Bradylama,
This is only speculation, but bugs like this are usually a result of something working just fine in the past, but then getting accidentally messed up right at the end.
A video game is a lot like a car. There's a ton of moving parts, and changing one part often can have a knock on effect further down the line. It's very very possible that in fixing one thing, you might accidentally change something that breaks something else. That's why games get intense periods of testing before release.
Now couple that with the fact that Stardock is a comparitively tiny, tiny company and you really don't have a ton of people that are testing. Even big companies miss things before ship date given the insanely quick development cycles present in this industry now.
So things are going to slip through. There's no doubt in my mind social production worked at one point in time, but then some piece of code got overwritten or changed or .... in the process of fixing something else that put it out of commission. It's not like they went through the trouble of adding all of these techs in the game that affect social production and just never bothered to add the code to support it.
heh
As things are identified, they'll get fixed. Have no fear. It might take some time, because you want to be sure that the new fix doesn't create any new problems somewhere else, but things will steadily get more and more refined and more and more polished.
Given the fact that good strategy games are played for years, a few weeks isn't going to make that much difference in the grand scheme of things.
In the meantime, i'll raise my hand for c), it's still fun to play, just work around the boggled social prod bonuses. (research is a bit screwy too, imho, but we'll wait to see)
