Second Age Techs and Buildings Should be Significantly More Powerful and Also Cost Significantly More Than First Age

Not sure if they need to be more powerful but at least their manufacturing costs should be increased. Currently, when you hit the 2nd age techs your empire has usually already developed to the point where most about anything can be built in 1 turn...

Is there a way to easily change all second age techs quickly without having to change each tech individually? 

They do already cost a lot more as you rank up each building.
However it doesn't seem to be enough.

In fact the cost of everything needs to be higher.

I have a couple of 10ish planets connected to 1 shipyard, they pump out nice medium ships every 4-5 turns and at the same time finish buildings on their planets (from the 2nd age) in about 5 turns.
Baring in mind they only have TWO factories, this feels much too fast.

My capital produces anything in 1 turn, again with only a couple of factories (although I had the malevolent trait +10 to raw for the capital).

I rushed ahead to get medium ships and Harpoon's, and I really don't feel that I should be able to knock out 1-2 of those every single turn.
I'd say make build costs at least 150% of what they are now, if not 180% - across the board.

Nope.You'd have to change each individually, and for each tech tree. You'd also need to spend a lot of time figuring out the tech choice weights, and it would still gimp the hell out of the AI (because it would insist on trying to upgrade its first, solitary factory all the way to the highest level it can on every new colony, using the present global econ settings regardless of how inappropriate they are - both things we can't even control in the xml right now). 

I'm not opposed to the idea in principle, but it's not something that's practical to mod in right now.

Check out my spreadsheets thread. Ships as a general rule don't increase in manufacturing or maintenance anywhere near as fast as you'd expect atm and that leads to a LOT of issues with overly cheap ships and minimalistic money issues allowing you to push production and research output up in unfortunate amounts.

That said there's a huge issue with so much stuff being a combo of production point, maxmanufacturing and either one of social or military production.

As an example a 10 base pop planet throwing the entire pop at production at the start of the game with 6 factories surrounding a solar plant and +25% military manufacturing boost from traits with 100% approval.

Raw production from pop is 10.

Approval gives a +25% production points multiplier multiplying that by 1.25 for 12.5. That's then multiplied again by the max manufacturing boost of plus 325% or a 4.25 multiplier. That turns 12.5 into 53.125. if you now dedicate that entirely to Military production the further 1.25 multiplier to that from military manufacturing boos turns that into 66.40625. We'll call it 66.4.

So that means collectively a 6.64 multiplier has been applied.

And that's pretty low level. Malevolent tree's 2nd and 3rd bonuses combined with say the first 3 government techs and maxed approval and 6 mega factory's surrounding a fusion plant with 2 manufacturing specialisations and the military specialisation can give you something like a 2.7 military multiplier a 1.85 production point multiplier and a 5.95 max manufacturing modifier for a total multiplier of approximately 29.72 on a raw input of 20. Or 594.4 production output from a 101 pop world. Even if you throw half of that at research with no research boosting buildings simple passive research boosts from various places and the fact that production point modifiers apply to wealth and research too mean that your probably looking at between 20 and 30 research and just under 300 military production. Even if you split that evenly with social your looking at about 150 military and 120 social. No planetary improvement even costs 1,000 manufacturing a turn, in fact very little costs over a few hundred.

If the update you want to apply is something that can be expressed with a math operation and its targets can be identified with an xpath-rule it's possible to use XML patch tools. Simple updates are easy, like "modify ImprovementDefs.xml by multiplying Value=Value*2 in all //DefaultImprovementList/Improvement/Stats XML-blocks that have EffectType=ManufacturingCost", which would double all production costs.

Of course, such a simple modification isn't a solution for this because you don't want to increase the production costs of all improvements but just the late game ones, and you may want to increase them by different factors depending on how late they appear in the game. The latter could be done with multiple passes but the real problem is coming up with a rule that tells you which improvements are the late game ones. I don't see any XML tags or values in ImprovementDefs.xml that could be used as keys... The existing manufacturing cost? Assuming they already increase towards the end you could perhaps update those ones that are above some value?

Yeah, mechanically it's not hard to do it quickly. Doing it in a remotely workable manner, on the other hand, actually takes some thinking and maybe a week digging through the files. 

But anyway the problems aren't in changing the actual files, which is merely time consuming. It's the changes we can't make which are the problem. If you pump up the price of a building which the AI is going to build before it's economy is ready, then you cripple it. 

The player generally will lay out his whole planet before doing any terraforming or upgrades. The AI does exactly the opposite. Say we increase prices by a factor of 2 every tier - so the first building costs 30 manu, the second 60, the third 120, the forth 240. The human player will build 15 factories and then start upgrading them. The AI will build 1 factory, and then attempt to get it all the way to level 4 if it has the tech to do it before it builds a second. It will spend 450 manufacturing on that first tile, which could be 30-40 turns, and it will still be way lower than if it just built 15 factories. The human has managed to get all 15 factories in that time, and now begins upgrading them - so he gets higher, faster.

