1.4 Serious Bug/Misfeature in Transfer of Manufacturing->Shipbuilding

They added a new project that funnels social manufacturing production to the sponsored shipyard, you have to research it.

Oh, great. /sarcasm

OK, found it under Orbital Manufacturing.

I had to hunt for it, since I don't normally research Orbital Manufacturing until at least turn 50 or more; I don't need it the early-game (as I'm not running into the need for warships until turn 60+ minimum, and 100+ normally), and it's very expensive.

So, in other words, they're forcing me to research something I don't need for a long time, spend a lot of effort doing so, all to get a functionality that should be there from the beginning.

This does not make me happy. 

What is the benefit to you of it working the way you want?

What bad thing happens if you move the slider to 100% military for that planet?

the benefit is he can continue the game 

the bad thing is none of his planets can build anything else

You claim to have finished building out planet 1, but you have not.  Otherwise, you would not be getting a prompt to build something on planet 1.  Worst case, you should line up a Culture Festival if you have nothing better to do with that planet.  That's what I do until I get the projects I really want.

Me too, i do see his point but I can live with it and like the new project.   Wheel removal does take some getting used to

The idle colony prompt has everything to do with whether or not there is social production allocated while there are no projects in the build queue and nothing at all to do with whether or not I've finished building out the planet.

Also, allocating available manufacturing to shipbuilding when a planet is sponsoring a shipyard and has no projects in its build queue is just common sense. This is something that I feel that any planet sponsoring an active shipyard should do by default if it isn't explicitly directed to do something else, not something that should be locked behind a tech barrier. It's not like this is in any way substantially different from how military manufacturing becomes social manufacturing if the planet isn't sponsoring an active shipyard. If they're not going to keep the military manufacturing allocation slider available on a per-planet basis, then at minimum the military project should be available from the start of the game (even if they did keep the military manufacturing allocation slider available on a per-planet basis, I'd feel that the military project should be available from turn 1, or better yet not even something that I actually need to assign since it's the sensible thing for a planet sponsoring an active shipyard to do when it has available manufacturing beyond whatever is required for projects in its build queue).

I'm guessing they put the project with orbital manufacturing in order to slow down the very early game a little bit.  I don't mind it being there at all.

It's kind of like complaining that "I don't have tourism unlocked from the beginning!" "I can't build defenses on my planet from turn 1!"  The only difference being that you've been used to having the option to have 100% military manufacturing from the beginning, now they've moved that option to a little bit later in the game.  It's just something you'll have to get used to.

It's severely annoying for two reasons:

1) It's completely inconsistent with the fact that Military production automatically converts to social manufacturing on worlds without a Shipyard to sponsor;  this behavior is automatic, doesn't even need a Project, and is available from the start of the game.  Yet the inverse isn't, and futhermore, require significant effort to get?

2) It seriously cripples early-game play.  Without getting the new Project, you're left with ONE strategy:  Stop building on the Homeworld, put the Social/Military Slider to 100% Military (so you can actually get some colony ships built in a reasonable time), then NEVER build a shipyard on anything else until you've completed the expansion/colonization phase.

Early-game, you need to pump out colony ships to claim worlds (and the occasional constructor to get some strategic resources). Not being able to focus a planet's output on shipbuilding without crippling building creation on all other worlds is pretty much a game-breaker (as is the inverse choice: allow building on colonized world while crippling shipbuilding ability on the Homeworld).

And the fact that the "fix" Project for this behavior is #1 not obvious at all, and #2 on the MOST EXPENSIVE tier-one technology (it's 4x the cost of most others, and 2x the more typical "expensive" one) is stupid.

Since you'll almost never need to build warships until a well after turn 50, and typically can make it to turn 100 before they're really need (even later, if you use the Pragmatic ideology ability to disallow war on you for 50 turns), Orbital Manufacturing is extremely low priority, because that whole tech subbranch simply isn't needed for exploration and colonization.  And remember your research ability early-game is pretty limited - the "cheap" techs start at 4 turns to get in the *best* situation, and you quickly get to the place where a tech costs 8-9 turns.  Note, that Orbital Manufacturing will cost you 30+ turns at this point.

So, in short, the lack of the Project as a game-opener forces me to spend 20 turns (and give up 3-4 other techs I would have had otherwise) researching it as perhaps the 3rd or 4th tech I get (which means I get it around turn 30), and I get ZERO use out of that tech for another 50+ turns.

Yeah, that's not broken at all. 

If they don't want to give it immediately, then they need to create a specific tech (maybe "Orbital Construction") for just the Project which should cost the same as all other entry-level techs (e.g. Interstellar Travel); this can be a precusor to  Orbital Manufacturing.

And no, it's not anywhere near the same thing as not having Tourism not enabled to start (or Trading).  This is a problem that cripples significant portions of game play, and seriously restricts choice and strategic options.  Orbital Manufacturing effectively is now a "must have" technology, without which you absolutely will lose to the AI.

As a side note, I've already noticed the new setup has a SEVERE NEGATIVE impact on the AI's performance; those races which don't research it fall way behind in the colonization phase. The AI races which have it are far more potent than those which don't. The AI plainly doesn't understand how to deal without this, and doesn't recognize the important of obtaining it.

