the economy is completely overpowered

Just to be clear, you used cheat commands to make super planets without being harassed by your opponents, and that's overpowered?

i used cheat codes to not spend 100 turns crashing. the point of this is to show what is possible my current main game before i started testing this is 140 turns in and the ai wont come after me since im trading with them and buying all thier techs. I could fairly easily turn that game into a similar state to this one except that game crashes every 5-10 turns now.

as a side note i have the starbase economic ring overlap to 12 bases someone might be able to manipulate it to 13 but atm im happy with 12

over the next few days ill see how far i can push this with a couple of galactic resources and that 12 ring

Kudos to the OP!  This is a useful (and fun) variant of an Upper Bound test. All 4Xs, CCGs, maybe RPGs, and other games with pump-ups can benefit from this.  Sometimes you can spot flaws this way that are not revealed in any other way.  It also makes for great trivia questions and weekly contests

What you're seeing is that GC3 productivity is exponential.  If you live long enough to get past the bend in the curves, your upper bounds are ridiculously high.

OTOH, maxing one product is only weakly correlated to wins, so even these results are not necessarily overpowered.  An equally-skilled opponent will generally kill you before you get that far.  While you're pumping wealth past the bend, he's pumping invasion fleets.  If you can't bribe him off or buy him out, I think he wins that match-up.  (So in an open competition pool of equally skilled players, probably what happens is that equilibria of strategies emerge, and deviations get punished.)

Over in some (e)CCGs, we amused ourselves with various Upper Bound and Lower Bound challenges.

• [Chron X] UN Trooper is one of the suckiest common assets in the game: firepower FP-3 (where 4 is blah and 8 is strong, and default enemy HQ has 25 hp).  Many other effects pump UN, UN Troopers specifically, or any asset.  Let's ignore the pump-ups that are "in principle" infinite (e.g. programs with some copy-failure %, hence infinite given infinite attempts), and use the default max dup of 4 (of each card type).  We'll allow cooperation (willing or not) from your opponent, i.e. you can postulate 4 more copies of cards you want in opponent's deck, then steal them.  What is the upper bound of a UN Trooper's FP?  Using only the first 2 card sets, IIRC I got him up to FP-334.  (Later card sets broke this all silly.  But it's still weak because speed is uber-arch-omega-powered, and this is very slow.)
• [Star Trek: Conquest Online] One win condition is to amass 10 Q Points.  Various card combos + events earn Q points.  Since the game ends at 10+, to maximize this you must somehow lurk at exactly 9 Q, and then ... do whatever you do in one turn.  What is the upper bound of Q points you can score?  I proved 172!!
• [Chron X] Does any Turn-1 Kill deck exist?  Yes, exactly 8 cards (so you draw them all), and Codeslinger must survive 4 untaps (90% ^ 4).  This lower bound is actually quite useful, because any game involving racing must consider the possibility that I outrace you before you even get a turn.  Solutions are wondrous Rube Goldberg machines when they go off correctly.  The deeper question is: Given these game rules, and this set of game elements, does a turn-1 win-path exist?  It demands flexible thinking, some of which carries over into the more general problem of outracing everybody else.
• [Magic:the Gathering] Does any Turn-1 Kill deck exist?  Yes, at least 2 (assuming early-edition card sets with all the ba-roken power cards).  In Shandalar, you can build the Stroke deck, which I think uses mana batteries like a 7-bit counter to count to 127 mana, then Stroke your deck for 125 in the top of the 1st inning.

Some of these bounds are headaches for the game designers (and some are harmless, being their own reward).  A community of players can be (or, inevitably are) more thorough than the designer(s) at discovering unexpected combos, and we often unearth unexpected consequences that the designers overlooked or just didn't fully appreciate.  Hence a wise game company solicits many eyeballs, and diligent testers push the boundaries along every axis.  We've collectively revealed:

• Altarian Dark Energy Labs abuse (30k+ manuf)
• Iridium wealth abuse (100k+ wealth)
• Birthing Stimulus + overpopulation + influence flip abuse
• Diplomacy trade agreements abuse

Good work so far (by all concerned).  Let's find more things to abuse!  Enjoy them in Beta, you'll never do them in Release ...

Iridium wealth abuse 

if you're refering to what ive done none of this setup appears limited to the iridiums they just happened to be the race ive become familiar with

Actually you arrive at 103k wealth per turn only because the economic star base module bug is still in the game. If you correct for this bug the wealth generated will be (102995.2 * 3.85 / 5.6 + 230 - 122.7 = 70916.5) about 71k per turn.

