Naselus: Go check the files. The arbitration center and the Enlightenment temple are not faction wide and do not provide multipliers to raw output in the respective categories. The Enlightenment temple is really just a super powered, (as in better than double), Innovation complex and the Arbitration Center, whilst it does provide a flat bonus, does not provide a separate multiplicative bonus, does not get a non-standard adjacency multiplier. You can't stack it in the same fashion as the death furnaces bonus. The death furnace is broken balance wise in comparison to bot, neither comes close to the same level of benefit. They're both much more powerful than anything else you can get in the same slot for the same target. the arbitration center at absolute best gives something like a 55% boost over and above the previous influence output, and the Temple won;t even do that much for research. he death furnace is a minimum 50% increase, realistically a minimum 110% increase if you encase it in factories over and above the previous score. there's simply no comparison between the three. The death furnace matches or exceeds their best performance on a bad day and laughs all over it on a middling day. On it's best day it makes them look irellevent.

Erm no, he had to explain it once. The key point was he never sat down and stated prior to me discovering it that they actually had different mechanical modifier types for adjacency in the game code. i had to figure that out the hard way for myself. To be fair he probably thought it wasn't necessary but that's a typical communication SNAFU.

I was actually looking at the arbitration center, though I'd mis-read it anyway (saw the inf per turn effect and then read the details from above it). That's what happens when you ONLY check the code

But many other wonders DO give faction-wide benefits - +50% research for all planets from Research Cloisters, rising to 100% empire-wide from the upgrade; Assimilation cetners give influence empire-wide; Galactic Stock Exchange gives +50% gross income empire-wide, entertainment capital gives +25% approval empire-wide, the Hyperion MAtrix gives +50% research empire wide... There's a lot of them, and most of these are equal cost to the DF. The power of the Death Furnaces is pretty much in line with these. One could argue that the other ideology wonders could probably use a buff, but they're are not only easier to get to (level 3 rather than 4), but also the arbitration center is massively cheaper (45 manu compared to 202).

We should probably note that the Death Furnace isn't meant to be balance with the Neutral/Good wonders (those compete with the Citadel of Revenue instead, which is largely identical to the Good version, but with much less useful money rather than research), but is instead meant to balance with the level 4 traits from those ideologies. 

Or build your largest warship 1 per turn, AND have a helluva lot of research by using research project.

Um, no, it's not. It's a level 4 ideology trait. You have to get to 4 traits to get there. It's not balanced against the level 3 traits, because they're level 3 traits. Just because it gives 1 ideology point per turn and those ones do to is meaningless. 

 

So are the other examples I mentioned; I specifically avoided galactics. Check the files; they're all just IsPlayerWonder. There's a couple of Galactics (virtual world, for example), some of which are actually cheaper to construct than the Death Furnace. It balances against the equal-cost wonders, and yes, it's pretty much balanced for it's price. You do need to bear in mind that actually, the game hands out a lot of productivity bonuses - there's 100% from techs alone. Planets can have +30% just from random events. You get +25% just from high approval. These stack additively, so rather than going from 50%-160% from a completely adjacent-ed DF you could be going from 200%-310% - less than double, from a substantial investment of real estate. And the requires you to have a 7-hex gap available, in addition to hexes for farms and attendant approval buildings. To reach your hypothetical 40-pop world, you'd need a 20+ tile planet.

At it's best, the Death Furnace just isn't that powerful. You get 50% production, plus 10% per adjacency. That gives you 110% bonus if you're very lucky (maybe scaling to ~200% from some adjacency-booster techs, or if you get artful with durantium and powerplants). This means that, for the cost of half the planet, it's equal to... 2 planets. This is provided neither of you have picked up any of those aforementioned productivity increases; if both of you have, then the power of the DF is less pronounced in exactly the manner you go on to outline below:

As above. Productivity percentage bonuses are also additive. They're calculated in exactly the same manner as the other bonuses: (base + flat bonuses) + ((base+flat)*sum of % bonuses). They are not really much more powerful than the equivalent boost to industry/research whatever, since they're just the other side of the multiplier - it's only because they're rarer that they are more valuable, in fact.

Since you do get at a 1-to-1 exchange rate from food it turns out that the Biomass Re-sequencer (75% of the cost and maintenance of the DF, though it does need to be built as an upgrade) has pretty much the same effect as the 'base' Death Furnace, aside from the adjacency bonus. Only - you'll hate this - the Biomass resequencer is actually better in the late-game.

If we take your hypothetical 40-pop world, with 6 lossless farms, 6 top-level approval buildings, 6 industrial sectors and the Death Furnace, then it produces 45 base production (5 from the colony itself, 40 from pop), has +110% productivity from the DF, and has manufacturing bonus of 600%. It's not that useful for anything apart from manufacturing, since even it's doubled productivity is converted at 1-to-1 for research or econ. It's effective production is 94.5.

