Bonus spending does not appear on planet screen...

Not a necessarily a bug, but interesting

The other day I was playing around with some planets to see if the numbers for spending, production, and time to completion matched up. It turns out that the time to completion for planetary improvements is a little screwy, but that's the subject for another post, which I'll put up after I've had time to crunch the numbers some more. In the meantime, I thought it was interesting that the "Spending" number on the planet screen (below "income" and above "maintenance") actually includes the maintenance costs, but not the money spent on bonus research and production.
An example - for the purposes of my testing I had set the spending slider to 50% social 50% military 0% research. My planet Toria had the civ cap and three factories and 12 points of asteroid production. That gives me 24 + 6*3 + 12 = 54 total industry points. I had 30% military and social production bonuses (civ wide) and no power plants, manufacturing capitals, or econ starbases. So I was getting 35 (27 + 27*.3) military and 35 social production points on the planet. All well and good. Maintenance was something like 5bc per turn (I forget exactly what, but something like that). So I was surprised that "spending" was 59bc/turn. I had 27 social base + 8 bonus, for which I had to pay 1/2 (4bc/turn), so social should be 31 and military the same. 31+31 = 62. Where was 59bc/turn coming from? Well, looking at some other planets I determined that it was the base social and military production (27+27) plus the planet maintenance (5bc/turn). So there you get 59bc/turn.

So it turns out that bonus production/research costs are not figured into the planetary spending number. They appear all lumped together on the "economic" tab as "bonus production." Interesting point - I was totally up the bonus production and research for my 5 planets, and I was coming up with a number higher than the bonus production costs on the econ tab. What was going on? I figured out that bonus production costs round down and are figured planet by planet. And if you have planet producing one bonus research point (for example) it will round down to nothing. This rounding down is separated out by production type, too, so that if you have one bonus social, one bonus research, and one bonus military, you will pay nothing for all three.

Nothing groundbreaking, but I thought it an interesting point.
5,927 views 3 replies
Reply #1 Top
What are you doing with the asteroid production? That is supposed to be free.
Reply #2 Top
Nice, looks like those power plants, civ abilities, manufactoring capitals, moons, etc. really matter!!!! Maybe bonus production / research is too powerful (although it applies for the computers AIs as well, however.
Reply #3 Top
As far as I know, asteroid production is not free. Asteroids are just like factories - you pay 100% for the base production. This is made clear on the "summary" tab of the planetary screen. Initial colony (or civ capital), factories, and asteroid mining bases are all listed separately and the "total industrial" number at the bottom of that window is the sum of all their values. Your base military or social production is your slider percentage times that number. Then you add the bonus production, which comes from civ-wide bonuses (racial abilities, tech bonuses), planetary bonuses (moons, rings, and events), and starbase bonuses. This "bonus" production (which cost 50%) is what does not appear on the planetary screen, but off on its own on the econ tab.