posted 11-21-98 03:27 PM ET        

"Third comes the selection of your colonies' economic structure. Here I had three choices, Free Market, Planned Economy, and Green. Free Market economies improve the energy production of each of your cities (in Alpha Centauri, energy is wealth), lowers your faction's morale, and severely reduces the effectiveness of your police force. Planned Economy cultures will benefit from improved population growth and better industry scores, but don't work as efficiently as their leaders would like. Lastly there's the Green Economy that improves both efficiency of your workers and the amount of environmental impact they create, but reduces how fast their populations can grow."

And here's something we know from the www.gamespot.com preview:

"Peacekeeping Forces: The humanitarian democracy known as the Peacekeeping Forces is led by Commissioner Pravin Lal. Because the Peacekeepers have a large bureaucracy, they are less efficient than other factions, but they attract more intellectual talents, have more clout in the planet's democratic council, and can exceed the population limits that other factions must live by."

So, my question is: what is meant by "efficiency"? It seems to me that it might not make much sense if it affected productivity (otherwise the better industry of planned economies wouldn't make sense) and it might not make much sense if it affected research (otherwise the "intellectual talent" attracted by the PKs would be counteracted). Also, I can't think of any way in which being "green" would make you more efficient (at least the way I think of efficiency). So what's the speculation out there?