Your wrong. I am not sure why, or how, and i have no proof to contradict you, but yah, your wrong. Feel better?

With that big increase (300 to 500) in the cost of the NLC, we need the advanced factories fixed.

I avoid building/upgrading to Manufacturing Centers as long as possible but eventually I need advanced factory techs in order to further build up my mining resources. The AI on the other hand will race to the advanced factories, thus slowing down its planetary build up. In fact the AI will terraform to unlock new tiles on its planets without factories and with many empty tiles!!! The AI should build a factory first on each planet and it should not terraform until all free tiles are used up!

In v1.2 the output of the Manufacturing Centers and Industrial Sectors was reduced.
Enhanced Factory 10, 100 (Output, Cost)
Manufacturing Center 11, 200
Industrial Sector 16, 400
I suggest:
Manufacturing Center 14, 200
Industrial Sector 20, 400
that way the output increases by about 40% and cost by 100% for each upgrade.

With that big increase (300 to 500) in the cost of the NLC, we need the advanced factories fixed.

Not quite sure how this relates to morale and farm changes in v1.3 beta 3 or how a NLC cost increase provides any extra reason to fix the broken factory upgrade path, but I do agree with you that the factory upgrade path is broken. But it's not just the factory upgrade path that's broken.

The way I have dealt with this is to immediately turn off the auto upgrade feature on every planet that I colonize, conquer or flip. Since there's no global feature to do this (hint, hint) I have to go three menus deep into every planet I own. That way when I start down a research path (for example factories), I can wait until I reach my ultimate goal before I go back and schedule the upgrade. This avoids the thrashing that would otherwise occur as each of my planets immediately starts building the first upgrade during which time I've researched the second then it starts building that one, etc., etc., ad nauseum.

This applies to all the planetary building upgrade paths (farms, research, economic, morale). Yet another downside is that you can't simply go back after completing the research on a branch and re-enable the auto upgrade feature, it simply doesn't work (at least in v1.2). You have to go through all your planets (maybe close to 500) and individually select each tile that you want to upgrade. What a pain.

Another problem is that once you've researched an upgrade in technology the old building is no longer available to build. Building a Enhanced Factory on a newly conquered planet would be a useful thing to do before upgrading to say Manufacturing Center instead of having no industry on the planet until a Manufacturing Center can be built. However, if I get to Doom Ray for example, I still have every single lower end beam weapon available to place on the new Dreadnought I design. I would much rather have old tech buildings available and have all the out of date weapons and defense not cluttering up the shipyard menus.

I really would like a response from someone from Stardock on these (I feel) very legitimate points that I bring up, but if history is any guide I won't. Oh well.

Would you like a bandage for that big hole you just shot in your foot?

I've tried waiting and that didn't work. I've tried humor and that didn't work. I've tried pleading and that didn't work. Sarcasm probably won't work any better than anything else but it can do no worse.

As I've noted before, it's a matter of budget and priority. I agree that some things need tweaking myself but I don't have source access, I'm just the forum guy.

AFAIK, Brad made what changes were made for 1.3b3 himself based on his own thoughts. If one of you wants to compile an official list of tech tree/improvement "problems" and email them to me (click my name above and use the email option in the menu), I'll post it somewhere for the devs to find easily for when they are able to look at it.

guh. Well time to re-learn my start and how to adjust my economy and i was just starting to get incomes over 10k

BACK to the original poster :

Dear god I hope you're wrong too... Maybe they changed the happyness equation too, that would be the only thing that would make sense of this.

As you've pointed out, there was little reason to bother with entertainment centers except for 25B+ planets, now it sounds like planets that populated are pretty much impossible with any decent tax rate.

Which would mean even less diversity / decision making in the game. I was personally enjoying building up 75B planets on the side...

Mumblefratz, here's my $0.02 for your list. I hope the data collection goes well.

Farm Improvements: Please add the last two missing levels of farms. Also, Basic and Intensive farming use the same graphic icon; this gets confusing when you have too many planets to manage.

Morale Improvements: The last two, Zero-Grav and VR centers, have always been very expensive. Now it seems that our economy will become weaker, while these improvements give a much smaller morale bonus. Please lower the prices for these improvements commensurately.

Factory Improvements: If the Enhanced Factory has an output of 10 and the Industrial Center an output of 16, shouldn't the Manufacturing Center have an output of 13? Its cost is exactly between the two others, but its current output level of 11 makes it extremely counterproductive to build. As it is, I really hate it when my agents steal this tech, because it means I have to drop everything else and rush to develop the next level in order to get something worthwhile.

I currently do the same with banks/stock markets - thank you for fixing those two.

Edit - I just DL'd the beta and checked out the xml. Manufacturing Centers are at 12 output now. Meh. I can live with that.