When I select to place a project, such as economy stimulus or research project, in the manufacturing queue, if I spend any points in manufacturing at all, I get a flat bonus such as +10%. This bonus applies if I allocate 1 manufacturing point or I allocate 100 points of manufacturing to the project.
This means that whenever I select a project, I have to change the economy wheel setting on the planet to have 1 point in manufacturing and the rest somewhere else such as either research or wealth generation. Otherwise I am wasting huge amounts of manufacturing points for no benefit.
It would cut down on a lot of micromanaging if projects would give a flat bonus even if no points were spent in manufacturing. This would allow me to just set my research planet to 100% research and not have to adjust the economy wheel to ensure no manufacturing points are being wasted on the project.
Alternatively, the benefits of any project could be proportionate to the manufacturing points being spent on that project.
This whole thing with the projects and focusing wheel are just broken from a micromanagement perspective and should go back to the drawing board (in my opinion). You have two mechanics that do the exact same thing... what is the point?
Yes, it is not a very good mechanic and doesn't actually add any benefit apart from a cheap 10% bonus for research specced planets (if you can handle the micro-management to do so). I believe it is supposed to add 10% per 10 points of manufacturing allocated.
I'm not sure what they were trying to achieve by doing things this way, as setting one of the stimulus projects on a fully manufacturing specced planet provides a potentially big bonus (say 200% for 200 manufacturing) - but 200% bonus to zero research is still zero. Much better to have used the traditional "converts manufacturing into research or economy" style projects.
From the tooltip on the colony screen, you can see that the projects add only a flat bonus if at least 1 point of manufacturing is dedicated to working on that project. It does not appear to matter how many points you spend as long as it is at least one.
i kinda agree with JorgenCAB here. the old empire wide sliders in GC2 were bad, but the new "per planet" sliders aren't much of an improvement. they succeeded in making an empire with highly specialized worlds efficient, but the price you pay for that efficiency is constant slider adjustments.
i can somewhat agree with the military-social slider that allows the player to build/upgrade structures and build ships at the same time, but the production to mfg/res/wealth slider seems redundant.
we already decide what that planet should do by plopping down the buildings. the ratio of buildings on the planet already kinda determines what the planet is supposed to do, so why do we even need an abstract "total production" that gets funnelled into the 3 yields mfg/res/wealth via the slider?
of course it's probably too late now to change the fundamental mechanics of the game, so i guess the best we can hope for at this point is some UI improvements and perhaps some sort of governor script to make the micromanagement a bit less tedious.
or i guess one could simply overcome that urge to squeeze out optimal performance and build lots of "generalist" planets with a little bit of everything that can be controlled with the empire wide slider
If only it was just about squeezing that extra bit of optimal performance from a planet - but it's not. Specialising vs generalising results in at least 3 times the output (often much more when taking adjaceny and planetary bonuses into account).
Have you guys actually tested this? You're talking about it like there's no scaling factor.. but there is!
.01-9.99 manufacturing will give you ONE of the listed bonus. 10.00-19.99 will give you TWO of the bonus. Just load up the game and try it.
I agree that it is silly that you can get ~10 manufacturing worth of bonuses from .01 manufacturing, but you don't *have to* slide it down ~1 manufacturing, it does scale with production.
Have you guys actually tested this? You're talking about it like there's no scaling factor.. but there is!.01-9.99 manufacturing will give you ONE of the listed bonus. 10.00-19.99 will give you TWO of the bonus. Just load up the game and try it. I agree that it is silly that you can get ~10 manufacturing worth of bonuses from .01 manufacturing, but you don't *have to* slide it down ~1 manufacturing, it does scale with production.
Thanks for pointing out the scaling. I did not test it with enough production to see the higher level bonuses. Still requires a lot of micromanaging to optimize it when there is a sharp cut-off point like that.
This now would also require a lot of micromanaging to determine whether it is better to spend more of your production in research directly, or more production in manufacturing for higher bonuses to research indirectly.
