The All Lab Approach

The way it works with labs and such, they don't actually pay for research or production or whatever. They just allow you to spend more money on them. So, that 20% reasearch bonus means you have 20% more in your budget for research which translates to faster tech. The catch is, you need the economy to support it. When you crank up the research slider you can hit the red sooner.

So it does translate into more cost then.

Thats what I was wondering. So if you are playing a smaller galaxy with rare planets where the econ is real tight, that 20 percent bonus might not be as sweet a deal as it seems...

Bingo!

I never use research bonus or manufacturing bonus because of that but mainly because i don't like having a production slider held hostage by an ability bonus (Meaning i do not wan't to turn somthing down if there is an ability bonus attached that would get wasted!).

I'm pretty sure that half the bonus production for racial picks is free, but the other half you have to pay for.

How many points give 20% science bonus? I will guess and say 3 points. Then 1.5 ability points are scammed away because their not free, not free = toilet flushed!

You can build too many labs making it possible to spend more than you make on research. I try to work it out so I get close to the break-even point when spending and research are placed at 100%. Otherwise, I'm wasting money on labs I don't really need because my economy can't support the spending I've made available. Conversely, with too few labs, I'm not doing the reasearch I can afford.

In Dread Lords, don't overwrite any of the "free" racial bonuses. Otherwise, points are wasted. If a race has a free bonus in an area, but it's not big enough, use a different race or use a political party to enhance it. Don't change it with your own points. Apply your own points only to non-free bonus areas. In Dark Avatar, free racial bonuses stack with your own points so its not an issue. You're not wasting points by adding your own to a free bonus.

Hi!

This does make the labs more of a money sink, but you pay only for a half of added production. However I'd suggest you to not spend starting points for research bonus with all-labs approach, because what you'll lack is production ability, not research. Better spend points into social production. You'll find yourself upgrading buildings for almost a whole game... Some bonus to mil production will also not harm you, but don't exaggerate here. All-labs beats opponents with quality, not quantity.

BR, Iztok

So just to understand the mechanics better then, can one of you please explain where your getting the "half are free but half are wasted" thing. I understand the lab strat, thats not the issue. And I understand that more research bonus translates to more cost, but what exactly are you meaning by half of the 3 points would be "free"?

Say you put +20% in research. You have to pay for the +10% of it. You don't have to pay for the other 10%. It's free.

So, if you're building all labs, research bonus is great, because that 10% is going to be a higher number.

Also, you're paying less maintenance for more research, which pays for the 10%.

On top of that, you can afford more space (because you're not building factories) to build economic buildings to pay for the extra research, and therefore can build more labs then you would be able to without the economic buildings.

Just to clarify though, when I focus on social, does my social production bonus affect that, or is it still my research bonus affecting that, because all my production is coming from research after all...

Piznit, if your labs would be producing 500 base rps and you have the +20% racial modifier then you get 10%(500)= 50 rps for free. They are treated exactly the same way as the points from a research treaty, only they are linked to your research production. You also get an additional 10%(500)=50 rps that you have to fund, so it would be like having extra labs producing a total of 50 rps except you don't pay maintenance, just the cost to fund the research. The free points have nothing to do with the racial points spent buying the bonus.

Jythier, your social production bonus affects it, your research bonus does not. Racial bonuses (boni sounds silly) are applied after focusing. Iztok Bitenec has a wonderfull post that covers when production modifiers are applied over in Game Talk.

Basically the way it works is that you pay 1 bc for every RP you produce "on-planet" but for any global bonus research you pay 1 bc for every 2 RP's of "off-planet" bonus production.

To take an example lets say you have Xeno Lab on your home planet on a 300% research bonus tile for 8 RP plus a "bonus" 24 RP. Along with this you also have 24 RP's of research from your civilization capital and you also have your tech capital for an additional 100% research bonus.

So this gives you a total of (24+8+24)*2 or 112 RP's of "on planet" research for which you will pay (assuming sliders at 100% research and 100% utilization) 112 bc's.

If that's all the bonuses you have then you will see a planet production of 112 RP's and on planet spending of 112 bc's plus whatever other maintenance you have for other buildings on the planet.

However, let's also say that you happen to have a fully populated economic SB giving a 24% SP/MP/RP bonus to the planet along with 39% from a maxed out research mining base and another 37% (randomly selected to make the math easy) of racial ability. So you will see the 24% SB bonus listed in the planet details screen. In the racial abilities listed in your civ manager you will see your base racial abilities of 37% plus the 39% from resource mining for a total research ability of 76%. So your total global research bonus as it applies to your home planet is 100%.

