How do production bonuses work?

Think of production bonuses as increasing the amount of work that a given planet can do. By building manufacturing center, anti-matter power plant, fusion power plant, etc. you are expanding the potential of that particular planet.

You don't actually have to pay for all of the increased production, but you do have to pay maintenance on the associated buildings.

Putting these projects in your queue is only really useful if your spending is holding steady at 90%+, IMHO.

And that's what bothers me about it... A +20% increase in production with a 3 maitenance is justified if the planet is producing 15 military plus social which should net +3 "free" production, offsetting the maitenance, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

A good deal of the improvements don't seem to justify their cost in upkeep to warrant building.

Well, if you are at 100% spending and making money, having a way to spend more BC is always useful.

For explaining manufacturing bonus, this http://www.galciv.com/encyclopedia.asp?action=showpage&page=http://www.galciv.com/docs/undocs.html explains some bits. I will take the manufacturing capital, since it is easier (work the same with all planeatry manufacturing bonus):
The manufacturing capital give 100% manufacturing bonus. only 1/3rd of this bonus is free, the 2 others 2rd must be paid.

So if you planet has a base production of 24 BC in social (or military), the manufacturing bonus are:
24*1/3 = 8 of free bonus and 24*2/3 = 16 of paid bonus.
So the total production is 40Bc + 8 free BC.


Maintenance in F4 screen correspond to maintenance of social improvement, propaganda spend on planet and life support for planet with a PQ of 14 or below.



Not quite exact: you paid for 2/3rd of the bonus given and for the maintenance of the buiding


Right. Generally, don't bother to build social improvement with maintenance greater than 3. And those at 3 should be at the end of you building queue.

And for information, empire wide manufacturing bonus must be completly paid (ie no free bonus for bonus choosen in political party or as picks)

And governement help to increase the production:
republic (available with the tech Diplomacy) allow to increase the base of the production of 50%. There is a same increase with Star Democracy and Star federation.

It is important to know that all manufacturing bonus (from planets or empire) are calculated on a base, that is based on governement, PQ, population, morale and dpending. This means that all planetary bonus add (and not multiply). So having a +100% manufacturing bonus, a +20% and a + 30% leads to a +150% bonus applied to the base of production.

It'd be nice if Galactic Civilizations showed this base number so I could more accurately predict the result of building a power plant or whatnot. That is, if the base production is 30 then a 20% increase at 3 maitenance (for a bonus of 6 IUs, only 2 of which are "free") could be determined as not worth it.

Likewise for economic improvements... If a planet is generating 60 credits per turn, I'd have to look at the planet bonus (and further, my empire bonus) to determine just how much the base income of the planet is so I can determine if certain improvements actually improve income.

And to make it worse, some starbase modules incresease production (I think it 50% paide, 50% free) in planets locatedin the same sector.


And there are penalties between PQ of a planet and generated income ...

As a rule of thumb: avoid to build any improvement with a maintenance cost of 4 or 5. But there are always exceptions

I suppose one might wish to build at least one decent planet loaded up with all the possible manufacturing bonus improvements in order to get, say, an Overlord, built in minimum time at full spending (100%)? Or is that false? If false, then why even designing improvements to have maintenace costs beyond the threasholds (whatever) that you stated earlier, as no player in "the know" would want to build them... knowing there is a catch that basicly makes them useless and rips the player off, so to speak. But I'm thinking the reason for those more expensive (in maintenace) items is that they can help, but only as I said at beginning (heh, that reduce maintenace mod I suggested in the other thread is looking even better now after having read this thread).
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I've played games where I built every social project on every planet, but it was beginner difficulty and I had a bunch of green resources to exploit, and I'm not sure that all of the projects were actually helping me. (especially considering that I had spending at something like 40% most of that game)

I think the higher end social projects are intended to allow you to specialize planets for certain tasks. (Freya I is all about the tech bonuses, and it goes into high gear when you put the tech slider to the max, Freya II is all about manufacturing ships, and can crank out top shelf overlords in just a few turns when military spending is maxed out.)

I don't much like specializing when it requires you to accept that there will be waste inherent in the system, but that may be the point of those social projects which seem unreasonable most of the time.

As I continue to learn the details of the game, mostly from playing it, it is becoming clear to me, especially after reading threads like this one, that it is important to use those governers in order to specialize (I wish they would remember build ques as default without having to re-enter them each game - I hate that). I only recently started to refuse construction of every kind of improvement in favor of specilizing... it has helped my games greatly.

Currently I'm playing in a gigantic map (the Balanced one, in fact) and I have all of my planets loaded with the same governer list, which puts the first two planet quality improvements up top, has a couple manufacturing improvements after, and then it alternates between morale and economy boosting facilities, finishing off with research boosting, the embassy, and the culutural exchange center, and finally terraforming. I also have a ton of starbases at my command. This means that all of my planets end up as superproducing giants, cranking out constructors in about 5-10 turns and easily supporting about 30 billion people and still growing strong. My spending hovers at about 50%.

This strategy works rather well and makes managing planets pretty easy (most of my time is spent making sure they're building something useful, military-wise). I don't think this strategy would work too well without having a ton of starbases around to give these bonuses, thuogh. I mean, 3 economy resource starbases mean a boost of 150% to economy, which is a _lot_.

Without such resources, I think it would only be worthwhile to build moral and economy boosting improvements. Economy boosts a planet's income and generally produce more than the maitenance of the facility and moral boosts a planet's maximum population and thus boosts the maximum potential income. As a benefit with the moral improvements, taxation can be increased as long as population has a good upswing. When population curve starts to level out, lower taxation again. More money means the spending slider can be increased. If I get to 100% and I'm still generating cash, then I just dump the money into destabalisation and this makes it slightly easier to take over that enemy's planets through cultural conquest.

Also, I don't think there's any downside to using the production bonuses starbases can provide. There's no maitenance and while some of the bonus does have to be paid for, some of it does not, making it "free" money at a 200 bc investment. A side effect is that the colony in question is more able to pump out starships more quickly.

Well, in the link I have given previously(http://www.galciv.com/docs/undocs.html), it is stated that there are some capped effects about free production

Well, don't forget there are lots of starbase modules that improve production. And there are some limits on the number of starbase in the same sector.

And if you could have more than one colony that benefits from these starbases ...