Economic Stimulus? How does it work?

You get a 10% boost for any of the Projects for every 10 points of manufacturing, or fraction thereof. So 0.1 to 10.0 manufacturing allocated to projects gives +10%, 10.1 to 20 give 20%, etc.

Basically just have 1% of manufacturing to get the minimum, as you already figured out. But it can go much, much higher than that.

Hope that helps.

Edit: Note that on a highly specialized research or economic planet, the 10% (or whatever) bonus may actually be worse than no bonus, because you are in effect removing production from research/economy; with stacked bonuses it can sometimes be more efficient to just put it on 100% research/econ.

I believe every 10 manufacturing gives you 10% more bonus. So if you set social manufacturing to 20 points, you will get a 20% bonus.

It's not as simple as that, though. There is a round up in the calculation. If you have 25 social manufacturing points, you get a 30% boost. What people have found is that if you have a manufacturing specialized planet and set your wheel to 99% wealth, 1% manufacturing, you maximize the wealth you get, but only by a few bc. And because that is a pain and counterintuitive, there is generally a request to revamp the projects.

When the Economic Stimulus project is active, the planets manufacturing points are divided by 10, rounded up, and the resultant is then multiplied by 10% and this is the bonus that is applied to your planetary income.

Most of the time it is better to just produce 1 mp for 10% bonus and move the slider toward wealth.

Also be aware that the greater the fraction of planetary production you sacrifice to get the project bonus, the smaller the base value that the project bonus acts upon becomes. Getting a 10% bonus to colony income when 99% of the colony's production goes to wealth is significantly better than getting a 20% income bonus when only 70% of the colony's production goes to wealth. High income bonuses on the planet additionally greatly degrade the value of the economic project, and you can reach a point where the colony's income bonus from improvements and other features is great enough that using an economic project reduces your overall income rather than increases it, at least as compared to simply throwing all production into income generation. Given that the accuracy of the production distribution setting is +/-0.005, the maximum wealth (or research) bonus for which it can be expected that a 10% project bonus will produce a net increase in the overall planetary income is about 555% (this does not include the project bonus), assuming a nominal manufacturing fraction of 1%. Assuming an actual manufacturing fraction of 1%, the maximum wealth bonus for which you will not lose income by using the project to get a 10% income bonus is 890%.

More generally, the maximum bonus Bmax to wealth or research you can have before using a project becomes counterproductive is

Bmax = ((1 - m)*(1 + P) - 1) / m = (P / m) - 1 - P

where P is the bonus you expect to see from the project and m is the fraction of planetary production given to manufacturing.

OK, thanks all. So unfortunately it seems like another micromanagement need to optimize the colony output, eh? :/

If you're trying to maximize the output, sure, but remember that you're unlikely to be getting more than a couple extra credits per turn out of the economic project. Project bonuses stack additively with the other bonuses to that output type, rather than multiplicatively, and making use of a project reduces the base value upon which the bonuses act. You're not usually going to be losing out that much by just setting a planet to 100% wealth (or research) instead of 1% manufacturing 99% wealth (or research).

For example, if you have a bonus of 200% to wealth or research, and you can get an additional 10% by spending 1% of your planetary production on the appropriate project and 99% of your planetary production on the corresponding output type rather than 100% of your planetary output on the output type directly, your multiplier to that output type goes from 3 to 3.069 (not 3.1; remember that you've sacrificed 1% of the base value to get the project bonus in the first place), which is an increase in output of about 2.3%. Let's say your base production is 20. That 2.3% increase in output brings you from 60 to 61.4 output. Not really worth bothering with if you don't want to.

Yep, agreed. It's likely going to be a pretty small number overall (although it'll make more difference earlier than later) but that brings me back to my second question - what precisely is this mechanic supposed to accomplish?

In the Civ4 designer's notes, there was a very good section about 'interesting decisions'. If something is always beneficial and you always have the option to do it, it shouldn't be an 'option' in the game - it should be by default because otherwise you're just forcing the player to do mouse-exercise. To me, these 'stimulus' type projects are exactly that - a no-brainer bonus that the only 'cost' is the player's tolerance for micro-managing the planets. That is not an 'interesting decision' IMO. 

So I guess I'm just not seeing the reason for the mechanic to exist. Perhaps it's simply a relic of a previous version of how the econ worked (ie, similar to 'Trade Goods' in MOO2). But now it just seems odd to have a 'bonus' (however minor) that just requires micro to accomplish with no other cost or thought involved.

Again, that's for the info on this!

Thats why i pretty much always go for the influence project,  it always gives a nice bump so does the birthing project

Quoting Uncle_Joe, reply 7

... - what precisely is this mechanic supposed to accomplish?