Now let's look at the biomass re-sequencer. 6 lossless farms with the biomass in the middle will give you 51 base food with a 50% bonus. That's 75.5 pop; you'll need around 10 entertainment buildings to cancel out the population. But we have 80.5 base production and spare slots that can be used on more or less anything; and we can pick whatever we want. In fact, you can pick all the possible choices, since this is a planet-unique and so you can follow the same strategy everywhere.

Now, where the biomass re-sequencer takes off here is that not only that you can build one on every planet, but also that it benefits much, much more from all the other % productivity bonuses in the game. The 100% bonus from the governance techs, for example, gives this planet 161 production points. The planet with the Death Furnace is only getting 40*310% = 124. If your population is just happy, then you'll get 18 extra production points, compared to the DF's 10. Sure, with optimal placement the DF is powerful, but not in a particularly unbalanced way.

This is also where the Hive comes in. The hive adds direct production bonuses to the base number - so it benefits from the % multipliers, where the DF never does. The DF does benefit from flat bonuses to production - but there's fewer of these and their total is much lower than the effect of % boosts, so the corresponding increase from the Death Hive is even less impressive. For example, the galactic governance techs equates to +2 production per hive; the Death Furnace never benefits from these directly at all.  The only generic-tree production tech that directly increases the power of the Death Furnace provides an additional +0.5 production for that planet.

The hive's problem lies in that flat bonus and the fact you get one per colony, not in the use of productivity or even in the %-based adjacency bonus. The combination of %-adjacency-bonus and flat main bonus is too much, mostly because both constituent elements are too high for a building that costs the same as a T1 factory.

One aspect not yet discussed is custom races.  Thalan tech can manufacture a helluva lot, but they are expected to have much lower population.  Terrans  I suppose are the baseline (they only have a +1 in manf, while all other races except Altarian have several bonuses across manf/research/econ), and pretty much use a generic tech tree.

Create a race giving you positive traits on the way you like to play, negative traits that are meaningless with your playstyle, will easily break the original intent of a particular specialized racial tech tree.   I'd frankly consider playing a custom race with Thalan or Yor tech trees, to be an exploit, even though allowed and encouraged by the design of the game.   Wanna be fair with your custom race?  Use the generic tree.

One person's exploit is another person's strategy.  

Isn't the whole concept of "strategy" to exploit things? 

Karl, I did not, at any point, say that increased total manufacturing stacks additively with increased max manufacturing. I am well aware that they multiply. What I did say, which you appear to have failed to grasp, is that total manufacturing bonuses stack additively with other total manufacturing bonuses, which are NOT RARE. Techs provide a 100% bonus. Approval gives a 25% bonus. Some worlds receive a 30% bonus just from settlement events. You appear to be labouring under the delusion that one world receiving a 110% bonus is game-breakingly potent. It isn't, since by the end of the game EVERY PLANET has at least +100%. By the Age of War, most players will have a 55% bonus empire-wide.

Don't get distracted with the manufacturing bonuses, because you can apply them elsewhere anyway. The biomass resequencer world could have a quantum powerplant surrounded by industrial sectors too, and would achieve a higher Max manufacturing bonus, and will actually achieve higher levels of manufacturing output later in the game as the other production bonuses are twice as effective. That 100% from governance techs gives it 150 base production, while the Death Furnace at the same tech level on the same planet (minus the sequencer) will only get (40*210%) 124. 

When I use the term 'production', I'm referring to what the code calls ProductionPoints, which are, in-game, rather confusingly referred to as Total Manufacturing. It does not refer to manufacturing output. I get that you only figured this one out yourself a couple of days ago, but most of us already had a firm understanding of the difference between Max Manufacturing and Total Manufacturing. The neither of the planets in my Biomass re-sequencer example ever have 588 production. They have 588 manufacturing. 

The reason you're freaking out is mostly because you don't realize that it's not really that powerful. Consider your singularity example. This wonder gives +25% manufacturing to all planets, on top of the 200% bonus it gives to the planet it is on. It also gives +5% to ALL planets based on it's adjeacency bonus, to give +55% globally from being sited surrounded by the most basic factories. On most maps, this will be vastly higher than the bonus from the DF. The DF, even perfectly-placed, at the sort of tech level that you get it at, will NOT double your existing production output, because you likely already have +55% or more from technology and approval. You are going from x+55% to x+165%, which is not double what you had anyway. It is not the all-powerful godhead that you believe.

As I noted, increasing the actual flat bonus to production (so Hives, or just adding more food) is actually more potent, because this IS multiplied by the other % bonuses, and then also multiplied by the max manufacturing bonus. And you can build this EVERYWHERE. The DF is not overpowered for a player-unique wonder.

Until both of you spell out the math, calculation by calculation, this will all be lost in translation.  Regardless, lets go with the worst case scenario, "death furnace doubles a planet's manufacturing".  Isnt this a bit inconsequential on nearly any map except the smaller ones, as this is a player unique structure? ONE planet gets "double production"?  As well, ANY player can get it if they put the points into it?

