Effect of the Children's Creche on Efficiency

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

Hi all. Can anyone help me understand the subject. I am reading contradicting sources.

http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Efficiency_(SMAC)
A Children's Creche, among other benefits, increases the efficiency rating of its base by 2.

https://alphacentauri.gamepedia.com/Children%27s_creche
Base receives +2 on growth scale and +1 on efficiency scale.

http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Inefficiency_(Advanced)
Efficiency   = social engineering efficiency (+2 if Children’s Crèche)

Which one is correct? Also does this efficiency modifier affects both inefficiency and b-drones? I would understand it affecting inefficiency since each base inefficiency is calculated independently. So you just modify Efficiency value in the formula. However, it's not that intuitive with b-drones since they are defined by NUMBER of bases above threshold. Also additional drones are distributed across all bases more or less equally. So what if one of the bases has Children's Creche? How does it affect b-drones formula?

[bvanevery]

Which one is correct?

The Datalinks of the game itself, say +1 Efficiency.  So that's what I'm going with, unless someone has proof of a bug or the Datalinks themselves being wrong.
 

Also does this efficiency modifier affects both inefficiency and b-drones? I would understand it affecting inefficiency since each base inefficiency is calculated independently. So you just modify Efficiency value in the formula. However, it's not that intuitive with b-drones since they are defined by NUMBER of bases above threshold. Also additional drones are distributed across all bases more or less equally. So what if one of the bases has Children's Creche? How does it affect b-drones formula?

By "b-drone" I take it you mean a drone that appears due to Bureaucracy.  Such drones are not distributed across bases "more or less equally".  They are distributed randomly, in as many cities as you are above the Bureaucracy threshold.  They could appear in a city that has plenty of happiness and you don't basically notice.  They could appear in a city that's not so well developed and you get an immediate drone riot.  The effect you usually experience as a player, is when you settle a new city, you often get a drone riot in one of your old cities, at random.

I doubt that individual Children's Creches affect the global formula.  I bet it keeps one of those drone riots from happening at that specific base.  However I could be wrong.  Conceivably, all of the Children's Creches could be added up to determine some kind of ultimate Efficiency.  I haven't studied the game binary so I don't know exactly how it works.

The way I see it, a Children's Creche costs 1 energy to maintain.  If you are losing 1 energy due to inefficiency, it's a break even / worth doing.  Assuming you don't have something more important to build.

The real need for a Children's Creche, IMO, is when you want to trigger a population boom.  That +2 GROWTH is really important, as you need to get +6 GROWTH to get a pop boom in a city.  Maybe if you get everyone into a Golden Age you can do it that way instead, but getting your global GROWTH up to +4, then building Children's Creches, is reliable.  In my mod, +4 is as high as you can make global GROWTH, so Children's Creches are pretty much essential.

A Children's Creche also gives a defensive MORALE bonus and reduces a base's vulnerability to enemy mind control.

[ih8regin]

They are distributed randomly, in as many cities as you are above the Bureaucracy threshold.

Not as randomly as you might think, but in order of establishment, or order of SMACX's internal list of bases which it uses to update per turn. However, this implies that no base can have more than one b-drone, which isn't so, or at least shouldn't be so. I expect that when you cross the double efficiency barrier, the second b-drone starts being added from the beginning of your base list on top of first one, triggering riots if a certain base happened to be "the next" in that list and "just enough happy" previously. Same for higher order barriers.

Also a CC in a base adds the hardcap on inefficiency of 50% to that base, so that the base will always produce at least half of its minerals and energy instead of them being wasted to "corruption". (SMAC definitely, don't recall if applies to SMAX)

[magic9mushroom]

Which one is correct?

The Datalinks of the game itself, say +1 Efficiency.  So that's what I'm going with, unless someone has proof of a bug or the Datalinks themselves being wrong.

In vanilla SMAC everything (manual, and both places in Datalinks) says +2 Efficiency. In SMAX the entry for the Crèche says +1 Efficiency, but the entry for Inefficiency (Advanced) still says +2 Efficiency.

The effect is in fact +2 Efficiency, or at least that's what the displayed inefficiency of bases with/without a Children's Crèche implies.

Also a CC in a base adds the hardcap on inefficiency of 50% to that base, so that the base will always produce at least half of its minerals and energy instead of them being wasted to "corruption". (SMAC definitely, don't recall if applies to SMAX)

This is not how it works in my testing, although it's possible that this is one of the things the GOG version changes about vanilla SMAC.

[Alpha Centauri Bear]

The lowest inefficiency is -4. With CC it becomes -2. So, for the people who does not know the effect of it it seems like it is reduced in half.

[magic9mushroom]

The lowest inefficiency is -4. With CC it becomes -2. So, for the people who does not know the effect of it it seems like it is reduced in half.

I mean, I thought of that, but the guy specifically said that bases would always produce at least 50% of their total energy, and at -2 EFFIC or even +0 EFFIC (if he'd never tried the boneheaded option) you can still lose it all (though for +0 you need a Headquarters and a base a long way away from it; with no HQ you actually would keep 50%).