Does the Industrial Spec affect refineries?

Yes it does. i had one refinery on a fully industrial spec world, and one on a fully social world. the social world refinery was producing MUCH less than the industrial. The industrial world was producing more than if i just left the world alone. I tested this on the Vasari. I haven't tested it on Tec, or Advent yet.

it is not supposed to increase it.. it is not written in the description.. maybe if it does increase refinrey income, we should tell the developers it is not written in the information of the specialization..

If it doesn't, IT SHOULD...

why? still they will be inferior to trade ports.. but if you actually think of social specialization, where trade gets severe penalty, there refineries may actually be useful..

Yeah, but no need to make them even more inferior...

More? If you build refineries on a terran with 700 population, it could give more  income than a terran with full industry, if my instincts are right, though not based on calculations, but would be good to see refineries actually be useful..

Anyway you cannot make refineries be competitive with trade ports.. You would need high numbers for it, and it is not likely to happen.. So what would justify increasing their income rate if still trade would be always better even that way? Or maybe you could give refineries 100-200% bonus, and again Advent would get a disadvantage. Refineries were always strange, and need an overhaul just like Advent resource focus, which is worse than a joke..

I get that Refineries are really expensive, but they are really powerful if you place them right . And I also wonder if this increases it

not really.. a longer trade chain makes trade much better.. and they will be so much better it will be more a solution to buy metal and crystal from the black market

One thing that has to be considered for trade is that the per node trade bonus adds all trade lengths of all those factions you have a trading pact with together...

In a 5s game, you benefit not only from the length of your trade route, but the sum of yours and all your allies' trade routes...this means that even a frontliner can get a 20+ trade route bonus even if they have only one trade port...

Even if refineries were somewhat competitive in FFA, large team games would still make trade almost always better....

I'm not really following here...I think what you are trying to say is that even if you gave the specialization trade bonus to refineries as well, the trade ports would still be better...

That is true...but I don't see the meaning behind this...something that gives a bonus to trade but not to refineries only widens the gap between the two and thus makes the problem worse...sure, giving a bonus to both may not solve the problem but at least it prevents it from getting worse...

Refineries could be made to be competitive...but the devs won't do it for the same reason they won't nerf PMs...

Something I was experimenting in my last game, is I would social spec my terran/ocean worlds, and stuff them with just enough refinery nodes to saturate all the nearby extracters, plop in one broadcast center on each of them.

Then focus a trade port / industry spec on all my volcanic / ferrus. In the end I didn't spec roids or dwarfs, but still put trade ports on them.

I was playing solo and the income really was quite radical. While its true you can gain more raw results from pure 100% trade, you're also giving that money to enemies if you do it on the black market and they have resources up for sale. Whereas with my setup I didn't even need to buy resources. I was solo and didn't want to setup trade routes either.

Finally I believe its more of a situational thing. I must admit my planet placement luck was amazing, I literally had no overlap in getting the perfect number of refineries with no wasted space. I wonder how often that can happen.

exactly

what i meant to say is, if social specialization weakens trade, then you may actually build refineries there, but now i understand what you wanted to say, yeah, it widens the gap if they don't give bonus to refineries also..

In the games against Hard AI's with social spec on my home and on the higher pop planets like ice or desert my economy was so good I steamrolled the others, without building a single trade port..as TEC... I built trade just because of honour to my factions name (traders emergency coalition without trade lol), i researched extra population and all the extraction increase and damn it was great.

So in singleplayer mode it seems social specialization IS AN ALTERNATIVE TO TRADE, you can happily live without building trade ports at all. I guess the same won't be true against unfair AI but I did not have the will to play on that level yet lol If you upgrade your homeplanet fully with social, it is earlier and cheaper than trade.. and you only need to upgrade that planet and build ships elsewhere. Just think, Advent loyalist with pacts can have 135% allegiance with 700< pop, above 50 credits per sec.. from just a terran.. only by upgrading "population".

I don't think this is true in current sins implementation. I think that got obliterated in one of the various updates somewhere. No?

Does seem to have gotten removed...idk what update removed it but I know it used to be this way in rebellion, so it wasn't a trinity -> rebellion change....

Something I have noticed by playing with a friend, is that its much more useful to get tradeports everywhere, than in a chain.

Maybe it's because of my chain that I had, where he got the bonus from, but he was advent, I was TEC, and he got more credits than me. I had a large chain, he had trade ports at every planet...And he got a much higher income...

You are so confused that I cannot answer.

Of course he did... trade ports  provide their own income. But getting mostly just one long chain is far more efficient, since each unique gravity well on the trade chain adds a small amount of credit income to each trade port along the chain, hence you don't want to just build trade ports everywhere, because it takes a very long time for them to pay back their investment. Plus, you can't really use as much income as that would grant you anyway.