In this case you actually see the planet producing 224 RP's while the planet spending still only shows the 112 bc's cost of the "on planet" research. However if you go into the domestic policy screen under expenses you will see a cost of 56 bc's for Bonus Production/Research which is the cost of the extra 112 RP's of research due to global bonus.

So the bottom line is that you pay 1 bc for every RP produced "on planet" whether it's due to bonus or not but you only pay half of any RP's produced due to global bonus including econ SB bonuses.

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This actually brings up a bit of a pet peeve of mine and that is that although I will use an "all factory" approach in mid to late game I absolutely think it's a mistake to totally ignore research building, particularly on bonus tiles and particularly early in the game. Yes, I agree that to have sliders select between industry and research results in great inefficiencies and waste, but that still doesn't mean that you can't get higher levels of both industry *and* research by using a balanced approach versus using only one of industry or research.

The reason for this is that when you use focus to get research out of industry or vice versa to get industry out of research you lose all benefit of any and all bonuses of the opposite type. So I might have a NLC on a precusor mine on a planet with my tech capital with 16 econ SB's along with 6 fully mined research resources and a racial research ability of 20% and that single NLC can give me 22*8*2*(16*24% + 6*39% + 20%) = 2,245 RP's of research. However if I use focus to use the same NLC to generate industry, the most I can get is 22 SP/MP's of industry. Clearly this is an extreme example, but it's definitely true that if you use actual research buildings on research bonus tiles that you will be able to generate higher levels of research than by having just a bit more industry and using focus.

Thanks for the clarification and the link!

Hi!

Errr, please check that with the game. IMO you should get 22 * 8 / 4(focus) * (16 * 24%(starbases) + 40% (minimal military or social production bonus from techs)) = 186 production points. At least Dark Avatar 1.61 works this way.

BR, Iztok

I'm not sure I buy this even given that Iztok is an otherwise impecable source. Perhaps because my experience is limited to DL.

In any case, for DL, research bonus of *any* kind, either racial, mining, econ SB, bonus tile, tech cap or omega research is *not* applied to research from focused industry nor for that matter does it apply to industry from focused research.

I suppose this could be completely different for DA, but I still have a hard time believing this.

Err. I have. I can also probably dig up some screenshots to prove it.

However, as I said above, my experience is limited to DL (v1.4x specifically) perhaps there has been a major change from DL to DA in this regard. It would certainly explain why I haven't been overly enamored with my attempts at all factory on DL.

Hi!

I loaded the last turn from my recent DL 1.5 game (1.50.128). My main ship-producing planet has an output of 1706 MPs at 100/0/0 with 50% bonus from technologies, 357% from starbases and 60% from moon and Manuf. capital. With focus set to research it produces 1276 MPs and 1108 research points (118% racial bonus to research). So in DL 1.5 bonuses definitely apply to points transferred with focus. Your experience is very likely the game-version specific behaviour.

BR, Iztok

Thanks for leaving me a graceful way out but in fact you are correct and I was wrong even for v1.4x. When I got home tonight I got out an old endgame.sav file and carefully applied your formulas and findings from the thread listed above and lo and behold they all came out very close. Certainly close enough that it could be exact depending on at what points in the calculation you applied rounding.

I did it both ways with research focused to industry where the global production bonuses were applied and then in production focused to research with global research bonuses applied (sans tech cap and omega research). The only thing I can say in my defense is perhaps I was drawn offsides by the tech cap and omega research *not* working in this manner as was pointed out in the other thread.

One very interesting thing that I did notice is I was able to verify a suspicion I had about precisely how the Artifical Slave Center works. It was noted in the other thread that the ASC bonus is not listed anywhere. It was also noted that this bonus wasn't applied to focused production. I didn't verify that point but I was able to determine that the ASC bonus is special in that it multiples all other bonuses and does not simply stack. Note here I'm not talking about focus.

For a quick random example lets say you have 100 MP's of factory and your manu cap (I'll assume the 50% DL bonus) and then you have a single 24% econ bonus and a 30% racial bonus. Without the ASC total production at 100% sliders is

100*(1 + 0.5)*(1 + 0.24 + 0.3) = 231

If the ASC bonus stacked (i.e. was additive) then with the ASC you would get

100*(1 + 0.5)*(1 + 0.24 + 0.3 + 0.5) = 306

However the ASC bonus actually multiplies *all* bonuses and really gives

100*(1 + 0.5)*(1 + 0.24 + 0.3)*(1 + 0.5) = 346

I'm not sure whether this behavior has previously been reported or not. But this shows how huge a bonus the ASC is. Basically if you have an 16 econ SB array with a 384% MP bonus the ASC essentially single handedly turns this into a 576% bonus. The ASC 50% multiplicative bonus in this case is giving the equivilent of a 192% additive bonus.

