Kids, time to have the DR/TDA/PR talk...

No goats here, for a start they cant type.

Trims, the issue is that it was <completely> worthless for the last year. Now its worth building. I like the bonuses I happily abuse it in the GST mod. If I were to suggest a way to better balance it, would be to make the improvement a 2tier upgrade bound by ages. 1rst age its 1 resource and 1/2 what they are now, then is Age of war its needs 2 resources to upgrade to its full effect. 

My final point is this, if the AI is using it in a fashion like a player and getting the same benefits then its ok with me. I'd like to see <more> higher powered unique buildings but with a higher and varied resource cost. Again, if the ai is coded to build them quick and build them up and around then life is good for us players...not gonna touch multiplayer on this though...

I want it to be worthwhile, and I certainly would like to see similar buildings available later in the tech tree, too.

That said, for the particular purpose these buildings are set for, the current implementation is just as bad as before - too much is as bad as too little.

And, yes, the AI is using it.

I thing the happy medium would be if your empire never had more than 3-4 of these buildings, and then could build an Improved DR/TDA somewhere after the Tier 3 buildings came on-line....

I disagree with your 5 assumptions of what the improvements are supposed to do.  I think they are meant to serve as part of a synergistic economy mechanic of flat and percentage bonuses that will let the player accomplish interesting and amazing things with a degree of creativity.  They might use a nerf from a start value of 8 down to 6, but that is the most I would do, if that. I think the inbound flat adjacencies are an excellent idea and enjoy working with them in my planet planning and terraforming efforts. I might grant you that they are overpowered, but that doesn't seem to be enough. You seem to actually dislike them as a non-fun element.  I don't understand why they are not fun for you, but they definitely are for me. In the OP you seem very dismissive of the possibility that anyone could actually appreciate and enjoy the mechanism.  The only conversation you suggested was how to fix something that I don't consider broken. Good luck with that, but I don't know if you actually want to hear from me or anyone like me. 

hey, how about something like this (for the DR, same applies to TDA):

 

 

Name	Tech Required	Base Bonus	Level Bonus	Adjacent Bonus	Cost to Build	Maintenance	Required Resources
Durantium Refinery	none	6	0.25	+1	75	0	1 Durantium
Durantium Processor	Practical Fusion	8	1	+2	250	1	2 Durantium + 1 Antimatter
Durantium Foundry	Industrial Expertise	10	2	+2	400	5	4 Durantium + 2 Antimatter

a disagree,

if you take a late game farm thats +5 to pop, with 3 adjancies and +50% its 10,5 pop a 100% production-bonus makes this 21 production with the usual split of

45/11/45 that gives you 9,45 base manufacturing + 9,45 base research + 2,1 base wealth.

while you get less manufacturing you do get additional research and wealth.

so the DR is a strong early/mid game improvement but weaker late game

(notice that +50%food and +100%production are pretty low bonis)

Sure, population as a whole gives you more distributed results.

I presume you're talking about Lossless Farm.  The comparison isn't even close.

1. To get a Lossless Farm (at the very end of the farming tech tree), you've had to research 6 techs ahead of it. This is a turn 300+ technology. 
2. You've had to build the prior farms, which cost you 142, plus the 101 for this.
3. If you have +100% to food, you've had to research another 3 techs, minimum
4. You'll be hard-pressed to get more than +100% to Raw production. Starbases only provide +10% each (all the rest of the modules provide stat-specific bonuses, not Raw Production ones, and you can't put more than about 8 SBs around a planet), and 100% morale gives a +25%. Even late game, most worlds hover in the +50-75% to Raw Production range.
5. Raw Production is really only produced by 3 things:  population, mining facilities, and Colony Capitals (and Precursor Planets). It's pretty unusual to get those three things to add up to 50 or more.  Which means your total Raw Production for a planet will very rarely exceed 100.

Compare that to a DR at the same time, which is going to have all the bonuses from the Factory tree to work with AND all the other manufacturing bonuses that we tend to accumulate, and that's not including the ones from buildings.  By turn 300, most of my planets get +300% manufacturing just from 3-4 starbases and civ-wide bonuses without trying too hard.

A DR is going to have a bare minimum of +5 levels, and most will probably be in the +8 area.  That means 16 directly to manufacturing. Just with that +300% from civ-wide bonus, that turns into a 48 manufacturing, and there's usually another +200% just from 2-3 factories and a power plant. That means the DR provides almost 100 manufacturing points in a average (non-specialty manufacturing world) setup, independent of where the production wheel sits. On a specialized manufacturing world, total manufacturing bonuses are going to be in the +1000% range by turn 300, which means the DR just by itself will produce 170+ manufacturing.

The aforementioned setup (1 DR, 2 factories, 1 power plant, in a configuration which yields +5 levels to the DR) is trivial to set up on most worlds, and consumes 4 spaces. The late-game manufacturing bonuses, which proliferate like weeds, make the DR even more powerful then than in early/mid game.

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Erischild:

Don't get me wrong, I *like* the idea of direct bonuses to Manufacturing/Research/whatever, in addition to %-bonuses.  But it becomes tricky to balance, as those flat bonuses tend to inflate very quickly out of control, since it's pretty easy to get %-bonuses from a variety of sources. And the math on this one says the DR/TDA are far superior to any other building you can build, yet are available for relatively low cost (and, as Durantium is seldom in short supply, that's no brake on their placement) and can be put on every world.