The option to set 100% military production is still there. The only thing that prevents the player from setting 100% military production in the early game is that it prevents colonies from developing at the same time that they're sponsoring a shipyard.

Beyond that, though, why should the military production project not be available from the start of the game? You say that it's to slow down the early game? Then why the hell don't they increase the cost of early game ship components? That would be the sensible way to do it, seeing as it'd have the most consistent effects across games, playstyles, and chosen factions (or faction traits, for custom factions). It's not like it's that hard to just go through all ten or so early-game components and double the manufacturing costs or something like that, and increasing the production costs gets around the "build out two thirds of the planet, then build shipyard and stall development" that gets roughly the same early-game shipbuilding rate as the "build out half the planet, build shipyard, and continue development with half the manufacturing going to shipbuilding and the other half going to development." Changing the manufacturing costs of the components instead of basing the slow down on locking part of the UI behind a tech also avoids issues that crop up from the variability in when that bit of the UI becomes available. Thalans and custom races with Intuitive can have access to that bit of the UI from game start if they want to; their early game can therefore be unaffected. A player who manages their survey ships well and always remembers to switch to incomplete (or even uninitiated) research projects whenever they come to a capsule or artifact can rapidly gain that bit of UI, certainly much faster than anyone who isn't micromanaging their survey ships around to ensure optimal use of Unfortunate Geniuses and whatever the 25% of the tech gets developed one is called.

i dont get your problem.

i set my slider to 100% military at the start of the game and never ever move it.

If i want to build on the planet i simply shutdown the shipyard.

this doesnt impact early game at all.

It does impact lategame, where you have enough manufacturing to build buildings and ships in 1 turn simultanuesly

But that defeats the whole purpose of avoiding micromanaging, which is why the sliders/wheel went away in the first place.  Same thing as if you sponsor/don't sponsor some other shipyard.  The idea here is to reduce micromanaging, not require it as a workaround for a (rather simple) problem.

And your "solution" doesn't work if I want to build BOTH a building and a ship on a planet, but only build ships on another.

As the song says, you can't always get what you want, even in a space 4X game.  We disagree on whether it is good game design, but that is cool, too.

tbh,, I've been wondering why ANY project is tech gated recently. Now that they all cap at 100, none of them a super-powerful or anything, and it just creates a wave of micro going back and changing the projects on the right worlds when the 'correct' one is finally unlocked. I don't think the ship building project is on a T1 tech to slow the early game down - since you can research it from the get-go more or less. I think they probably just had to unlock it on something and wanted it unlocking early, so they stuck it on a T1 tech that every race definitely has access to.  And yes, this again shows that these changes aren't about reducing micro.

Just unlock the project from the start; there's no real advantage to forcing the player to rush certain techs to unlock micromanagement reduction. It's just poor design. Lock out UI until a certain point in tutorials, so the player can learn the game; don't lock stuff out in free play because it just becomes frustrating for experienced players and leads to optimum strategies which everyone eventually has to adopt.

At least in 1.3.x and earlier, the XML supports projects that lack any prerequisites; the Economic Stimulus and Cultural Festival projects are implemented as such, and in older versions of the game the other projects weren't linked to techs either. The developers may have felt that they had to have it unlock on something, but the developers did not have to make it unlock on anything. It being locked to a tech reflects either a conscious decision to make it unavailable in the very early game (outside of factions with the intuitive trait, which can, if they so desire, have the project available from the start of the game) or the developers forgetting that they need not assign a prerequisite to a project despite two examples of projects without prerequisites existing in the same file that they'd probably be editing to add the new project (and despite said file being so short that you can see most or all of it at once on a small-ish monitor that doesn't have an excessively low resolution).

I tend to agree, though I'd argue that v1.4 projects are more powerful than identical projects in v1.3.x and earlier since in v1.4 you can no longer set 100% of a planet's production to a single output on a planet-by-planet basis. Specialized worlds generally stand to gain a lot more by allocating more production to the output type that fits the specialization than by sacrificing some of the base output of the desired type to improve the output multiplier by the small amounts that the projects can manage, especially on worlds that don't have significant manufacturing multipliers, but in v1.4 you are to my understanding much more limited in your ability to adjust the spending allocations on one planet without adjusting the spending allocations on another planet and so using spending allocations instead of projects to boost output is no longer as superior overall.

Oh, I know. But it wouldn't be the first time that the devs have 'forgotten' such a thing is possible, or have arbitrarily dumped an unlock onto something that didn't require it. It's worth remembering that scripter is a junior job, so the people editing files atm are unlikely to be the same ones who were working on any given file six months ago.

Regardless, it's not a good decision to have it locking out on tech - in fact, it's not a good idea having ANY micro reduction stuff unlock on techs, since it's very immersion-breaking when the Vok'Tar Sapce Emperor sends his elite science teams to discover the Secrets of Making A Big List Of Planets With Checkboxes.

Orbital manufacturing is a tier one tech. If you object that much to using one of the other projects, it should only take you a couple of turns to pick up the military spending project even very early game.

  Takes a dozen turns for me at 50% to research in the early game.  I could get 3 other techs in that time.  Worse, the AI doesn't research the tech, which cripples their expansion.  6 turns of 100% research once I have built up my homeworld ain't fun.

   Taking away meaningful choice and railroading the player is never a good idea.

   But it is an opt in, so I hope it gets changed.