Overpowered is more than just "not all races have access to the X".  It's also in the context of "X is far more powerful than anything else available, for little extra cost".   Name me one other improvement that:

1. Costs so very little for such a very large set of bonuses
2. Can be built everywhere
3. Provides a substantial bonus independent of the Production Allocation Wheel's settings

These improvements are radically better than any other "ordinary" ones (i.e. the ones of which you can build multiple-per-planet).  They're also far, far above the one-per-planet buildings in power, yet cost substantially less.  And they're even slightly more powerful than the one-per-empire projects (E.g. Manufacturing Capital).  The *only* thing that is more powerful than these is the One-Per-Galaxy special things.

Compare the Durantium Refinery to the Manufacturing Capital:

DR:  1 per planet

MC:  1 per player

DR: 150 cost to build + 1 durantium

MC:  227 cost to build

DR: +8 to base manufacturing

MC: +200% to manufacturing, +25% to influence

DR: 0.5 maintenance

MC: 2.3 maintenance

DR: +1 base manufacturing per level of building

MC: +5% manufacturing per level of the building

DR: +2 adjacency bonuses

MC:  +3 adjacency bonuses

In short, the MC costs 50% more to build, can only be built once, is 5x as expensive to maintain, and doesn't cost a durantium resource. 

It takes a LOT of Raw Production to overcome that +8 bonus, since you can't really get more than 50% of Raw Production to a Manufacturing (coersion nerfs anything higher).  In short, a planet with the exact same configuration of factories means that one with a MC needs to have at least 6 more Raw Production than one with a DR to have the exact same Manufacturing output.  It's a little better the more adjacency to the MC you can get, but it gets *much* worse the higher the total % bonuses from all other manufacturing buildings get, plus made worse by the fact that most people aren't going to run the Production Wheel with more than about 40% to Manufacturing.

So, we're looking at a scenario where the DR/TDA/PR are better than ANY other improvement you can build, with two exceptions:  any Galactic singleton, or certain configurations of the one-per-empire buildings.   All the while these buildings enjoy far cheaper build costs, and much higher availability.

That is the definition of a over-powered item. It's significantly out-of-line when compared to any other available improvement.

"If you think the Doom Cannon is too powerful to build, then don't build it" - Mallory Lloyd

Seriously. If you think something is overpowered, don't use it.  Unless you are playing multiplayer games and you have issues with them using it.

I doubt any serious hardcore GC3 player here would say "Nerf the AI" as we all want the AI to be smarter and better to provide a challenge.

So this topic of discussion is -very- off topic and weird to me, as why would you want to nerf yourself when you can just restrict yourself from building it?

P.S. Everything you "want" to do to the tile improvements can be done via XML coding by just swapping a couple numbers. You don't need to nerf EVERYONE across the board in all cities and nations of the world because you are unhappy with 1 improvement that you can fix yourself.

WTF does nerfing the AI have anything to do with this? That wasn't even suggested.

I can't believe we're having that discussion again. We hashed it all out when the topic of Sensor Boats was hot.

Why have StarDoc do anything? They've made a system that's customizable by anyone, so why bother to have them make ANY changes?  I mean, just have them put out feature release, and leave the balancing and playability up to the community, right?

So why did StarDoc change the DR/TDA stats from when they were introduced, and what's the PR doing there at all?  Hmmmmmm...

The point is that 99% of the audience isn't going to mod something, and you want to make the base game without any obvious exploits or serious balance issues.  It's a serious sales problem if the pitch is: Buy GC3, then go here to download this X and clicking through 6 pages, and get that Y over there, and open this file to type in Z here, in order to get a nicely balanced, fun game.

The new DR/TDA/PR are seriously unbalanced, and need to be corrected; just like the old DR/TDA were seriously unbalanced (in being *under*powered).

The "don't use it then" mantra is as dumb as the old Patient/Doctor joke: "It hurts when I do this..."  "Well, don't do that, then..."

There is a difference between "It hurts when I hold something doctor" and "It hurts when I bend my fingers all the way back like this doctor"

One you can help, the other you need to survive. If this was the fact that the colony capital was quadrupled in effect in a new patch, something that is placed down that you cannot help, and made numbers go crazy through the roof.. I would agree with you.

You are either suggesting the player is using it too powerfully, at which case, you can edit it in the XML code in 10 seconds.

or you are suggesting the AI is using it too powerfully, which almost no one has an issue with except for newbies.

People complain about Carriers because the AI makes a ton and they destroy. If someone complained carriers are too strong for players, i would say the same thing, don't build them.  I don't. I hate carriers. There is a cheat code screen in the game, anyone can use it, but I don't.  Should this be removed too? Just.. because?

