Am I losing money or gaining it in my colonies? different screens tell different story...

Mmm – I don’t really know the mechanics here. Perhaps the calculations you are making do not include any civilisation wide economy bonus you may have?

What you "believe" is the Domestic Policy mini-screen, accessible from the bottom row buttons, because your civilization's net and gross income are far more important than any one colony's net or gross.

I'm unsure exactly why the numbers may be different in those two places, though.

Yes, but when I'm looking at a planet and tryinig to decide what improvments to build, I tend to look at whether or not the planet is sustaining itself economically. If it is, I may build factories or labs, if it is not, I will build econ bulidings or farms. Bad tactic?

It's definately sub-optimal. The AI probably follows a similar strategy, which is why it fails so often.

It is better to centralize money production on a few high-PQ planets. The other planets are consumers of this money. This is more effective because you can have more tax buildings as well as a higher than base population on that planet (since it has the tiles to handle it). One high-ish PQ planet can financially support 3-4 others when properly built up.

And it's true for concentrating research or production, too.  Stacking more base production tiles on one planet nets you a larger bonus from the single power plant you build on it, or the single economy starbase next door.

I'm not a maximizer, so I think the "Bad tactic" question depends mostly on what you want out of the game. If it's a top score, then, yea, it's probably bad because the game has some biases twoards planetary specialization.

But if you're just looking for a good ride down some middle way, then I'd recommend using the Civ Manager. The income column there seems more or less reliable to me. If a colony is in the red, I postpone any improvements. If it is barely in the green, I think a little about how much a new improvement might spend in production before I build it. If it has what looks like plenty of profit, I don't hesitat to build whatever seems appropriate for the world.

Personally I don't look at the colonies themselves as far as profit/deficit goes, but if I did I'd probably see them fairly close to each other-some making 3BC, some losing 3BC-as mine tend to be relatively but of course not completely balanced.  As such, looking at the domestic policy screen is all I need to determine whether I can afford to build something else.

The rest of this post is entirely more information than anyone wants or needs, and may come off as a rant (particularly against specializing planets).  But that's my specialty (ooh, bad pun).

What can I say, I've done a lot of thinking about GC2's economy.

This is the theory that everyone's operating under, but assuming that all of your planets can support/do support the same population (which is obviously not necessarily always the case), it is flawed.

Obviously you'd want higher population planets to be more economic than either production or research.  But in the instances that they aren't, you're better off building roughly equally.  The AI's flaw is in that it funds production and research roughly equally for most of the game, and builds roughly equally as well, hence not getting the most out of its tiles.  That's not our goal-our goal is to build production/economy or research/economy roughly equal.

The reasoning behind it is this: If I have two planets at 8B pop, placing a stock market on each one gives me 1.25x the first planet plus 1.25x the second planet.  This is exactly equivalent to 1.25x (1st+2nd) because in this example my planets have the same income.  If I were to place two stock markets on one planet, I now have 1.50x (1st) + 1.0x (2nd), which is 2.50x or 1.25x (1st+2nd)-exactly the same as in the above scenario.

The idea that you'd be better off by placing your economic structures on high quality planets is dependent on economic structures providing a compound interest increase-but they provide a simple interest increase.  Going from one stock market to two increases your income from 150% to 125% (on one planet), which is a percentage increase itself of 20%, or rather 120% of the former value.

The only reasoning that you might successfully use to argue that larger planets should get more of an economic foundation is that they do in fact have more tiles to place them on, and your economy is dependent essentially on what the average value of stock markets is, which is a subset of how many there are on an absolute basis-basically, more is better.

This conflicts with both production and research as well in that each of these has a structure that grants a percentage increase.  Obviously on planets where you have power plants (which are deemed useless by almost all) or resource coordination centers, or even technology or manufacturing capitals (and let's not forget the omega research center), you would want more buildings to be multiplied by your multiplier.  Since TA's tech capital applies essentially as a racial bonus, and the manu cap has done so for some time, they're not quite as valuable as they should be, and in some instances you would in fact be better off by building another factory/lab, due to the factory/lab being multiplied by all other racial bonuses.

The other issue at hand is one of aggregation-research is done on an empire-wide basis, with the exception that you can only research as many techs per turn as you have owned planets (do note that this number is one higher than the stated formula for DA and TA), however this is not the case for industry.  Planets build social projects and ships on an individual basis.  Therefore you are theoretically better off clumping production on planets, and hence clumping economic buildings on other planets that you don't necessarily need production at.

But there's another problem-social overflow isn't truly wasted; so long as you upgrade something over it later (and the difference in cost between the new improvement and the social spent [but not money spent-which can be different thanks to bonuses] is greater than positive 50), but military overflow is wasted.  Not only does it not do you any good, but you're charged for it, too.  If you have a planet at 500 military production and you build a ship that costs 100 production, you're charged 500BC for it (neglecting the fact that half of a bonus is free).  So it is actually unintelligent to have any more industrial production than you actually need.