So I guess I'm just not seeing the reason for the mechanic to exist. Perhaps it's simply a relic of a previous version of how the econ worked (ie, similar to 'Trade Goods' in MOO2). But now it just seems odd to have a 'bonus' (however minor) that just requires micro to accomplish with no other cost or thought involved.
Again, that's for the info on this!

End of Uncle_Joe's quote

It accomplishes the following:

1.  It allows any/all planets to focus on one of several options, without requiring that each planet be built up for a specific focus.
2. Those options not only include research & economy, but population growth and influence as well.
3. Manufacturing focused planets can still generate a reasonable amount of research/money when they are otherwise idle.
4. It allows flexibility; if I absolutely need money or a specific tech right now, all of my planets can contribute meaningfully, even if they have no or few markets/labs. Did I just load a bunch of transports? Now I can focus on pop growth. Somebody surrounding my colony with foreign influence? Switch to cultural festivals. All without having to tear-down and rebuild improvements.

I'm sure there are more, but early on in GalCiv III manufacturing could be converted pretty directly to research or money, and at a rate that made pure manufacturing planets superior to dedicated lab/econ planets. This was the fix for that issue, allowing flexibility without becoming a "non-choice".

Quoting Sansloi37, reply 9

Quoting Uncle_Joe,

reply 7

... - what precisely is this mechanic supposed to accomplish?

So I guess I'm just not seeing the reason for the mechanic to exist. Perhaps it's simply a relic of a previous version of how the econ worked (ie, similar to 'Trade Goods' in MOO2). But now it just seems odd to have a 'bonus' (however minor) that just requires micro to accomplish with no other cost or thought involved.
Again, that's for the info on this!

It accomplishes the following:

 

1.  It allows any/all planets to focus on one of several options, without requiring that each planet be built up for a specific focus.

 

1. Those options not only include research & economy, but population growth and influence as well.

 

1. Manufacturing focused planets can still generate a reasonable amount of research/money when they are otherwise idle.

 

1. It allows flexibility; if I absolutely need money or a specific tech right now, all of my planets can contribute meaningfully, even if they have no or few markets/labs. Did I just load a bunch of transports? Now I can focus on pop growth. Somebody surrounding my colony with foreign influence? Switch to cultural festivals. All without having to tear-down and rebuild improvements.

 

I'm sure there are more, but early on in GalCiv III manufacturing could be converted pretty directly to research or money, and at a rate that made pure manufacturing planets superior to dedicated lab/econ planets. This was the fix for that issue, allowing flexibility without becoming a "non-choice".

End of Sansloi37's quote

Awesome! Thanks for the update. I figured it had to be something like that where they had something and then changed it because an independent mechanic like we see now, it's questionable. I imagine it'll see some additional massaging once the core issues are resolved (or possibly in a DLC).

Not trying to be combative, I appreciate the point of view.  But all those points you mentioned don't hold much water in practice.  While it may give you an option to boost the non primary portion of a specialized (or generalized) planets production the actual tangible effect has to be weighed.  How much power will you really get from that feature?  The game incentivizes you to specialize.  As discussed, for a specialized planet it amounts to busywork.  For a non specialized planet it amounts to precisely 10% of raw production. .actually it's true for both...which is somewhere around 2-3.  (I'm actually assuming 20 or 30 raw production on a planet early in the game).  How is this useful?  It's a lot of busywork for a rounding error of actual effect.  A manufacturing planet would be able to boost the production to get maybe a 50 % bonus using 10 raw and give you 5-10 bonus on the remainder...but why aren't you building warships?

The item you bring up that is valuable are the influence and growth projects since those are hard to modify otherwise...but science and research exist solely as a dump so that the game isn't always prompting you for idle planets.  These don't contribute anything meaningful for your time.

This is not actually the case. Pure manufacturing worlds were never likely to be superior to dedicated lab or purse worlds. The conversion from manufacturing to research/wealth was

0.25 * [raw manufacturing] * (1 + [manufacturing bonus]) * (1 + [research or wealth bonus))

The best-case scenario for using a factory world for research instead of a lab world for research is that you have fully-upgraded factories (I'll assume Industrial Sectors) and a fully-upgraded power plant (I'll assume Quantum, since Singularity is galaxy-unique)  and only the basic labs (i.e. the Basic Lab, +25%/+5% per level); I will assume that both builds dedicate the same number of tiles and the same tiles to farms, approval structures, and other structures which do not affect the output multiplier. In such a scenario, the effective research multiplier of the factory world was

0.25 * (1 + 0.75 * N + 0.05 * (B + L) + 1 + M) * (1 + R) = (0.5 + 0.1875 * N + 0.0125 * (B + L) + 0.25 * M) * (1 + R)

while the same world built as a lab world would have an effective research multiplier of