The more you increase the bump in prices, the more time the AI will spend using 1 factory rather than 15, and the worse it will perform. And we cannot code round this in the xml. Despite the general build order being defined in governors.xml, and despite the fact that terraforming is in the enums, it's applied automatically after the first factory rather than applied as part of the build queue; as are upgrades, because the AI does not queue up more than 2-3 things.

Those two thing combine to make modding in a change like this right now both fiendishly tricky to get right and yet also utterly futile even if you do, as opposed to quick, easy and effective. Quite frankly, anything which makes specialization more necessary rather than less is currently not worth attempting.

How about lowering the bonuses of the initial factory and increasing the bonuses of the later version? Instead of changing the AI to fit the game (which we can't do) how about changing the game to fit the AI? It's like what you did with terraforming.  

Make population to total production multiplier significantly lower (easy change), lower automatic production from colony capital, increase bonuses for higher tier buildings and suddenly the AI economic strategy isn't as bad.  

Instead of increasing research and manufacturing costs (which is pretty difficult to do) just make everyone's empires less productive across the board.  

If we cut total manufacturing by a third, that's equivalent to tripling the cost of everything. Of course in return you'll also have to cut LEP to 0.16 or something to compensate.  

I already reduced production by half in IAB. Much more than that and the start of the game becomes extremely slow.

Seems that is the real problem here. Why would they? Hell, research buildings should cost research, not just production, to mimic the progress being done by pumping resources into research labs IRL. Same with wealth really? Why are all these tied to a factory stat at all? The decision should be between the 3, not production then whatever you are aiming for. Raw production of ships is not comparable to the construction of a research lab, or a bank for that matter. Why they are all linked seems like a bad decision, especially after the 1.1 patch.

'Production' is basically 'man-hours'. You're thinking of manufacturing, which is 'man hours * factories'. Research is likewise 'man-hours * labs' and economy is 'man-hours * markets'. Manufacturing bonuses have nothing whatsoever to do with research or wealth bonuses, but production bonuses effect all three. So, for example, manufacturing bonuses would largely be a matter of better equipment, which enhances the productivity of the workers on just one specific task (industry). Extending the work day by an hour, on the other hand, would be an example of a productivity bonus. It impacts on all three other resources, because they're all basically products of it. 

But some of the races don't have "men."  How could they have "man-hours?"

Ohohohohohohohoho. 

(Runs away).  

What if we moved the later tier production buildings forward in the tech tree? If it only had tier-1 improvements available at the early development phase then maybe it would go "wide" instead of "tall" in its planetary planning.

That works till it colonises a planet at a later stage of the game.

Doesn't really solve the problem. As Karl says, it just moves it to later planets.You could also get the same effect by just lowering the weight on those techs so they AI doesn't pick them til much later... but again, it's just moving the problem. 

Ultimately, SD really, really need to fix the upgrade and terraforming to be lowest possible priority. But in the mean time, just about the only way to fix excessive output is supply-side - reduce the bonuses, make the buildings cheap upgrades that don't give a large increase in output but also don't take very long to put into place. There's no reason whatsoever that a single industrial sector should give a 75% bonus. These multipliers are simply crazy increases from spammable buildings; gaining 50% production from a wonder is barely relevant when you can get 30 times that much manufacturing bonus.

Really, I'd have no great objection to seeing factories nerfed right down to give 5-10% production increase + 5-10% per upgrade, with costs at a flat 30/tier. Then reduce adjacencies to a more realistic 1-2% per level, since it's also crazy to see bonuses being doubled or tripled through placement. This would mean there's no real functional difference between building all your factories early or building one and upgrading it to the highest level you can, and a really well-laid out world would only see some 10-20% increase in output over a random mess; a top-level wold would be getting only +25% per tile and so you'd almost never see a planet with +1000% of anything. 

A lot of problems with the economy basically boil down to colony capital + buildings being powerful enough to do most things effectively in it's own right, regardless of population. Karl's early-game example was flawed, in that he missed out the +5 production you get from having a capital building - a modifier applied before almost anything else (only food bonuses are applied earlier), so in fact his 66.4 manu planet would output 99 military manufacturing. This is why colony spam is so OP atm. The colony capital is basically 5 free production before bonuse, and given that it can be 150 turns before planets start to reach 20+ pop, that's an unfathomably immense boost - so immense, in fact, that population is largely optional until the point in the game where the AI starts it's end-game strategies.