Which leads us to doing a balancing act between industry and economy buildings on a planet-by-planet basis wherein we wind up having most planets be roughly balanced between enough factories to build things and enough economic buildings to run them-and the increased amount of factories allows us to build the necessary economic buildings faster, as well, leading us to a more immediate profit...or break even point.

Granted, during the colony rush, as well as at some other times in your games (like right after you build a farm on every planet), your planets will not be giving you the same income value, without accounting for stock markets.  Hence it is wise to have newly colonized planets be your production/research powerhouses, and to have your older planets be your economic juggernauts-typically your homeworld.  The only problem with this theory of course is that your homeworld is the only planet with a sufficient population base early enough on to colonize from, and hence requires a relatively substantial investment in production improvements to produce colony ships fast enough (however fast "fast enough" is for you).

The point at hand is that as colonies mature, you should convert them into more so economic than they are production/research (though not necessarily all-economic), but upon initial colonization they should be almost entirely either production or research, with very few economic elements.

I am gathering from this that the production bonus from a power plant or capital is not subject to racial bonuses?

Which would make sense, if I thought about it more...  I'd always thought of it as "this building generates 30% of the total of all factories on this planet" rather than the more obvious "this building increases all factory production by 30%."

I'd also ask politely for a pointer to the thread that discusses how the tech and manufacturing capitals become a racial bonus?  I thought it was just for the one planet it was built on...?  Curious about the "essentially" implying a more complicated discussion, which exists somewhere on this forum?  Or am I misunderstanding that statement?

In DL/DA, the tech capital is a straight 2x multiplier to everything.

In TA, it was changed (hard code, can't mod it back) to apply only to base research-which makes it for all intents and purposes equivalent to a racial bonus.  Basically, if you had 100 research, a 30% bonus, and the tech capital, in DA you'd get 100x1.3x2 for 260, but in TA you get (100x1 [base])+(100x0.3 [bonus])+(100x1 [tech cap]), which gives you 230 or 100x2.3, which is 1.3+1.  Hopefully that makes sense.

I can't remember how long the manu cap has been that way (racial bonus to planet equivalent), but ever since it got nerfed from 100% to 50% to 33% it's rarely worth using anyway.

I should really do some testing on this and figure out whether the power plants/research coordination center/omega research center are factored in as a multiplier or a racial factor as well, particularly given that the tech capital's hard code in TA changed.

Oh, I see.  No, no.  Think of the tech capital and the manu cap as rings/moons.  They're a racial bonus in counting, but only apply to the planet.

Gotcha.  So by "it's a racial bonus" you mean "it's a bonus applied to base, not a bonus applied after racial bonuses."  And the theory is that power plants apply as a racial bonus as well, and therefore the bonus production from a plant is not multiplied by other bonuses, thus making it possible (if your bonus is high enough and / or the base production from that planet is low enough) that you would gain less production than another factory.  Ex: if you had 4 manufacturing centers generating a base total of 40 mp, a power plant would give you +12mp with no multiplier from racial, so if your racial bonus is higher than 20%, another manufacturing center gives you more mp.

Without crunching the numbers, it seems to me that the manufacturing capital and power plants still get you ahead if you have enough base production, for ex: a PQ16 with a +700 tile.  And over-producing on such a planet only matters in a meaningful way if you're pumping out a ship a turn with a lot of overflow.  Otherwise, you're trying to hit some integer factor of the ship cost, and that's not really a sane goal unless all your other planets produce roughly the same mp and you design your ships to cost some common multiple of your production... (which also btw is not sane)

I'm guessing, also, that the 1/99/0 slider thing doesn't help with the "military overflow still gets charged" thing, i.e. funded social production that gets shifted to military production is treated as straight-up military production if you overproduce, and is not refunded to you.

Exactly.  Which is why I said essentially. 

Except that it is a sane goal when all your planets need to produce ships, whether they're colony ships, constructors, survey ships, or endtree dreadnaughts.

You are correct that due to colonization events, as well as bonus tiles, among other things, not every planet is going to have an equal production, particularly if you're assuming an equal number of factories.  But the goal is just to get it as close as possible to minimize waste in the scenarios where most or all of your planets are building identical or similar ships-which for me is roughly 95% of the game.

Overproducing from my perspective matters because that's wasted money, and I dislike waste.

Right-you still get charged for whatever the value is.  But the value will be less since the social that transfers over doesn't get a bonus.  So say in a 100 industry scenario, with a 20% military bonus, I have 120 military that costs me 110BC to build my 75BC ship at 100/0/0, but if I set funding to 1/99/0, I have 1+99+no bonuses = 100BC cost for my 75BC ship.

Really, dude?  You design all your ship types to have a common divisor equal to your target production?  Don't get me wrong; this is not derisive disbelief in any way.  But like wow, man.  I thought "I dislike waste" is not building industrial sectors on non-bonus tiles.  You put me to shame.  Is there a magic number (production-wise) that you've found easiest to work with?

This also makes your point about the equal-distribution-of-population-and-economy-tiles more evident.  This is a unified strategy of general efficiency to win all the races, everywhere, rather than a more specialized strategy to win just the two or three races that are enough to win a game.