If you look at this in another way the ASC is like having a 50% manufacturing capital for military production on every planet you own. Is it any wonder that evil is the way to go.

So that's 100% economy bonus, 50% stacking manufacturing bonus, *way* better colonization events, best unique techs?! I knew evil was overpowered (which is why I don't usually choose it) but that's just ridiculous!

50% *multiplicative* manufacturing bonus


No doubt evil is the best. Being evil does make you a bit of a bigger target but I'm not suggesting this even comes close to compensating for all the goodies that evil gets.

However the 10% approval bonus Neutral gets is pretty powerful because it's a 10% bonus directly to approval not morale that then gets discounted by the planets "base morale". Also neutral is definitely less of a target than either evil or good.

It's Good that really does get the shaft. I've always been convinced that people playing good are really playing a higher difficulty level. However, does that mean when you conquer the planet with the MCC or ASC on it that you destroy the planet?

I'm not sure. I've never seen the AI build either!

The only alignment related special project I've seen them build is the Temple of Righteousness.


Neutral and evil far outweight good. There's just no reason at all to play good other than an easy time with the other goods. Neutral actually used to be on par with evil before they nerfed the NLC, but the military production and economy bonus you get with evil is awesome. Neutral still has a few things going for it. You get the instant terraformaing which I really like and the instant approval bonus which helps when you need it most. Also, evil costs 10k when you research Xeno Ethics. Neutral is cheaper at 2K. Where you get the big hit playing neutral is later in the game when that evil economy and military production bonus is really helpful. But, I still like neutral a lot and plan on playing it next game (DL). I just wish they would bring back the NLC. It was a huge mistake to nerf it the way they did. It's pretty worthless now, costs twice as much as Discovery Sphere and provides only 25% more rp. They need to seriously rethink good alignment. It's all but worthless. And don't you dare nerf neutral any more or nerf evil to make up for it. Oh, wait, in DA they've already done that, netural was nerfed by requiring research of the terraforming techs. You don't get the instant terraforming anymore. So in DA, I'll probably never play anything but evil. Sad state.

Craig, who are you playing as? The cost in xeno Ethics is directly related to your "moral compass" at that point in the game, that is, a "good" race that decides to be evil pays 10k, neutral 2.5k, and 0 for good; or flip all that for an "evil" race. A "neutral" moral compass pays 2500 to go either direction.

And to be honest, I think its really the Good civilizations that should get the morale bonuses (doing good deeds and whatnot, saving kitties, helping grandma); neutral gets research, and evil gets production. Much better balance that way right?

Also, thanks be to Iztok and others, and Piznit for posting the question. I have been using the all-labs approach lately instead of the all-factory and this answered some game behavior i was noticing.

Good is awesome for smaller galaxies where you're lucky to have five planets.

Neutral is good to save your butt economically.

Evil is good when the colonization phase is over and you want to win faster.

Neutral and good are better for all labs when you can't build the Mind Control Center or orbital terraformers very fast all.

That doesn't make any sense. Being evil, you can net a 100% economic bonus and a 50% production bonus, not including other benefits. That allows you to build faster and longer since your economy is more powerful.

Neutral indeed gives a morale bonus and all your planets are terraformed automatically as you research, but there isn't really any inherent economic bonus there. Good doesn't do diddly squat.

For an all-labs strategy, being evil is the most sensible choice, followed in the distance by neutral. Good is never a good choice (ironically enough).

Yeah, I think that's a design flaw in this game. The 3 ethical alignments should have all had their strengths and weaknesses - instead, Evil has only strengths, Neutral is... okay, and being Good is punished.

Evil gets the Mind Control Center - a 100% Economic boost, and the Artificial Slave Center - a 50% galaxy-wide Manufacturing boost.

Neutral gets a 10% Approval boost, instant terraforming, and as many Neutrality Learning Centers as they want.

But Good gets... a random loyalty bonus(which doesn't really work)... the Empathic Tactical Center - a 20% Defense boosting joke... and 'Hall of Empathy' - a building that does nothing much really(the shady surrender-thing doesn't justify for the waste of land and build price). If the Hall of Empathy was like the Mind Control Center and gave a 100% Economic Bonus to substitute for it's being dysfunctional, then it would have been worth considering.