Building a strong economy is a foundational aspect of all 4X games, regardless of your overarching aims in that particular campaign: whether you’re racing for a technological victory by researching the most advanced technologies, or raising an unstoppable military juggernaut to crush your enemies with, “the sinews of war are infinite gold” to quote Cicero. Or, in the case of Galactic Civilization’s IV: Supernova, infinite credits.
And even that timeless wisdom doesn’t quite do things justice in a space 4X: infinite credits would be pretty helpful and though we can trade cash for various things with other players, and there are ways to rush build, buy or otherwise purchase goods and services, we can’t always instantly transform credits into advanced technologies, Cultural Starbases or a host of other tools we need if we’re to lay eyes on that victory screen.
GalCiv’s resource system is a large topic, and we covered it fairly extensively in this video on Youtube, but as a continuation of our series aiming to demystify the early game for new players, I’d like to pass over that fine detail and instead give you some very broad advice on how the economy works and what each of these resources does.
As a quick recap, natural resources are represented as Planetary Input, which are then converted by Citizens, Districts and Improvements (and a few other miscellaneous things) into Planetary Output. Manufacturing and Influence are used at the planet level, for colony construction and shipbuilding, and pushing out your borders respectively.
Planetary Output values then contribute to your Empire’s overall treasury of resources known as Civilization Output, where they’re used for various things, and these are fairly intuitive: Research allows your scientists to discover exciting new technologies, Food is shared across your Civilization for Citizen growth and approval, and Income is taxed at a set tax rate to provide Credits, for paying for all your infrastructure, with the surplus pooled and available to spend on a turn-by-turn basis.
This screenshot from my video on GalCiv’s economy summarises things a bit more simply.
Here’s a quick example using Minerals and Manufacturing.
The Core World of Ivoria here has mineral resources called Mineral Input, worth 5 points. We’ve also got a Colony attached, Ivoria III, which is contributing it’s own Mineral Input of 3, for a total of 8.0. If we had Asteroid Bases around Ivoria, you’d see their input here too.
This Mineral Input is then processed by Manufacturing Districts, any manufacturing Improvements (like the Planetary Generator and Elemental Fabricator here), and some other bonuses such as our Governor’s Diligence score (Diligence is a character trait used to modify Manufacturing), and the various Diligence scores of our Citizens too.
You can think of Citizens bonuses to Mineral Input processing as having dedicated workers leading your main industrial operations, and for some civilizations which hate pollution and shun organized industrial efforts, as some kind of highly efficient and alien cottage industry. We can assign Citizens a Worker job, to help them focus on improving Manufacturing output even further.
There are other modifiers involved, including Economic Starbases (which have an industrial element that helps production) and various effects from Civilization Abilities, in game Events and more.
Finally, after applying our current Approval as a multiplicative modifier, we’ve ended up with a score of 23.8 for our Manufacturing Output on Ivoria.
Approval is, and I stress, VERY IMPORTANT, because it directly affects the output of Manufacturing and Research, and low Approval can be crippling to your economy, so work to keep your Citizens happy!
So, what can we do with this Manufacturing output? Well, every construction project on our planet has a Construction Cost, and our Manufacturing score is deducted each turn from that cost until the total cost is paid, at which point you get your shiny new Coordination Beacon, in the example above, which required a total of 120 Construction points to create.
That Manufacturing score is also translated into another resource called Military, which is basically the same as Manufacturing Output, but is used by your attached Shipyard to create shipyard projects (warships, research missions, starbase modules and more).
This is a very brief overview by way of example, and we’ve only taken a look at just one of the Planetary Input/Output chains, but I hope this helps to demystify some of these arcane numbers a little bit. Technology, Farming, Wealth and Culture all have their own little rules but you should be able to follow the example here, with the help of the in-game tooltips, to work out what modifiers are affecting each, and where they are used.
I’d also strongly recommend that you check out the video I linked at the start of the article, as it details all this much better, and in a much more amusing format too, I hope!
If you’ve got any questions about this or anything else, just leave them in a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them.
Cheers!