1 planet with 0.1 population and 6 top-tier factories, with no adjacency bonuses or power plants will produce 6.4 base production (25% bonus from approval), and then apply a 450% bonus from the factories. That's 35 production before military or social manu bonuses. From 0.1 pop. With 10 times the population (still only 1), it will only produce  41 - you've increase population, the supposed driving force of production, by 900% and only achieved a 20% increase in output. With 5 population, 50 times the first example, you get 61.9 output - still not even double the 0.1.

Get rid of colony capital production bonuses - or, better yet, convert them to social manufacturing - and slash the impact of buildings to 5%/tier, and the problem completely changes. My 0.1 pop world with 6 top-level factories now suddenly has 0.1 production, which is multiplied by just 250% (150% bonus plus the base 100%) to... 0.25. The identical planet with 1 pop produces 10 times as much from it's 10-times larger population. The 5 pop planet produces 50 times as much. The early-day planets aren't completely gimped - they can still build buildings from the 5 social manufacturing on the colony capital, but cannot exert influence on an empire-wide level (by contributing military production, research or wealth) until they have large, significant, productive populations to have do that. As an added bonus, by fixing colony capitals as a flat social manu bonus, you don't need to micro-manage sliders to upgrade research or econ worlds. Just point the population 100% at whatever it is you want them to do on day one and let the colony capital do the building. As a final positive, the AI now also cannot cock up it's development, because that social development MUST be spent on buildings - it's can't divert it into research or wealth due to inopportune slider settings.

If SD want to have population=production as the basis of the economy, then it should mean exactly that - the sole source of non-multiplier production should be population. Not techs, not Hives, not colony capitals. And if they want to use cumulative %-based multipliers on that from buildings for final output, the individual multipliers should be small. An factory-covered world set to 100% manu should produce 4-5 times the manufacturing output of a lab-covered planet set to 100% manu, not 40-50 times as much; otherwise, in order to make research-based planets actually capable of upgrading themselves, costs have to remain too low to be relevant to manufacturing.

I didn't mean anything about Raw Production, probably bad wording there. I meant specifically the factory buildings etc. which should be aimed towards ship building and possibly some great projects only. (if we had some good ones) Why you need a bunch of those to make research labs or upgrade them is my issue. Wouldn't it be better and simpler if you got rewarded from investing in the 3 different resources, with more efficient buildings for said resource? I get that this is possibly some design overhaul, but since it's not working properly at the moment, this is a good time to bring up the core design and discuss it. 

The bad wording is largely SD's fault for making manufacturing and production as ambiguous as possible. Most of us have now dropped 'Total Manufacturing' as a reference to production (the way the game refers to it) and refer to 'production' and 'manufacturing' as separate concepts - production being general output of the population prior to specialization, and manufacturing being the general output of factories.

I don't really buy the idea of spending research to build research buildings or wealth to build wealth buildings, tbh. Banks need money, sure, but you don't have a bank til someone shows up with a cement mixer. As for research labs... the really expensive bit of the Large Hadron Collider was not the scientists who run it. It was the equipment, which comes from factories rather than science labs. Besides, factories aren't specifically tooled for military manufacturing - they're general manufacturing units which are presumably equipped with at least 3d printing technologies and can pump out whatever the hell you choose to ask for. There are military manufacturing bonuses elsewhere; these really don't have anything to do with research or wealth even in the production of the buildings.

Truth be told, there really is nothing much wrong with the fundamentals of the production * manufacturing bonuses * mil/social bonuses model. What we have here is a balance problem - the system is fine, but the numbers being fed into it are out of whack. Compare and contrast with the issues around LEP, which is a systemic problem - in that case, the system itself is unworkable because it's riddled with ineffectual compromises and perverse incentives, so no amount of tweaking the values can fix it; even if we accept that you can keep approval as the limiting device (which is itself highly debated, and the consensus view is moving ever-increasingly against it), it still requires a complete change in how approval is calculated just to make a semi-workable system.

You say the factories currently in the game aren't specifically tooled for anything, in my version they will be. And why shouldn't a research lab who is actually R&D said 3d printing technology, be able to use their latest prototypes to improve their research capabilities? This is small stuff, vs big stuff in a nutshell. You don't use a massive Boeing aircraft hangar to make a small toilet for a research lab. Currently, that is exactly what we are doing

And in real life, even if the research lab which comes up with the better toilet doesn't mass-manufacture them, or distribute them to other research labs. They send the design to a toilet factory, which does that. And this is how the game is set up - your research lab generates research, which you use to acquire 'toilet specialization 3', and then your factories can mass-produce them and equip your labs with the best toilets that your civilization can devise. And that's largely how civilization has worked since Adam Smith cottoned on to the advantages of the division of labour.

