Um....... Are you talking GalCiv 2 or 3? Because this sounds like a common complaint on GalCiv 2 that is now addressed in GalCiv 3. Just curious.

I did a little analysis based on my understanding of the way the gc3 economy system works as described in the economy 101 post. Based on a planet with 40 pop and 18 available hexes (no capital to simplify things) - and with only a choice of factories or labs that give a 50% bonus...

It appears that the best way to build a research specialised planet currentoy is to split hexs evenly between factories and labs (9 each), set the slider all the way to production (0% research) then build a research project. This outperforms the slider set to 100% research and 18 labs by a factor of just over 3.

Is this intentional? It seems like the research project is currently very OP, since I believe it adds base research rather than final research?

this has been discussed a few times in the dev stream

atm the thought process is

you can build a stage 1 factory in a few turns and then put that production towards a stage 2 and then put that to stage 3

however while that is useful in the early game after a few dozen planets have been colonized it is far easier to quick build a few buildings which would save many turns getting a new planet set up. but if this is the case why should we have to quick build the 1st and 2nd stage just to get to the third it would make much more sense to just quick build the third 

this doesent make any sense to me it should take time and manpower to upgrade a building from 1 stage to another its not like the guys who built it are sitting around going;

hey we can see the tech tree and when the player researches stage 2 factorys we can build them,

we have the specs for the stage 2 factorys why dont we just build the stage 2 around the stage one and when the time comes we press this button and the stage one just disappears.

the same with economic project and apparently it is intentional or at least it was in the early betas

https://forums.galciv3.com/458781/page/1/#3503121

he said that at first yet 2 posts later apologized and stated it was intentional and should be that way

So the stardock rep confirmed they want a diversified planet to be many times better than a specialised planet at its own game? That makes literally no sense and will screw up the economy of the game.

I hope they come to their senses about this. There should always be a concious choice based on risk/reward for specialisation vs generalisation. 

Ie, creating too many research or money specialised planets and getting a tech advantage should leave you vulnerable to a surprise attack - as those planets are generally practically useless at producing ships. But if the optimum research planet is 50% factories, then there is no real choices - just do that each and every time

You even get the added bonus that when it comes building upgrade time, a planet with the 50% factories will do the upgrades much faster than one with 100% tech or wealth, which makes the decision even more of a no brainer. 

I really hope they overhaul this before release.

No, they confirmed that projects are working as intended. Split planets will only outperform specialized planets on very high quality planets, and only late game, and even then not by "Many Times."

This is made even worse when farms are taken into account too. Farms + lategame is already broken - there reaches a point where its better to just farm up then specialise, which makes literally no sense.

I think the economy fundamentally just needs a retune / rework. One simple way to do this would be to let factory/lab/market bonuses compound multiplicatively with themselves and other improvements, rather than additively. All other bonuses are added additively at the end. This would cause a big nerf to farms and starbases if tuned correctly, which IMO is really necessary. Because as it stands right now, in mid-lategame it actually pays to despecialise as your planets approach their pop caps and replace with farms.

As is, even on a fully tech specialised world, it still makes sense to have a bunch of factories - since otherwise your specialised world will spend majority of its time upgrading buildings rather than pumping out tech.

TLDR: As it stands right now, there is simply no good reason to pursue the specialisation route beyond earlygame. 

Uh, that should be:

c*(1+ab/2+f)/(1+ab/2+f) = c(1+ab/2+f)^2/2

Doesnt change the conclusion though. 

You're missing a constant of 0.25 in your equation, representing the intrinsic 4:1 cost of Research Project (4 mp => 1 rp).  Hence your +manuf% must be exactly +300% to break even, and > +300% to make a profit.

You are correct that a medium-large planet that builds a (nearly-)full ring of manuf, or overlaps 12 economic starbases, can easily exceed +300%.  Then it is more profitable to migrate your research and wealth planets to be some convex combination ( a,b ) of a*manuf + b*specialty.  (N.B. the solution to that optimization problem is not necessarily at 50/50.  Considering that the function ab is maximized when a == b, my guess is that production is maximized when your +manuf% == +rp%, however many hexes of each it costs you to get there.  Solving that incrementally, whenever you have 1 more hex to build, assign it to whichever +% is lower.  But this is a greedy algorithm, i.e. with zero look-ahead, so it surely fails to account for larger adjacency features such as full hex rings.)

This is all (currently) as designed and intended.  Whether it is an emergent bug that was not fully anticipated is ... yet to be admitted

Nobody knows what the final vision of a GC3 endgame looks like.  Very many game features already need to be thoroughly rebalanced:

• non-micro UI help
• planetary invasion viewer
• ideology maxing
• diplomacy trade/treaty valuations
• wealth easy-peasi-ness
• 32-bit overflows: wealth, ship/fleet stats

For now (Beta 4), just verify that the economy game mechanisms work as intended.  So far, all of your calculations are supporting that .  Simply being mathematically ba-roken or overpowered is not, by itself, a design bug.  Keep in mind that all of your enemies will do the same thing, and then they'll come kill you while you're both still in the midgame ... so maybe you need to go kill them first in the early game.  Race!!

Yeah Gilmoy. My equation was very simplified to just show the presence of a square term without getting into massive detail

You are also right in that the actual solution is not 50/50 - its about making sure the total +manf = total +rp (or close as possible). Then there's the food (c) to factor in... I love optimisation problems! And yep, thats before adjacency etc.

But the key is that im worried the square term will overwhelm the nuances. I personally just think it should be eliminated, as it represents a fundamental flaw in the design - specialised planets should scale better than non-specialised, as they are less flexible and harder to setup (less factories = longer upgrade times). 

If anything, the situation should be reversed - specialisation penalised earlygame and rewarded lategame

And +300 is really easy to get to - even in early-mid game! A nieve 7 xeno-factories and 7 labs with 1 farm on a class 16 planet (these are not usually that rare), combined with a few basic starbases should do the trick

Then once you get terraforming in midgame and also midgame tech etc that planet explodes ahead. Better still, it upgrades much faster, and can easily pump out warships in an emergency. Whats not to like!?

Thing is Stanley, I dont see why it has to be that way.

The team at Stardock is generally really innovative, and so I'm hoping they can sort this kind of thing out. Especially given the awesomeness of immense and 64 bit.

Not much you can do about your computer though.

i useually try to place 12 Around my home planet and then economic / manufacturing relics and mining rigs