This complaint is acting like its breaking the game when all its really doing when you get down to the math is giving 10-20% extra base manufacturing mid to late game.  I don't know about your worlds, but some of my manufacturing worlds have 100-120 base manufacture wtih significant population mastery and reasarches.  Early game, yes its powerful, but you sacrifice valuable resources to do so.

I understand everyone has their own right to feel and say what they want about the game, but I have not in all the years of playing this issue was incredibly overpowered or crazy.  Maybe thats just me.

I respect your feelings and thoughts, but of the 5 people that have posted on this issue in reply to you, none have said "I agree with this statement." All have said I do not think it is as powerful as you make it out to be.  Maybe this will change in time if this topic gets hot, maybe you will get more supporters, I don't know.

I would like to see the AI tweaked to make more use of special buildings. I think another pass on how they build planets would be really good, as well as further improvements.

I really like how the gal civ 3 AI has shaped up -- it's pretty good, even if there is more room for improvement.

this is an old post regarding the map editor but its a list of things that need to be added as well.

While I think the Map Editor is a vital piece for a some players, I personally have never used it, and rarely do in games.  So I won't be updating this post with map editor requests as I do not think I could do them justice in describing what needs to be repaired.  I will leave that up to people more awesome to me to post and refine a collection and requests in their own dedicated Map Editor post.

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but I would like to see queueing of Research instructions become possible, so you could say research this tech, then this one, then this one and so on and not need to babysit your research each time.

Another thing which I think is vital and which the game badly needs is to some way to visually check your status when you are suddenly whisked away to a planet screen or similar to make a decision. At the moment you have to make many decisions based on memory alone.

Fix the Diplomacy and Design screens to close when you hit Esc -- just as the rest of them do.

If I enter the ship designer from within the shipyard... return me to said shipyard on complete of new design... there is a good chance I might want to build my new design

Remember the list of things that happened, were built on the turn, or just needed your attention? (Like foreign ships in your space) Put it back. It made it easy to keep track of where each of my 40+ colonies and shipyards were focused.All I get now are a bunch of "Idle Colony" or "Idle Shipyard" notices. When I've got a half dozen or more colonies all finishing production within a turn or two of each other, especially if I'm shifting focus from say econ to research (or any other changes), that little list was like having my Grand Vizier giving me a weekly progress report -- made life easier.

You keep putting in useful things and then dump them in following releases. Inconsistency is not helping me appreciate the good stuff you're putting in. But hey,  maybe if I wait long enough you'll put it back in like the golf ball (or whatever we're calling the econ adjustment thing).

Issue: This is a bug, but I think I've got the problem identified. The issue is newly designed ships changing mass after their design is implemented and in production.

When it happens: Somewhere between game log-off and game log-on. Technology is usually high enough for Large and Huge hull designs. I haven't seen it happen in early gametime.

What happens: Ship design disappears from build list. I found the missing ships when I toggled "Show ships that are over mass." (or whatever)

Why it happens: Probability 1) Bonuses for traded technology that decrease the mass of modules are somehow lost from the calculations. 

                      Probability 2) Factors involved in mass calculations that were available during previous game session are somehow lost during the savegame or ignored due to a database conflict.

The issue only seems to affect player designs. I have not observed the disappearance of game-provided designs.

Huge ships are gaining 15 mass points

Large ships are gaining 12

Medium ships are gaining 5

Small and tiny ships are gaining 3.

Conclusion:
I believe that this bug may be a database conflict caused by traded technology. Let's say for example you researched for 'Rapid Fire Missiles' and traded for 'Missile Miniaturization.' They are options. If you research for one, you can't research the other. But you can trade for the other. However somewhere in the save game process when exiting the game, either 'Missile Miniaturization' is lost or upon startup, the calculations fail to audit this technology because it has already audited 'Rapid Fire Missiles' as your bonus for that level of the tech tree.

In my experience of this problem, I can eliminate other weapon types as the problem because I haven't fit my ships with any weapons besides missiles. So the data loss may be occurring in missiles, defensive modules, sensors or logistics. I can also eliminate propulsion and life support modules as the problem because some of the ships that gained mass had neither of those. 

I hope this helps.

It may not be that they are gaining, but rather you are losing. The "Trading Resources" for military give you additional Mass, so if you design a ship while you have that resources, then either trade it away or lose it back (after getting it in trade form other) it will adjust your mass.

Nope. That did not happen. I haven't traded any resources nor lost them due to conflict in this game.

Losing ship design happens to me when:

- I redesign a planet resource that gives my ships +capacity

- I loose the monosodium whatever trade resource that gives my ships +5% capacity

and other things like that

If the ships you are "losing" are built to MAX specifications (like almost every capacity point in there) check it out.