1 + 0.25 * (N + 1) + 0.05 * L + R = 1.25 + 0.25 * N + 0.05 * L + R

where N is the number factories, M is the non-structure manufacturing bonus at the planet, R is the non-structure research bonus at the planet, L is the number of lab levels that the lab world can attain, and B is the number of additional levels that the factory world can attain. In order for the world's effective research multiplier when built as a factory world to equal that of the world when built as a lab world, you needed a number of additional levels B and a non-structure manufacturing bonus M such that

0.0125 * B + 0.25 * M = (1.25 / (1 + R) - 0.5) + (0.25 / (1 + R) - 0.1875) * N + (0.05 / (1 + R) - 0.0125) * L + R / (1 + R)

In order for the world to offer a better research multiplier when built as a factory world than when built as a lab world, the LHS must be greater than the RHS. This is not an easy condition for the factory world to fulfill, especially since B being large doesn't necessarily help the factory world (each possible value of B carries with it an implied minimum value of N and L; this may well hurt the factory build more than it helps it by comparison to the lab build). Adding empire-unique or galaxy-unique structures can change things a bit, but, well, just how heavily are you going to stack the deck in favor of the factory world to show that the factory world is 'better' than the lab world at producing research?

The same applies to a purse world. Note that the above assumes that we're looking at the long-term picture. A factory world could in theory finish building its structures before a lab or purse world and thereby attain a temporary lead in total output to date.

What was likely to be the case was for mixed lab-factory or market-factory worlds to be superior to pure-lab or pure-market worlds. For some reason, this was deemed to be illogical and unacceptable by a vocal portion of the player base, despite this being more similar to reality than a complete dissociation of technological development and industry, and also despite the questionable logic of the single-output planet.

No worries, polite disagreement isn't being combative in my view. And you may be right. The main reasons I don't think the current system is bad (not that it couldn't be improved I suppose) is that

1. It is optional micro. If you don't feel it is worth it, you are not required to do it. Just set social manufacturing to zero and it won't bug you to set a project.
2. It allows those who want to wring every possible point of research/econ possible from planet the option to do so. It is often a pretty minor effect, but when has that ever stopped (some) people from striving for absolute maximum gain?
3. It allows a very hands-off approach for those who have absolutely no desire for micro. No, I'm not trying to contradict myself just for fun!

For those who play on Normal or lower (~ 94% according to the Metaverse), planet specialization is completely optional*. So you could easily play at that level with a bunch of non-optimized, general purpose planets and still do fine. Instead of adjusting production sliders every time a new improvement is developed, one can just leave a certain amount of social manufacturing active and start a project; upgrades will occur automatically and during lulls you are still getting some benefit from that manufacturing via Projects. It may not be efficient, but it sure is simple and easy.

*I've found that specializing planets on Normal allows one to dominate the AI. If you move up in difficulty though, you start to be required to specialize just to have a fighting chance, since the AI has been given handicaps just to deal with the ability of the player to "play optimally." Kind of a viscous circle!

I guess my question to you would be: what do you feel should replace the current system? Genuinely curious. I am decent at creatively altering systems from within their established framework, but I'm not too good at coming up with entirely new systems.

I'm sure that you are quite correct joeball123; I was basing that on what I read on the forums prior to release, since I was not in the Beta. Thanks for the correction!

To be honest I don't see it as a terribly flawed system.  As you mentioned in point 1, it's completely optional even when playing a min/max style due to the limited effect.  I actually use it as a visual reminder since my planet quick view will be blank for any "completed" planets.  Any upgrades show up and are easily noticed that way.

Also, I had not really thought about the effect on more casual play.  If the end effect is improved experience for a lot of players then it's fine the way it is.  The only thought I could come up with would be to have the project convert a % of your manufacturing bonus into a science bonus.  This would not require raw production (and if you make it automatically dump raw manufacturing back into science as if you had changed the wheel it would be better).  This would allow you to retain some benefit from generalizing a planet without requiring you to micro a slider wheel to 1% or having you grossly under perform by using a large amount of raw production to get a small bonus when the same raw put directly into science would be better.

The reason I don't think it is okay as it is right now is that, even with OCD-like micro on a manufacturing-specialized planet, the extra wealth/science gained (compared to just setting the slider to 100%) is minuscule. No, a manufacturing-specialized planet should not be able to compete with a research-specialized planet in the amount of research it can produce, but I think the projects have to be more than just marginally better than not running the project. Otherwise they effectively serve as an inefficient method of allowing a planet to idle without adjusting any sliders.

I was told there would be no math here.

Clearly you were misinformed.