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.

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

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.

Well managing stuff is supposed to be fun!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.