The arbitration center is the one that truly gets the shaft.  Spamming out culture on 1 planet....oh, wow,"great".  They should have balanced it with a huge econ bonus - benevolent gets research, prag should get econ, malevolent gets manufacturing.

And a level 4 ideology pick, I would not at all consider to be "early" in the game.

Rather than run through some math i've gone and done a test game, i'll include the highlights in screenshots below.

First i want to note something i didn;t know. The governmental bonuses all apply, not merely the highest as i assumed, (as many other bonuses work out at), however as you can see below it still doesn't change much.

The basics however:

The world without the singularity powerplant or DF on it produces 6119.2 production total, from a raw of 363.1

With singularity plant this increases to 7365.3 total manufacturing, a total of a 20% increase.

It should be noted the empire wide boos from the singularity plant is a meager 60% max manufacturing modifier. Meaning on any world with decent pre-existing production it' a drop in the bucket. I didn't actually have another world setup to show that however so the screenshot just picked a random one.

Replace the Singularity with a Df and the total production jumps to 10902.2 and Raw increases to 625.7. This is an increase in total manufacturing and raw of just under three quarters, (72% raw, 78% total)

And just for the sake of those wondering the two put together pull 13941.2 total production and 672.1 raw. An increase in raw of 85% over the singularity alone,a nd an increase in total production over the same of 89%.

That last line is part of what i'm getting at, but remember you'll most likely when you first get it put it on your homeworld where you also have the preceeding +100% military manufacturing and a world which is both your most developed, had the most time to accrue population, and which is probably near the top of your list in size terms. So your single most powerful production planet is now equivalent to four of itself. As you accrue more raw production and military manufacturing bonuses that will fall off a bit, but even then you've got a homeworld worth 3 non-homeworld planets of a similar size in one.

A single class 16 undeveloped world is worth a lot less than turning a fully developed class 16+ into 2 or more of itself.

At the same time as i tried pointing out earlier the other two ideological wonders have serious opportunity costs associated with them.

First if you rush the other wonders you either have to get 4 traits as well to get yourself an ideological building at t1, or skip that and accept a slower ideology build up afterwards due to less buildings till you get your next trait. In addition the preceding traits for the respective ideological wonders are much less powerful for the other two than for malevolent. Benevolent is especially bad with neither being worth a damm, and even pragmatic's one good of the two is so time dependent that rushing the line robs it of most of it's power.

Malevolent by rushing the DF not only get superior ideology generation to the competing options for the other two line's, (unless they turn their wonders into 4 trait picks as well, in which case, yeah the whole argument about non-equivalence breaks down), but a sequence of powerful bonuses that are vastly superior to what the other two get.

I think it's pretty clear that both the death forge and the hive both need some severe nerfing. 

now, back to the poor old altarians...

I can set up a smaller example to simulate an earlier example. But of course an earlier example IS NOT going to have the same size + empire wide bonuses meaning your not going to get as much falloff on the DF meaning it gets more powerful at lower tech levels, not less.

And again you can see how it does not in any way balance out against the singularity powerplant. it doesn't even come close to balancing out against it, a tech capital + power plant + factories is something you can do on most decent sized planets of the sort you'd use for production. I simply left it setup in a config that let me slip both in but a config for just one would be several tiles smaller.

You can talk maths all day. the numbers aren't going anywhere and the conclusively show that an endgame wonder is getting utterly trashed by a mid to early-mid game wonder. Thats so far past screwed up it's not even funny.

This. It's no better than some late-game colony uniques. It has taken two wonders to make it equate to two planets. That's nothing special when the only thing stopping you having those two planets instead is... an extra -0.2 approval. One planet being as powerful as two other planets if it has half a 

As to the argument that evil is more powerful than good or pragmatic - that's something I can agree with. Not as game-breakingly as it was in baseline GC2 (here, have an end-game-level gun halfway up the tech tree! ) but the others do suffer - pragmatic's very good at the bottom of the tree, very early on in the game and then becomes near-universally rubbish by about T3, and while benevolent has some really powerful abilities it also has a lot of dross.

Of the level 1 buildings, Good is arguably best simply because it gives influence, while both resistance and % approval are largely broken. Good's level 1 wonder is similarly broken by the bad approval mechanics, so that it has very little impact on larger maps. Of the level 3 wonders, Good stands out by far ahead, with a 200% research bonus and +1 culture per turn; evil's is waaay weaker, giving 100% of the much less useful money and only 0.2 cpt. But again, pragmatic gets shafted; Influence is good and all, but 50% isn't very much, and tourism is basically just gross income's poor cousin. The one real advantage it has (being absurdly cheap) is pretty meaningless since it's one-per-player. I do rather wonder if that's not a bug, given the utter disparity between it and the other two.