The alternative you're proposing is a group of scientists gathering together, doing some maths, and a laboratory materializing out of their equations. They then, making use of the computers and blackboards and suchlike in their new lab, write some more complex math that causes an additional research lab to pop into existence next door. Converting factories to only produce military production is one thing, but you'd then need to give research labs and markets a social manufacturing value... which would mean the best way to build a wonder or upgrade a planet would be to cover it in research labs. Including upgrading factories - your massive industrial base would be useless for upgrading itself until a bunch of bankers showed up, presumably with a lot of construction equipment.

It turns out that producing toilets and aircraft is actually a pretty similar process tbh - ultimately, all forms of manufacturing boil down to taking some matter and then re-shaping it. Research, conversely, doesn't involve taking matter at all in a lot of cases, but rather giving people enoguh time and comfort to sit and think really, rally hard about something. Wealth largely consists of taking something and changing it's location.

@Naselus: I'm not sure that I specifically agree or disagree with you regarding manufacturing and production. However, I generally dislike the multiplicative nature of the current system. Primarily because such a system makes it very difficult to implement small scale modifiers. Because of all the other multipliers is that apply a small change in one could result in a large change in the end sum result. 

However, honesty compels me to admit that reducing individual number components to sufficiently small values will achieve a similar effect. But this means reducing all number values in an appropriate manner, not merely one aspect of the entire sum. What you are suggesting regarding factory's however only acts on reducing one aspect of the entire sum. Whilst it is true that outside of malevolent ideology it is difficult to achieve very high military manufacturing multipliers that is not true of production modifiers. The combination of an economic ring, all governmental bonus, and the approval bonus, can in total produce just under a 2.5 times multiplier. It is important to remember how multiplier's function when expressed in GalacCivIII. The percentages is listed as a bonus are the amount added to the base amount, thus a base bonus of just 100% is actually the same as a 2 times multiplier. TBH I'm sure you will already know that Naselus but it is worth pointing out for anyone reading the discussion who has not already realized this point. It is also important to remember that it was clearly intended that factories and associated buildings were to be the most important source of colony wide manufacturing output.

Your suggested solution whilst doing an admirable job of bringing down one aspect of the system in terms of total multiplier value, does very little for the other aspects of the system. You're solution creates a situation whereby the majority of the total multiplier to both forms of production output is concentrated on the production point part of the equation. This acts to effectively make production point multipliers more important than max manufacturing multipliers. This acts to devalue factories and associated buildings by comparison. If the intended dominance of factories and associated buildings is to be maintained all aspects of the sum must be just as equally. This requires that production point multipliers and the few large sources of military manufacturing bonus also be adjusted. 

This is why I generally consider reducing the number different types of multiplier and/or moving the majority of the multiplier's to max manufacturing to be the more optimal solution says this would create an additive stacking affect reducing the power of non factory base multiplier's considerably. It would I admit somewhat devalue factories initially on a new world since you would need a number of fully upgraded factories possibly with associated buildings to see a significant rise in total production output. However as you have already noted factories and associated buildings have rather large modifiers. A similar principle applies to wealth and research buildings.  The sole negative with such a principle would lay in the extra benefits provided the sources of flat gross income, and research.  Primarily in the form of tourism and ascension crystal benefits respectively.  However both of these are arguably already issues in one form or another with existing global effects. In particular I suspect based on experience that production point modifiers apply to the sources of flat military manufacturing that they may also apply to sources of flat gross income and flat research.

first I'm against anything that nerfs Ai. If you didn't. Start out with giving the capital production. I would recommend excempting the yor from this, and this is why it is already hard to increase population with them. They need a fair amount of starting production. I don't. Have a problem giving different races different playstyles.

Basically, opportunity costs.  If you lower on-planet building bonuses you'll also need to lower off planet starbase bonuses as well.  

@Naselus

You say it's like that in the future like it's a fact. Why would we need a toilet factory to make a toilet with 3d printing+? We are in the future after all, and this design is better for the game. Most likely with robotics and 3d-printing it's a matter of allocating resources (the wheel in Galciv3), to get whatever you need. The infrastructure is most likely not needed except for the big stuff. (like spaceships etc.) See the point?

So you are saying that raw production is just a whip to get them working? Like some lab in a poor country could come up with some revolutionary particle physics discovery out of nothing, if only they had this fancy building? It's an ongoing investment in research, this game just treats it all wrong. You can have the most fancy equipment in the world, and research nothing if the scientists do not know what they are doing. 

If we are getting started on production and IRL, Malevolent etc. production bonuses are just plain ridiculous (whip to work harder? yeah that works), and should be an example of why any argument defending the current system with IRL examples is not viable at all. 

Production represents A) how many people you have to work. and how productive they are.

The wheel indicates what industries they're assigned to.

It's called economies of scale. Look it up.