in other words, move that ship around, make a planet rock, and when all planets rock, park it at your best.

My complaint is that it is a BUG - the behavior of the Wealth improvements is not the same as the other Production & Research improvements, for no discernable purpose. All the basic improvements provide their own type of adjacency bonus, which is the whole point of encouraging people to plan their planet layouts, and one of the Big Selling Points of GC3 (over GC2).   Whether or not the wealth improvements should also provide an Approval and possibly a Population adjacency is another discussion, but they absolutely should be providing their own type of improvement adjacency bonus.

When the adjacency bonus was first removed, I felt as you do. Now, I have learned that by using some advanced buildings (think Colonial Banks, et al), you can create an economy-boosting powerhouse.

I have one question:

What does the Market/Shopping Center's building description say it does? Does that match it's function? If Yes, you can't identify that as a bug. If No, it's a bug.

Then regardless you can call it an oversight/miscarriage of justice/whack/dumb/etc.etc.etc.

If it works as intended, it is not a bug.  You don't have to like it.

The fact that the market center has synergy with entertainment buildings, which are tied directly to taxes (so yes, money) makes the adjacency make sense to me.  It is designed with a bit more subtlety than a straight-up percentage bonus.

(edit)  in fact, when they took the wealth adjacency off the market center, they changed the Colonial Bank from 1/civ to 1/planet.  This more than makes up for it.

It's not working as intended, as that would require an indication thereof. There's no indication whatsoever that this is some kind of intent, and it makes little sense when - as indicated above - literally EVERY OTHER of the 5 don't work this way.

The tooltip text is: "Increases a world's gross Income." For both MarketCenter and ShoppingCenter.

And again this is NOT indicated anywhere. It's just what you infer based on the adjacencies they've given it.  Which is why the current setup is a BUG.  

No, it doesn't. Colonial Banks are decidedly inferior to what the prior Wealth Adjacency Market Center was.  A nice little 3-triangle of Market Centers (with +1 Adjacency) has +6 Adjacency. The same triangle with a Colonial Bank has but +4 Adjacency as it stands now. And the Colonial Bank itself is the same power as a Market Center, and inferior to a Shopping Center.  It gets much worse with 4 or more adjacencies.  Not to mention that the Colonial Bank is the 5th Wealth tech, and obtainable about the time planets are full built out, so counting on the CB as some sort of compensation for the brokenness that is the MC/SC is just incorrect.

So why the super-special "it's not a bug" treatment for the two introductory Wealth Buildings? When everything else doesn't do that. Why not use (again, like EVERYTHING ELSE) auxiliary wealth buildings for differentiation?  Wealth is one of the 4 core stats in the game (Manufacturing, Research, and Morale being the others).  It's not anymore different or important or special than those other 3.  So why on earth treat it differently.

That people can play around it or adapt their playstyle does not in any way diminish that IT IS A BUG.

As to the +5 Raw.

Name me any way to get +5 raw production, with ZERO moral effects, on any world that isn't incredibly fortunate enough to be surrounded by a massive asteroid field, or which is either your homeworld or a Precursor Factory World that you've built several Approval buildings on.  Now, name me any way to do this within the first 50 turns.  Now name me a way which you can instant-buy that, for barely more than the cost of 1 introductory building.

A +5 raw boost is massively overpowered, even in late-game, but especially when you can literally buy it right about turn 30, and easily triple the entire output of a planet at that point. 

It's even worse on smaller maps, where, due to limits on the total number of planets, you're not going to get more than a half-dozen all game, and won't have more than 3 total when RG-278 is a viable purchase.

In Crusade-based games, with very limited ability to gain raw production through ANY means, +5 is a massive bonus.

And again, it's something that is completely out-of-balance with all other Mercenaries.

Great to know you all love the game so much that you are arguing about what you think is a bug or what you think is by design     

@Trims2u

Not to pile on, but if only you had a way to change the game play to suit your ideas of it should be. Oh wait, you do. Just create a mod that overrides the behavior. It's so easy for simple improvement changes (Sorry @heromvore) that even I have done it.

It's listed as an explicit change in the change logs, so yes, that's what they intended. It's about, oh, say #30 in importance of the policies and rules that have changed since GCIII 1.0 came out.

As a player since GC1, and with over 3k hours in GCIII, I can't say that I've always agreed with the new changes to game play, but I've been patient and after playing with them for a bit, have seen what the intent was. For the few things I felt didn't fit my play style, I've been willing to make small mods to cover them.

At this point, I'd much rather the company spent their time resources on GCIV or GCIII5.0.

If you need help in creating a module to make those changes, just let me know

Your response never bothered me personally, but it did prompt me to find supporting evidence. 

Hopefully Trims2u will admit that he also missed the patch note, and let this go.  As said above, it is easy enough to mod the behavior.

That is was an intentional change does not make it NOT a bug.  OK, then, call it a misfeature. Either way, it's something that breaks the overall design of the game, in a way that's neither intuitive nor consistent with the rest of the game.

Notice that nothing was said about the other wealth improvements, and nothing was said about WHY the change was made. That's a big change in design for a single line with ZERO supporting rational.  Heck, it's not even in the Balance section, where they talked about how Tourism had been radically redone, and one would expect that major changes to the Economics buildings (and fundamental economics of the game) work would, at minimum, be similarly discussed in Balance.  Instead, it's buried at the end of the Change Log. With nothing more than a "we changed it from X to Y."

Notice that none of my other concerns have been addressed:  you've all been reduced to arguing that "well, StarDock did it, that makes it fine."  @Horemvore is correct:  you're all wrapped up in defending that SD did this, without addressing anything about what the change did or why.

So, No, that's not fine. It might have been changed in 3.0  (which, I might add was TWO YEARS AGO), but that doesn't make it OK, because it's a fundamental alteration of the previous design, with no reasoning or balance at all.  I've also searched all the archives, and I don't see any discussion of this HUGE change in design anywhere. 

On a related note, notice that there was, at one time, a limitation of the Market Center to "one per planet" and the Shopping Center completely deleted.  (that happened right around 3.0 as well).  Those were "intentional" changes, and plainly were bugs. Just because someone altered a file intentionally, doesn't mean that intention was wrong or mistaken. Thus, it's a bug, and should be fixed.

And that fact that I can mod around it (which I already do) doesn't invalidate the fact it is a bug.  If the Disruptor Beam damage was suddenly increased to 10 via a patch in 4.02 with a single 8 word sentence in the ChangeLog, I sincerely doubt that anyone would call this just something to adapt to, or that I should mod my way around the issue.  Problems with the fundamental design of the game should never be addressed by  "well, you fix it for you" attitudes.

Thankfully, SD doesn't have this attitude.

Agreed.  Just because you don't like a change that was made purposefully (along with many other changes in Crusade which changed what came before) doesn't make it a bug.  At this point, you are just whining.

meh, the synergy between econ and approval works out.  +0.25 up to +1.0 (depending on approval building) per approval adjacency means one can have both happiness and cash improved.  It did take me a minute to work out the benefits of the new system, back in the "crusade just released" days, but it actually works out pretty well.  YMMV, of course, but this is by no means inadequate.  Note as well, that both the standard approval buildings, and the Hot Springs line, will both improve Econ as well.

For that matter, and FAR more important than the MC adjacencies, I'd love for synthetics to have at least one minor building that used population boni