That's actually a confirmed bug that only appears with the "right" mix of DLC's. Consulates are not supposed to give that bonus. 

It does relate, though, which is why I originally brought it up.  You play an Echoing Heartstone or two, and your influence skyrockets.   Tourism makes some obscene income off of that.

"I don't get why there are so many buildings with leveling bonuses or adjacency effects that have  nothing to do with their actual type."

This is something I've been ranting about since... forever. I really want to like this game. I've spent many hours (more than I care to admit) playing this game and it's always the same thing. SD doesn't seem to give a damn about professionalism. Typos and grammatical errors are rampant. The buildings and improvements don't reflect what they actually do. Balance is way off, the Tech Tree makes no sense, and the list goes on and on and on... yet they insist on adding new things when the old things don't work.

There was a time when the icon colors indicated what the building was related to. Orange for production, green for population, and purple for diplomatic types. Not any more! Now you have to hover over each type and you still can't be sure what the hell it's supposed to do. The tooltip might tell you one thing when, in fact, it will do something else. Why would a missionary building (Pragmatic) help with ship construction?! That makes no sense to me. And I don't think you find that out until it is in the build list. Shee!

There was a time when Trade Routes gave you a diplomatic boost, then it was taken away. Now I'm getting messages from delighted aliens telling me how the Trade Routes are making them happy-- well, which is it?!

There are massive games such as those produced by Paradox (and the Sid Meiers Civ series) that don't suffer from these blatant and simplistic problems and it's not because they are less complicated. It is because they take the time to pay attention to detail. This attention to detail produces professional-looking, quality games, rather than a slip-shod affair.

I can forgive the occasional bug-- that is bound to happen in a complicated program. Ignoring basic game-play details, on the other hand, is not acceptable.

Sorry, SD, but you're dropping the ball on this one.

In order to try to keep a positive tone here, I will say that the graphics are wonderful.

Richard

Yeah thanks for taking this shit else where. This complete disregard for Thread Ttitles and respect of others is why I bloody left the Discord channel.