I talked a bit about this on another thread, and I wanted to make it's own to gauge what the level of interest/concern was.
https://forums.galciv3.com/479003/page/1/#12
Basically, it boils down to this: After the 1.8.1 patch, the DR/TDA went from being mostly irrelevant to quite overpowered.
--
The questions I have is this: do other people feel that they're now too far the other way? What do we do about it?
My criticisms are based on the idea that the DR/TDA (and to lesser extent, PR) all are intended for the following purpose:
- An "early game" (i.e. turn < 100) improvement
- Provide a substantial boost to a player's game if they can get built
- Be expensive enough for early game that only 1 or 2 ever are built
- not so expensive that they can't reasonably be built in an OK timeframe for a world with 15-ish manufacturing.
- Be superseded by buildings in mid-game (i.e by turn 200, other available buildings are superior)
The last is key: that by turn 200, you shouldn't have any reason to build these on most worlds, specifically not on any major specialized (in the attribute the DR/TDA/PR is in) world.
The major culprit to the current problem is the adjacency bonuses, +1 to the stat, for each level of the building. That is, for a Durantium Refinery, it gives a +1 to Manufacturing (not Raw Production) for every adjacency bonus it receives. For even a typical setup, it's trivial to get +5, and +8 is not uncommon. This results in a DR with a +12 or more to Manufacturing, which is then adjusted upwards by all the other %-based improvements. Thus, in mid-game, it's not hard to have a DR which contributes 50+ Points to Manufacturing. The math says that a DR is superior to ANY other manufacturing improvement available to all races, in any situation where it can get 5+ adjacency levels and the world's population is below 30. Same goes for the TDA/PR. That's seriously OP.
On the other end, they're still too expensive to build in the early game. 150 build cost requires 10+ turns for most worlds prior to turn 100.
So, it's a bad combo - too expensive to use for their original purpose, too OP for the mid/late game.
---
My suggestion is to nerf the TDA and DR - leave the PR alone because it's not really that much of problem, as wealth is easily obtained otherwise. I'd suggest nerfing the per-level bonus to 0.25 or so, and the cost-to-build to 80. Maybe reducing the base bonus from +8 to +6, but if that's happening, I'd reduce the maintenance to 0. That makes it within a player's grasp to build around turn 50-60, but avoids the huge buffs it gets from increased adjacency common post-early game.
Thoughts? And please, don't use the "if you find it OP, don't use it" excuse.
(just to let you know how OP it is, the DR/TDA are currently better in ALL scenarios with at least 3 available adjacencies (or a bonus tile) than ANY other improvement - including galactic singletons and the special improvements available from the Lost Treasures DLC. And they're superior to everything just as a singleton if your planet population is under 20.)