Furthermore Iridia is a massive planet (after terraforming) therefor the adjacency bonuses come (exponentially) into play for the production on top of the larger - than average - number of improvements. And it was already known that ridiculous manufacturing planets were possible.

Where you perceive that the economy is overpowered, it is actually the combination of population and (exponential) manufacturing that is overpowered (and this has been shown in a number of threads). You get a lot of wealth because of a second bug, which you yourself already noted:

Your understanding should be correct, but a bug treats the generated wealth from "Economic Stimulus" as income.

So if both bugs ("Star base economic module" bug, "Economic Stimulus income" bug) would be fixed the actual wealth generated would be: 18392 + 230 - 122.7 = 18499.3. Which is still a tidy sum, but it is the result of the combination of population and manufacturing and not of economics. Case in point: your economic income (in the last screen shot) is actually zero; An income of 0 increased by 285% (not 460%) is still zero.

The conversion ratio manufacturing to wealth is the same as the ratio manufacturing to research. The main difference between wealth and research conversion is: there is no "Star base research module" bug. And these observations, and the actually conversion numbers, can be found (spread out over) various other threads.

Personally i don't believe an economic boost by 285% in the end game is overpowered. In this case the perceived overpoweredness (a word of my own warped mind) of the economics is simply the result of an underlying cause and two bugs. And both of these bugs have been around since the alpha versions.

The really amazing thing is that both bugs can be easily fixed - i have done so on my own installation. 

thank you Gilmoy and Thecw

which bug is this?

this 18.5 k still seems quite overpowered especially when you conisder that an extra 5 starbase's could be placed around this planet and its not getting any bonus's from precurser relics at the moment

however some of this could be more unique to iridia then i originally thought

I feel that making wealth/production/research should be a tough choice in this game and at the moment it is pretty uch no choice.  I should need to think do I want those extra few credits or those extra points in manufacturing/research (production)

At the moment these choices are relatively easy as there is no production overflow so anything beyond what is necessary for the next tech / improvement/ship should go to wealth. especially when you consider that i can send a constructor to the furthest reaches of my space, build a shipyard, then start pumping out ships by quickbuying them at no additional cost then if i was quickbuying them at a shipyard near one of my production planets. frankly a production world should operate in the red, economic worlds should exist not primarily to make money but to pay for operating costs of production worlds

once you unlock tourism this extra income usually covers  maintenance costs on all your worlds. this should not be the case tourism should be a special form of economic world requiring tourism improvements that gain adjacency bonus's from nearby empty tiles

what i meant by economy was everything controlled by the economic wheel or govern wheel or whatever its called now therefore in this case economy does mean "the combination of population and (exponential) manufacturing" at least in my opinion

androshalforc

Posted a new message in the support thread [.51][Bug] Star base modules have wrong upgrade prerequisites

and also one for the "Economic Stimulus income" bug: [.51][Bug] Economic Stimulus still generates income instead of wealth

Exactly my feeling. That is why i have requested in the past that the underlying problems of (linear) population growth should be changed and that the conversion rates (manufacturing to research/wealth) should be diminished. The last they have sort of done, but the conversion still goes from manufacturing points to income (and gross research) instead of to wealth (and raw research).

This means: build manufacturing power and the rest (wealth and research) can be converted from this on-the-fly. This makes for very boring planet layouts, and very fast games: I have done a complete cultural conquest victory well under 100 turn, a military conquest victory under 120 turn, and even when i went heavily for tech supremacy i won under 200 turn (well into the age of ascension); almost all of my games i play on either medium or large.

With the introduction of diplomacy it became worse: Simply go to war the moment you meet the enemy, kill their ships, and they almost give you all their techs for next to nothing - like 40 credits per turn, which is nothing even in the beginning of the game with even one half decent planet. To top this off they may hate you, but they seem to be voting exactly like you wish.

So i am hoping for the fixing of the bugs, the introduction of maintenance and ship upgrade costs. Because hopefully then the game will pressure me to make choices that are different from simply filling my planets up with farms and factories.

Oh, yes, please. Which tourist want to go to a world that is purely made up out of farms and factory? Not i. There should be a relation between the amount of natural beauty (free space) or tourism improvements and the actual generated income from tourism.