Well managing stuff is supposed to be fun!
sure it scales with the amount of manufacturing you invest, but it's not really worthwhile to use more than 1% for the research and money projects on most planets. 10 manufacturing for a 10% bonus is not going to do much when a single research building at the lowest tier already gives a 25% percent bonus that doesn't eat into the "raw research" that gets multipled by it.
assuming a fairly generalist world with 200% mfg bonus (for example 5 tier 3 factories a 40%), 200% res bonus and 20 "total production" for simplicity. putting the slider at 100% research gives you 20 raw research +200% from the res buildings, i.e. 60 total research. the slider at 50/50 mfg/res gives you 10 mfg + 200% and 10 res +200%; the research project converts the 30 mfg to 30% research, so you now get a whopping 33 research instead of 30. with the slider at 100% research, you'd get 60.
and the ratio gets worse for more specialized planets. the only freak case where it works somewhat is a world with very high mfg modifiers. like the mfg capital with 10 additional factories. but such a planet isn't going to be all that great for research either way and better used for building constructors when you don't need any warships right now.
Why should it be otherwise Azunai_? The purpose of those projects is not to give you more overall research/wealth/X than a specialized planet. The purpose is to turn a heavily manufacturing colony into something else. It's about flexibility. You *always* want production, whether its for building ships or upgrading tiles, and its *nice* that you can then turn that production into research or wealth through use of a project. But yes, if you have a 100% research focused planet, its going to make more research than a manufacturing planet that is doing a research project. How is this not acceptable?
I think Azunai's point is that you will still have to micromanage the sliders because it is never going to make sense to spend more than .01 manufacturing points on a project. So why even have the option of spending more than .01 points on a project which creates a bonus which scales so extremely poorly?
umm, you "discovered" that the projects scale with manufacturing. that example was just to show that the scaling is so weak it might as well not exist.
the planet in that example is NOT specialized. not at all. it's literally a 50-50 split between research and manufacturing.
let's do another example with the same planet, but this time we use our buildings differently.
again- 20 total production, this time we'll have 360% mfg and only 1 res building with 40% research. at 100% research, the planet makes 28 research points. at 50/50 with research project, it's 10 raw research multiplied by 40% (res building) + 46% (46 mfg converted by research project) - 18.6 research.
so even on a planet with 9 factories and 1 lab, it's more efficient to run the lab at 100% rather than using the research project.
my conclusion is that the projects are too weak right now.
No, its not really worth the effort... it most often are even more efficient to raze a building or two and build a market or lab and then raze them again and build new factories on huge factory worlds than using the research projects... It obviously depends on how many turns you will try to get some extra cash or research from them. But the extra 10% you potentially can get is so small when you compare with all the passive bonuses you will accumulate over the course of a game it's simply not worth the effort.
So even a super factory world have no direct use of the project outside of getting this extra 10% which is close to an exploit anyway..
As far as research and economic projects go, you might as well not have a scaling factor involved as, unless you're on a manufacturing-specialized world, setting the sliders to a position such that you get more than the minimum project bonus will hurt you more than it'll help you. The net change in the output multiplier from using a project relative to setting 100% of the planet's production towards the desired output type is
[net change] = (1 - [manufacturing fraction]) * 0.1 * ceiling([manufacturing fraction] * [production] * (1 + [manufacturing bonus]) / 10) - [manufacturing fraction] * (1 + [base output bonus])
where the base output bonus is the total bonus to the output type corresponding to the project from all sources other than the project, and ceiling(X) is the function which returns the smallest integer N such that N >= X. An alternative way of looking at this is that for a given project bonus P and a given manufacturing fraction x, the maximum bonus B to the output type corresponding to the project type from non-project sources you can have before using the project becomes harmful is
B = (P / x) - (1 + P)
The projects used to do this, but the way it was implemented resulted in the output being multiplied first by the manufacturing multiplier and then by the (research or economic) multiplier, and so people complained, and so they changed things to the present system.
This is actually going to give you 19 research; the 46 manufacturing gets turned into a 50% bonus because it's run through a ceiling function after being divided by 10 but before converting to a 10% per X bonus. You actually maximize at 1% manufacturing in your example, with 29.7 research produced; somewhere between 6% and 7% manufacturing, the total output falls below 28 and the project begins hurting you.
