Brad Wardell wrote:

However, new to GalCiv III is the concept of being able to FORCE people to work certain jobs. That is, I can draft people to go work in the factories or in the labs or raise their taxes. Through the production wheel, I can make people to work in the factories, raise their taxes or help out in the labs.

In every previous GalCiv, if you raised taxes, there was a corresponding morale penalty. We don’t have that here because it was decided it was too convoluted to have it just for taxes. However, what we really should have considered is that it’s not that people hate taxes per se, they had COERCION. They don’t like their government controlling their activity. If my taxes are 50%, for instance, that means 50% of the time I’m working FOR the government.

When I move my wheel to 100% manufacturing I’m conscripting my citizens to work in the factory and I get a corresponding boost to manufacturing:


Note that in this example, my morale is still 78%. In GalCiv II, if you raised your taxes to 100%, your morale would plummet unless you invested heavily into things to keep them happy. But in GalCiv III, there’s no penalty at all for setting manufacturing to 100%. I understand why people like the production wheel

Imagine if in GalCIv II we let people set their taxes to 100% and there was no downside to this. Now, imagine if we put out GalCiv II v1.4 and we made it so you couldn’t change taxes. People would have been ticked off. Understandably. But I hope also that people would understand that such a system is broken. There’s no such thing a a free lunch.

Ending the Free Lunch
I’ve had a lot of time to think about the production wheel. By reading the forums, at length, I’ve gotten a much better idea of what the issue really is. It’s the free lunch aspect of the production wheel I don’t like. In the real world, command economies don’t do well against free markets in the long-run. But in GalCiv III, they’re absolutely the way to go. The problem ISN’T the wheel on its own (I don’t like the micro management but I have no issue with people voluntarily choosing to play that way). The problem is that you get to coerce people without any downside.