I figured this out because I was like.. why am I losing ship designs?  Then I made one with just a few parts and didn't loose it.

Yep, with all these, ahem, "improvements" being suggested, some of them are not "nice to have" but pretty much "necessary". This game is still not finished, even a full year after release. That's pretty sad, really.

I'm not sure this has been added to the list: Waypoints. You know, some way to tell a ship to go THIS WAY instead of arbitrarily THAT WAY. It would be... Revolutionary.

Also, "eject ship(s)" should be changed to "New Fleet" and the new fleet should be selected AND on top of the stack afterward. Right now the way it works is asinine: You "Eject Ship", which means, if you really think about it, that the original fleet is still selected. However, the ship you just EJECTED stands on top of the stack. So what you SEE on top, is NOT what's selected. But every other instance of something being selected, it is shown on top. I can't begin to say how many times this caused me to lose battles, sometimes wars, and yes entire games because of this completely asinine and inconsistent way of doing things. The concept of "eject ship" is what it is. But "New fleet", with it both ON TOP and SELECTED would have the advantage of clarity and obviousness.

I would have to say if a building took me greater than a hundred turns I just wouldn't use it in early game making it useless to build starbases to collect resources in early turns. This is more of a problem for the Ai. who wants these resources. A complaint a lot of players made in beta. Remember that Stardock probably wants these resources more valuable than the other buildings. A nice solution to your problem would simply have these buildings increase in abilities with some kind of leveling system. Maybe based on influence, population, number of turns since planet been colonized, tech age your in game, number of turns been playing game, or number of planets colonized. Again if you make a building to hard to build I just wouldn't build it. This would make resources useless to bother with except for trading.  

What would be nice if for things like upgrades, we could set "Default" upgrade to. So when we open the upgrade menu, it defaults to the selected default upgrade, this would alleviate us having to scroll through the list to find an upgrade every single time... argh...

I would rather global options for this, so I don't have to here for each planet to shut it off.

Sorry not planet upgrades, but rather ship upgrading. Also a hot key for bringing up the Upgrade selection.

Ok then I'm going to write a disclaimer i was talking about planet improvements.

My Suggestions:

- More than 1 transport in a fleet  (the Ai should be able to do pre-invasion math, so it can send an appropriate number of transport ships, because no matter how many times you try, that 3 pop ship can't take a 30 pop planet, unless using invasion tactics).  This seriously hampers the Ai's ability to militarily expand.  It shouldn't take a 12 planet empire 100+ turns to conquer a minor race world.

- Garrison captured planets better

- Invasion target priorities - don't just invade the closest one, but the best one the Ai can reach.  Priority based on planet class, with precursor type worlds on top.

- Make the Ai able to use the population slider, both for more efficient invasions and colonization.  Set a maximum based on the population of where the ship is coming from, especially early game, so it doesn't depopulate its homeworld to rush colonize.

- Define alliances better, and implement them so the Ai actually uses them, and they actually make a functional difference in gameplay for everyone.

- Bribe values for me going to war should be on par with what humans get charged to do the same, with the same variables.

- Make the Ai fully affected by FoW at all difficulty levels.  Give it some other bonus to compensate at higher difficulties, such as improved mining efficiency or starbase effects.

- Better ship blueprints - less focused on defense (especially on transports), more engines (especially on larger maps)

- How the Ai values certain tech in trade should be modified by the racial preferences of that race.  For example, Altarians would pay more for +research/precursor tech, Drengin would pay more for weapons/ship tech, Yor would pay less for food/growth tech, etc.  GC3 has gone to great lengths to differentiate the races for better gameplay immersion, and for the most part it works.  But they all trade the same....kind of breaks immersion.

In my last game I wanted to try for a conquest victory, but along the way, I allied with two races to keep them pacified while systematically beating the other two races into submission and annihilation - and just as I attempted to attack my nearest ally to keep the game running, I couldn't. I couldn't break the alliance and ended up with another peaceful victory. Disappointing.

Bottom line: I want to be treacherous sometimes and make alliances to break them later on. 

Have to be careful with how you break alliances. Otherwise if an AI can break it at any time, whats the point. Should have a cool down period sort of like a "peace" accord, that you can't/won't attack for x turns.

As for another game feature that would be cool, would be move terrain building. That is so often I conquer a planet to find a cool structure I would love to take advantage of, but the AI put it in such a stupid place, it's better to destroy it. It would be nice if we could "move" the structure. I would even be happy if it took twice as long as building a new one "take it down gracefully (so you can rebuild it), build it back up" in another location.

Im more for that they make the AI smarter when its comes to placing those Improvements,

then there would be no need for this