To be clear, the biggest issue with flat bonuses is that they provide more and more benefit as times goes on, without you having to do anything.  A factory's +15% bonus only gets better if you can increase Raw Production, and as I pointed out above, that's pretty hard to do, with a fairly low cap. To improve there, you have to upgrade the factory (which requires time, Tech, and expending manufacturing points). The flat bonuses from the DR/TDA/PR get better every time you gain ANY %-age bonus for their stat. And there are literally dozens of ways to do this, many extremely cheaply, with a very high cap (I wouldn't be surprised if it would be possible to get +2000% to a particular stat).

The reason I don't like them as they now are is that they simply make Manufacturing too available. They've taken a game where I have to worry about how long it takes me to build ships or other improvements, to one where I've got more than enough Manufacturing to pretty much do whatever I want as fast as I want. it removes a lot of the challenge from the game.

 

I disagree. They cost strategic ressources. They should be worth it in any phase in the game. They have to compete with fleet boosters and mercs.

If you have too many strat ressources on your map, you can reduced that setting.

If the AI uses it, too, I am fine with it.

As I pointed out here, no they are not. If you have high pop and low +% boni they are worse than some unique +% buildings.

I don't knw, maaaybe they are a little too beneficial. But I would hate to see them nerfed into the ground. They are finally worth considering as compared to fleet boosters or mercs. They might even open up an alternative to hard colony rushing.

If anything, I woould really like to see them shutting down, when you don't have enough durantium anymore, due to a starbase dying or a trade deal expiring.

First: you don't lose most of the bonus of the MC only when parking it on a low production world. The adjacencies difference will be around the +50 to +100% range (assuming you get zero adjacencies on the world you put it on).

Second: no, 100 production is not hard to do. My last game has no world below 100 production on turn 141. Here are screenshots of the lowest (102.5 at 2 starbases) and highst production worlds (224.6 at 5 starbases), either of them is not done growing yet:

Is this lategame, well, yes it is. I had no mid game save game, sadly. I am posting this, because I feel like you are under some misconceptions about production numbers and on which turns you can achieve stuff like lossless farms.

If you are in the lategame, you can have up to 15 starbases around a planet, which is 75% RP, the governance tech branch is another 50%, 25% from morale. We can go even higher with ideologies. I have a Drengine tech tree game, where non of my planets has a popcap below 100. The largest world had 170 or so pop. All the worlds were maxed on pop with the use of birthing subsidies before turn 200 (funny thing when your civ alone has >50% votes in the UP).

max %-Productionbonis:

+25% from approval

+90% from Starbases (max of 18)

+50% from govern-techs

+20% from malovent

+25% from torian trait (dont know the name)

+25% from iconian tech

=235% total

this needs you to take iconian techtree and one of the arcean and one of the torian traits,

but even without those you get

+25% from approval

+70% from Starbases

+50% from govern-techs

+20% from maevolent

=165% total

 

to get to 100% production bonis you only need

+25% approval

+30% from govern-techs (age of war)

+45% from Starbases (also doable in age of war)

 

 

also the manufacturing bonis doesnt matter at all since they apply to base manufacturing no matter where it comes from^^

only point here is that you get a few more lvls, but that hardly matters

You forgot +33% from the death furnace.

The torian trait is called 'amphibious' and only applies to aquatic worlds.

Which Iconian tech gives +25% RP? I couldn't find it. edit: found it: Ultimate adaptability. Only applies to extreme planets.

The Arceans have an improvement which gives +20% RP

without the arcean trait it is 15 starbases, not 14 ... irrelevant detail.

Take also, note that if you want to max RP, maxing approval is not necessarily the way to go.

But case and point: 500 RP worlds are entirely possible.

Anyhow, back on topic (nice digression about RP, though...)

I just noticed something:

The DR and TDA both act like I describe:  they provide points to the Base Manufacturing/Research, which are then adjusted by any standard Manufacturing/Research bonus/penalty.

 

However, the Promethion Reserve doesn't act like this. Rather than add to the Gross Income (which is subject to all the normal wealth modifiers), it's a Net Income modifier, like Tourism.  So, it ends up as a flat bonus, not affected by any modifier.  Looking at the XML, it's verified that the PR affects ColonyNetIncome, unlike say, the Colonial Bank, which is a ColonyGrossIncome modifier.

 

That makes is a bit inconsistent:  the PR thus doesn't scale, and merely always provides the same flat bonus, whereas the TDA and DR scale as modifiers apply.  From what I see, there's no way to make the TDA/DR behave like the PR - there's not a similar divide like Wealth's Gross vs Net income in either Research or Manufacturing.  However, obviously, one can make the PR behave like the TDA/DR merely by changing it to be a ColonyGrossIncome modifier in ImprovementDefs.xml

 

I'm wondering if this was intentional or a mistake (or just an oversight).  It's also why I haven't seen the PR be as overpowering as the TDA/DR.

 

Wouldn't suprprise me if that were the case. I've seen more than a few crazy-big-map folks talk about raking in many thousands of BC per turn--sounds like a few make planet-buying a regular thing.

I'm not a hyper-optimizer, so I usually don't see my late-game income rise much higher than the low thousands. Maybe if I made it through a long-large enough game with the Iconian tech tree and got to Living Ships. Now that I think of it, I should try again. I'd like to have enough money flowing in to be able to freely upgrade my very experienced ships in a late game. Doom Rays all around! An interceptor pod in every capital ship!