We should also not that if you play the game on normal research pacing all colonies already get a +25% research bonus. If you add other passive bonuses you pick up along the way I have a hard time to ever see a research project being profitable above those questionable 10% you can get if you have the will to do it.
In my opinion they should just decide if they want the focusing wheel for individual planets or the projects for research and wealth. My vote would be to remove the focusing wheel for individual planets and keep the project for the simple reason it is the least micromanaging heavy option overall. I also bet that most players don't even use the wheel for individual planets (or much) if there was a good way to find this out. It is mainly a tool for min/max players and I'm sure they are in minority anyway. The slider for social and military production is a good tool though and not so micromanagement heavy.
I agree with pretty much every point in this thread on the weakness of projects. What more can be said? Maximum conversion seems to be 99-1 to exploit the 10% bump, at the cost of micromanaging your production slider. It's not worth it.
In the old days net social manufacturing converted to raw research/wealth. That was overpowered as star base modules allowed you to get huge boosts. Better would be if net social manufacturing converted to net research/wealth at a certain rate (25-33%), which would not be subject to planetary, event, or starbase modifiers. That would make projects actually useful but not overpowered, and there would be much less need to micromanage the production settings.
I disagree with removing the wheel, personally. In my view, it's the projects that are the problem, not the wheel. If we had the old projects, then any planet beyond a certain size class would optimally have a roughly equal manufacturing and research/wealth mutliplier, you'd set the world to 100% manufacturing, and you'd use a project to get the output you wanted; that model made it so that worlds automatically upgraded themselves and went back to doing what the player wanted out of them without any significant micromanagement in a relatively short time (and any micromanagement would have been to avoid interruptions in research/wealth generation rather than to allow the place to upgrade in the first place), made it so there was an actual reason why you might build a world which had a reasonably balanced mix of improvements, and had none of this annoying 'fiddle with the slider settings to maximize output' business. But people complained about how 'unintuitive' and 'overpowered' the old projects were, and now we're stuck with the current projects. At least the old project functionality can be restored with a bit of modding.
In my opinion there is always going to be the issue of when is it worth to use the project and when is it more profitable to move planetary production into research or wealth instead. As long as there are two ways of doing the exact same thing you will always have that problem, otherwise one is going to be completely redundant as the project more or less are right now.
This, exactly! The "new" project method vastly increases micro-management. I'm sure it is not beyond the wit of man (and Stardock in particular) to simply code in that referred / repurposed research or wealth from a manufacturing project is exempted from additional bonuses.
If you have a research bonus and manufacturing bonus of B from on-planet sources, you can get a pure-(manufacutring or research) bonus of roughly 2B on planet. Starbases generally give equal bonuses to each output category if you upgrade facilities equally. Assuming no bonuses from special planet features, you needed to have a bonus from improvements of B where
B >= 3 - b + sqrt(12 - 4b)
before the mixed world was superior to the specialized world, where b is the starbase bonus (assumed to be equal for both manufacturing and the desired output type). In the case where b = 0, you needed B = 6.46 (i.e. a 646% bonus to each of the two output categories) before the mixed world was better; if you get +100% per tile improvement, you needed a minimum planet class of 13 to achieve this. Even for a starbase bonus of 2 (+200% to each category), you still needed an on-planet bonus to each category of +300% before the mixed world was better, which with the +100% bonus per tile improvement assumed earlier still requires a minimum planet class of 6 to achieve. The old projects are hardly the overpowered monsters they were claimed to be.
Furthermore, if as you indicate it is only with stacked starbases that this becomes a problem, I would suggest that it is stacked starbases which should be modified, not planetary projects. I will however admit that I dislike starbase stacking to begin with; if I knew a way to mod it out of the game without modifying the starbase spacing variable, I would.
IMO only seems to be an issue in the very early game where 10% vs 20% vs 30% bonus is a difference that may be worth considering messing with production values. When it gets to 210% vs 220% vs 230% it seems a waste of time. Past 1000% that's major OCD for another 10% to matter.
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