that output. That makes sense (in my opinion) both from a realism perspective and a gameplay perspective.

Implementation-wise, this ability could work like the old shipyard UI. Alternatively, it could be a simple point-and-click mode on the main game screen:

 

    • User clicks on a colony

 

    • Under "assign governor", there is a new button, "reassign core world"

 

    • User clicks this button, all core worlds are highlighted on game screen. User clicks on any core world to reassign, or clicks a cancel button to cancel reassignment.

 


Obviously, implementation of new features takes time and effort, so I understand if this isn't possible for the dev team. I do think it would be a nice enhancement though.

Not me, I understand this taking ti, but this is the Alpha. I figure they have two years to do this. 

Reply #10 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Quoting mrblondini, reply 8

I think if Stardock want to allow us to manually assign colonies to a particular Core World because, say it's got great research buffs:

1. That assignment should be permanent. Or at least....

2. You can unlink a colony and send it's resources to another Core Planet, but the Governor the Core Planet who just lost Colony VegaIV to Core World VortexII is going to be one very angry camper with you as his leader and with the Governor of Core World VortexII. Permanent revolution/massive distrust of you as leader will become a serious issue. Which would be realistic. See how residents of Town A react when Big Company/Whoever decides to move their plant employing 120 people to Town B. Their morale take a serious and sometimes permanent hit to the Negatives.
the only way I would agree with this. If we get a pass on our first reassignments. Since this would be our decision to arrange the colonies this way. Or let us assign the colonies to the core worlds anyways. Maybe not permanent, ten turns instead. Why penalize us when we are losing control of our colonies. My guess is your new to galactic civilizations. 

Reply #11 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Please if we are going to have the above please give us an option to replace governors. 

Reply #12 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Well, no, I've been playing various GalCivs for years. Admittedly not particularly well, but....

My point is that if we want to manually assign colonies to Core Worlds, if we decide to change our mind and change which colony benefits which Core World, there should be some kind of morale hit. But I'd be fine with a "you can change the assignment every certain number of turns with no penalty" mechanic like you seem to be proposing. Your colonies are your slaves, basically...

Of course, the reason I want this kind of mechanic is to make Politics a much more important part of the game. If you want to be a democratic republic, you can't just treat the slaves like they're...Well, you can't do it all the time without serious penalties. Maybe if you're going be more autocratic with no elections, well, you can play meaner in that situation.

But whichever political system you choose to be, if you were Governor of a Core World that suddenly only controlled 9 colonies rather than 10, wouldn't you be rather annoyed?

There's no point in Stardock creating the Governor and Core World mechanics if they're just there to be shiny, happy people holding hands and loving whatever decision you, as their boss, makes.

 

 

Reply #13 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Well, I'm trying to avoid making my request more complicated. I think the ability to shift colony assignments is a key capability that we need to really make the colony/core-world system sing. It will allow players to really get the maximum capability out of their civilization, and it makes sense thematically that a galactic civilization with many core worlds would have the opportunity to specialize whole worlds to focus on a certain type of production.

I think you are both making interesting points about ways to give this colony-switching mechanic a bit more depth, but I think they are "icing on the cake" rather than critical features.

That being said, if we're brainstorming ways to make this more impactful, I do like the idea that governors like having more colonies, and don't like having them taken away. But I also think the level of morale hit/gain should depend on how closely a colony's production aligns with a core world's capabilities. For example, if you have a core world focused 100% on farming (i.e. just farming improvements), what do they care if a research colony gets reassigned? I mean, they probably care a little, but not much. On the other hand, they might get a positive boost if they get assigned a new colony with high food output.

Reply #14 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

We want to support both:

  1. The ability to switch which core world a colony feeds into. BUT this should be a rare event (remember decay means that 99% of the time you will want your colony to go to the closest core world). We don't want players to feel like they have to micro all their colonies to be effective so this should just be a way to handle unusual situations (and not required at all for more casual players). For example, you might have 2 core worlds right beside each other and be specializing one as a tech world and the other as a food world. If that it the case you may want to control which world nearby colonies feed into.
  2. We want to provide the ability to replace governors. This will not go over well with the replaced governor and strongly impact his loyalty. It might even lead to him refusing to give up his position and throwing his planet into anarchy.

Let me know your thoughts.

Reply #15 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Yes, the dual-core-worlds situation is the one that really highlighted this issue for me, where you have 2 good planets around one star. I think that goal of making it possible but not commonly necessary to do this reassignment makes sense.

I like the idea of governors getting pissed off when they get fired! ;-)

Reply #16 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

Quoting mrblondini, reply 12

Of course, the reason I want this kind of mechanic is to make Politics a much more important part of the game. If you want to be a democratic republic, you can't just treat the slaves like they're...Well, you can't do it all the time without serious penalties. Maybe if you're going be more autocratic with no elections, well, you can play meaner in that situation.

But whichever political system you choose to be, if you were Governor of a Core World that suddenly only controlled 9 colonies rather than 10, wouldn't you be rather annoyed?

There's potential in galciv4 to create a really deep and interesting political, diplomatic and espionage system. For example, if the player wanted to take the authoritarian path then there would be a number of choices that they'd have to make and challenges that they would need to overcome. If they wanted to take the consent of the governed path then they would need to make different choices and have to overcome different challenges. Depending on the path the player chose this would involve elections and/or espionage and/or bribes and/or assassination etc.


Another poster in another thread mentioned the civics options in Civ 4. Perhaps we could iterate on that system?


There's also potential to create some interesting and fun asymmetrical gameplay here. There could be a non humanoid species that's governed by a hive mind and thus internal politics is not an issue for it. It has drones that carry out its will and these drones have no will of their own. However, this hive mind could still have an ideology, and it's 'ideology tree' would be one that's only shared with other hive mind species.


Maybe there could be a species that's incapable of being ideological? Different options could be available to them that aren't available to other species?

Reply #17 from GalCiv4 Forums Top

What do you guys think about the following:

If there are 2 or more good planets in one star system the player could have an option to 'upgrade/promote' a governor to a 'Higher Governor' (a rubbish name I know :P I'm sure you guys can come up with a better one :digichet: ). A 'Higher Governor' then gives the player the option to turn a star system into a Core System where all the worlds synergise and give the player powerful and fun new strategic options. So instead of a core world building screen the player would get a Core System building screen. Colonies would then feed into this Core System.


This idea could be taken a step further by giving the player the option to create a 'Supreme Governor' by synergising all the 'Higher Governors' in one sector into one abstract entity called the 'Supreme Governor'. A 'Supreme Governor' would then give the player the option to turn an entire sector into a Core Sector. This could open up some even more powerful and fun strategic options to the player.