I've been reading a lot of discussion both here and on other sites about ideas and suggestions players have for Galactic Civilizations II.  Stardock, I like to think, is reasonably well known for implementing pretty significant changes into its software well after release.  If we think something is a really good idea and it won't dramatically change the product, we'll seriously consider implementing it.  We've been doing that since the first software products we released over 10 years ago.

Of course, the question is, what constitutes a change that is too dramatic? And how can we determine whether a given idea is something that's good for the game or not?

Before we start out there, I should make a clarification on something.  I've seen threads where people will say "Yea, but Brad says it's working as designed so he obviously thinks it's great."  That's not what I mean when I say that.  The context is important. 

As an engineer, I try to be precise as I can be with my words. That's one of the reasons I'm so wordy. What I write tends to be full of qualifications. One of the things I tend to object to strongly is when someone will take a design choice they disagree with and simply label it as a "bug".  A bug, to me, is something that is not working as designed.  Someone may not like a given feature, but if it's working as it's supposed to, it's not a bug. But that doesn't mean that we think it's the end-all be all feature.

One of the areas I want to tackle in the post release is the economic system of Galactic Civilizations II.  But I don't want to do it alone. I want to hear what other people think too.  But such discussions can be problematic.  As with any on-line discussion, disagreements will break out.  With people all around the world, many with strong opinions, you inevitably end up with some people who will state their opinions as facts. "This is how game X did it. Do it like that."  There is no single "best" solution. We all have our own ideas. What we can do, however, is build a consensus to some degree.

Economic Systems & Strategy Games

Some parts of the game I feel strongly about, other areas are open to significant change.

For example, in Galactic Civilizations II as leader of your civilization you can set your tax rate -- the money coming in from your people.  And you can set your "spend rate" which determines what % of your industrial/research capacity to make use of.  I believe that governments should be able to intentionally have deficit spending.  I believe that your financial income should not be tied to your industrial capacity. If you have the factories and labs to do it, you should be able to make full use of them regardless of your income. It's called deficit spending and it's practiced by many governments.  Your population will get angry if you go too far into debt. And right now, we have a -$500 debt ceiling. 

Having taxation and spending separate is something I'm married to. I like it.  I realize it's more complex than in some other games but of the other systems we've contemplated over the years, I think it provides the best balance between realism and simplicity.  People are free to disagree of course.  That's natural. Some % of people will not like it.  But I think most people understand it.

So let's talk about the part of the system I'm not married to -- the UI representation of it.

So you have your spend rate -- the % of your industrial capacity that you want to make use of.  Then the question is, where do you want that industrial capacity to go?  There are 3 sliders that control how that spending is funneled.  The three sliders allow you to decide how much to fund your factories and research labs.  Military and social spending goes into your factories which produce more planetary improvements and build your ships.  Research spending goes to your labs and is converted to research points that go to getting your next tech.

I don't think it's that complicated and judging from the various forums I read, most people understand how it works. But not everyone. Some people don't understand it and others just don't like it.  The group that doesn't understand it tend to be the same people who don't understand why taxation and spending aren't linked because "game X does that".  Part of the reason I put in having taxes and spending be separate was out of frustration with other strategy games that tried to act like ones money income was somehow tied to their industrial production. As if the Germans in World War II could simply have bought more armies with money (yea, I know you can quick build but it comes as a very steep price -- on purpose). Industrial capacity has nothing to do with wealth. Hence the division.

Rhetoric

I confess, I get defensive in response to rhetoric.  I tend to have an aversion to absolutes or people giving their opinions as facts. Every game that has an economic system is going to have people who think they have a better idea on how to do it.  We obviously like our system. We think it works pretty well and we think most players think it's fine too.  But that doesn't stop us from trying to listen and make improvements to make it even better.  But when some player asserts something is "broken" that makes it sound like it's a bug and then puts us in the position of having to defend our design decision. 

Every element of the game is a choice. Why only 5 planets in a solar system? Why not 9? Why do we allow millions of people to come into the tax system in a given week? There's so many design choices that have to be made but at the end of the day, our goal is to make the game fun.  But one man's fun is another man's headache.  I've gotten emails from people who simply can't play the game as long as Earth and Jupiter are on the map in the wrong scale (Earth is much smaller than Jupiter in real life but we try to scale things so that they're usable on screen).  Heck, I should post some of the emails I get, you'd be shocked at some of the stuff.  I got one today from someone who claimed they were returning the game because all the alien races are humanoid. I kid you not. Hey, at least they're not all humans with different nose ridges!

Rhetoric matters.  When someone comes onto the forum and makes a post entitled something like "Map system totally broken" and it turns out it's because we use squares instead of hexes or because the moon rotates around the earth in clockwise or whatever it puts us on the defensive.  I think that's just human nature.  I realize some people find it tempting to say "Everyone with half a brain knows that the moon rotates counter-clockwise around the earth!11!1" But when you're on the receiving end and you know pretty certain that 99.9% of people don't care which way the moon is rotating because it's just a cool graphics effect, it's hard to champion changing it (incidentally, we are going to tweak that since it's in the customplanets.xml file).

Other Economic options

I have some ideas on economic tweaks that I could see us making.

For example: Social Production.  Social Production could be automatically transferred to ship building when all planetary improvements are done.  This would solve the potential issue of people's economy becoming crazy when all social projects are completed.  And if there's no ship to be built, it would just go back to your treasury.  It wouldn't be hard to do, would only require modest AI changes.  I can assure you the AI would love it.

Another area I could see tweaked is the relationship between research labs and factories.  Right now, spending is rationed between factories and labs.  But that's not the only way it could be done.  Other ways would require some UI thought though to keep it from being too complex. 

For example, rather than having a spending slider, you would simply have an industrial slider and a research slider that would be independent of each other. Then you'd have a dial that would let you decide how much of that industrial output was going to planet improvements and how much to ship building.  But doing it in an intuitive way would take some thought.

There are many other ways it could be done too.  All would require thought on how best to present it so that it's intuitive to players and doesn't radically change the game.

Conclusions

It's always tough trying to know where to draw the line on improvements. Game developers want to satisfy their gamers -- all of them. And often times, great ideas come from players. The whole starbase concept in Galactic Civilizations came from players for instance.

But you also have to take into account the people want to feel like they're playing on solid ground. That the game they're playing isn't that fluid. Because every change one makes is going to disappoint someone.  So we have to be very careful about how we do things.

That's my 2 cents on that anyway.