Galactic Civilizations 3 announced

Yes. And tourism was kind of opaque for me as well.

Of course, and thank you for the shout out!

Well wow is all I can say.

My pleasure. Sometimes people write amazing things but they don’t get feedback and wonder if it’s having an impact. Sir, your words have a great deal of impact.

Continuing on:

There is a tax slider. Tom hated the sliders in GalCiv II (we had I think 5 of them) and I think we overdid it by eliminating all of them. So now there’s a tax slider.

The tax slider simply determines what % of your civilization’s wealth production you get to keep.

Having high approval = bonuses to your influence growth and your population growth. So for example, if your approval is 0 then your growth will go to 0 because no one’s going to want to immigrate your “shit hole”.

But you can see I have -3.6 morale points from unrest. That’s due to my tax rate. The higher the tax rate, the more unrest.


So you can see the effect of tourism here.

Little known fact: Inside our code, the tooltips are called “Chicks” (Tom Chick) as he was the one who came up with the idea that tooltips should be used to display detailed information in a clean way.

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So here is a Chick in action. I have two tourism improvements that total 1.5%. That means 1.5% of the travelers in my cultural influence will visit me and give me money. This is based on the number of tiles I have total + the number connected to my civilization capital.

Thus, 854 + 428 =1283 X 1.5X = 19.2 credits per turn.

But you don’t get that 19.2 credits yourself you commie. That’s the wealth your people have earned. Your tax rate determines what % of that will go into your coffers.

Now I can see how much my colony is generating in wealth per turn:

This is why the tax rate is a bit torturous. Look at all that money.

image

Now, I could just raise taxes to 100%:

But then look what happens.

Ouch. Nobody is going to want to come to my planet. My influence growth is greatly diminished and my raw production is even hurt.

And Influence matters in so many ways.

First, once everything is claimed, your influence will be relative to everyone else’s growth which affects tourism. Second, one of these two planets will eventually be culturally dominated due to their proximity. And I definitely don’t want to lose Ashley’s world.

What I think people will notice the most is just how tight everything is.

At first, they will think they have plenty of money (Which is good) because anomalies and selling techs and such bring in money. So you can keep your tax rate pretty low and run deficits. But as things stabilize, you won’t be able to do that. Every civ will be running very tight budgets and collecting goodie huts won’t keep your economy going on its own. That’s when that tax slider beckons to you.

@Brad_Wardell thanks for the preview! One little thing that’s always bothered me is that the chicks don’t list bonuses in order. My suggestion would be to list point bonuses first and then all percentage bonuses. Within each group, the bonuses should be sorted either alphabetically or by decreasing order of magnitude. At the moment, as far as I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be any order to them at all! Would be delighted to see that change in one of the upcoming updates! :-)

Ahhh competing interests in a game for me means interesting decisions!

I might just buy this…:)

Thanks for answer, I didn’t think you could but I figured that it doesn’t hurt to ask. I chose GalCiv1 because there wasn’t a ship designer in it and I thought that the ship designer in GalCiv2 was too cumbersome and disrupted the flow of the game and would be hard to use with a touch screen.

Just as an aside, I loved the tax sliders and stuff :)

This may be one the greatest things in this thread.

Yea, Tom and I have now known each other for 21 years. Yes, he really is that old. I mean, he’s SUPER old. While I am still 29 as I was back then too.

Anyway, he did a review of the game Entrepreneur and his review of it changed the way I thought of game development. But it wasn’t until Galactic Civilizations II where his feedback really came into play. At the time, we didn’t have the chick system.

To way over-simplify and paraphrase a series of discussions into a single paragraph:

Now that games aren’t 320x200 there is no excuse to demand players have to read a user manual to find out basic things. You should be able to mouse over everything in a game and understand where the numbers come from and what the item is for. If they have to look it up, then you have failed as a designer.

It was too late for Galactic Civilizations II but we began developing chick:: for Kumquat and now Cider (which is our game engine specific implementation of Nitrous).

What makes chicks so powerful is they’re almost like a markup language for tooltips. So a simple myToolTip = chick::calculate(objectID,scriptname) will put together the data (which you’d do in the background) and then myToolTip.display() will show it. You have to build this stuff deep in or else developers won’t use it readily. I.e. it has to be easy to use.

So now you know why GalCiv III, Fallen Enchantress, Sorcerer King have such well formatted, detailed “tooltips”.

That’s a very cool story - thanks, Brad!

Do you envision having techs that allow you to place new arable land tiles on planets?

…not until just now. That’s a pretty spectacular idea actually.

Next time someone asks “Why do you hang out on forums, Brad” someone should post MikeJ’s idea. That’s why.

Thanks Brad, that’s pretty cool. I figured someone in your position would be positively drowning in the ideas of wannabe game designers!

A question about tourism income: It seems like your overall tourism income will be proportional to planet count times the number of map tiles (because you can put a Port of Call on each planet). So if you doubled the size of your empire in terms of map space and planets, you’d multiply tourism income by 4. How does this scale for different map sizes? It seems like on very large maps, tourism would be everything, at least until you reached the size where your tourism grab hit 100%.

You are correct.

One of the changes is that planets cost more base maintenance than before. The bigger your empire, the more it costs. On the other hand, the more tourism you have.

We have up part 7 of the “Humans vs. The Multiverse” series.

Can not remember if you could build irrigation/food producing starbases, or perhaps there is room for transport ships with biodomes to give new settlements a “Kickstart” in the foodstuffs while they focus on the all important factories to build more ships to win the war…

Ok so we got a bunch of logs in on what people do to the AI.

The AI now does some of these things back.

Now, I want to be clear that I am sure no one here has ever used their starting Survey ship to snipe a peaceful alien’s colony ship to prevent them from getting a planet. Because that would be wrong. So…so…wrong.

Gorramit. Back to the drawing board…