Don't be silly.

I design my target production to be a common divisor equal to my ship types.

It's much easier that way.

I did say that the planets are not equal-they're just roughly equal.  A planet here and there will have say 5% more production, or maybe 5% less.  And my homeworld is an anomaly in this instance, because it's designed to pump out the biggest baddest colony ship it can every single turn.

Considering that my needs change during the course of the game, as I progress from tiny hulled colony ships up to 575 attack huge hulled behomeths, no, not really.  There are of course several near-magic numbers, but it's been long enough since I've had an actual game (read: not testing something) that I wouldn't remember any of them.

There's also the little thing about my still trying to let go of DA and like playing TA, but the changes are significant enough that, as evidenced by this thread, I have to redo everything in it-especially when you consider that I get all my research from focus, which now suffers an efficiency penalty as well...

Exactly!

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Maybe I should have said "I abhor waste."

Wow... I'm probably the most wasteful player there is... not only do I tend not to pay attention to my production after the first few months, but I'm probably flushing BC down the galactic toilet faster than I can count. I even love building Industrial Sectors on newly acquired planets in the late game. Probably because I get lazy though, and unless I'm in a bind, I tend to just 'Let things run their own course'.

It's only a "waste" if you're not having fun. One of the really swell things about GC2 is that it works well as a sandbox toy and also as a competitive game. Whether you care about scores, efficiency, etc. is just a matter of taste. At least until some evil Metaverse recruiter gets their hands on you...

I get often clugged in enthousiastic growth at whatever the mood swings lead me; pretty much stay in the economic red for most of the game; maintain a strong military; keep up with research decisions; put something on every darn last surface tiles under my thumb... to W_i_n.

All and any other concerns like efficient planets, centralized BCs makers (which i just may lose through conquest, btw -- financial collapse ensues), optimal productivity, focused numbers, proper slider levels - don't matter that much if all of these optimal choices lead me... to L_o_s_e.

It's a magnet - positive against negative. Extreme opposites.

There's no shades of gray, no fine-tuning capable of altering my destiny.

Unless i aim for something else, consciously.

I often try to stay at bringing in no more than 5000BC a turn, which is enough to upgrade older ships... when it surpasses this, I will build more labs and factories. The tricky thing is when a economic event happens, and money starts flowing in like mad crazy... I can never remember or keep track of what it used to be at, so when the event ends, I always find myself in horrible debt suddenly, and building econ buildings like mad crazy.

I'm the opposite...  I'm a pre-planner, and I hate micromanaging, so I micromanage like crazy in hopes of avoiding micromanaging later.  Which doesn't work, because I'm always expanding, so there's always something that needs the Guiding Hand of Me involved.

But that's how I have fun.

And I absolutely refuse to alter my production layout for the econ event precisely because it ends.  If it's not a near-permanent income, I treat it as bonus cash and won't build any infrastructure that relies on it.  So I have to frantically spend it all on rush-buying until it ends.  Even War Profiteering I'm having trouble with, because if I build infrastructure that relies on that income I get REAL MAD when some jackass AI signs a peace treaty.

Hahahahaha lol.. that had me cracking up laughing

Same with trade, I used to make trade routes that would go as far as possible, and then on some turns I would suddenly be bringing in nothing, other turns I would have a heap of BC coming in... and I couldn't stand the drastic changes due to my freighters being at different spots bringing in more and less constantly.. so now I just trade with the local minor and set up tons of trade starbases along the way.

Consistency!!   <--- not quite sure what that 'smiley' is doing.

**We are sorry to report that Trade Route X is no longer safe to be maintained!**

Now, there goes a bunch of happily upgraded Econo_bases which have no tradeships input to boosts. Can i fit the bases with some sort of an Engine to move them where they'd be somehow more useful?

It's not the distance baby, it's the resilient cashin within a specific number of turns - fast.

No offense but I don't think you needed to go into all that to explain this conclusion, which I see as self-evident.  The planetary specialization paradigm does not seem to have been debunked.

Ultimately there will still be specialization of economic, production, and research worlds.  A "life cycle" does not preclude this, and indeed was already present in the model I follow, nor do economic worlds not being as rich as they could be prevent them from making the empire richer than it would be.

There are some worlds that specialize at nothing, junk worlds not especially good at anything.  Planetwide planetary bonuses help particularly with determining specialization, and I find that placing a letter denoting a planet's specialization before the planet's name helps with sorting and managing the empire enormously.  We can have our own M class worlds!

I tend to get overly wordy sometimes...

I did however place a warning in the second paragraph.

As for "debunking", well, I use what works for me, and everyone else is free to use what works for them.  I just thought a different perspective than what has come to be the norm might be helpful.

I appreciated the detail -- just trying to understand the game and every (long) explanation of something helps!

I just skimmed this but I don't think anyone actually answered the original question.

On the planet screen income is self explanitory.  Spending INCLUDES maintenance + BASE research (unmodified by bonuses) + production/military.

So what's listed on the colonies tab is Income - Spending.   You don't actually subtract the maintenance from the income because that's already included in the spending.