This is the most infuriating bug in the game for me. Makes building social improvements impossible without majorly wasting credits. I really hope this will be fixed this week.

To prove this set 50% industry and 100% research and compare with 100% industry and 50-50 research-social, with nothing being built on any planets, and you'll wonder where your money is going.

Remember that you can "focus" your planet to building something as well. This is done by going to the planet screen and up top are the 3 boxes for spending, click the icon in the upper right portion of the box and it will highlight the box and focus on that. So if my planet doesn't have any buildings to build then I'll focus on Manufacturing (if I'm building ships) or Research if it's a research planet. Then I'm hardly wasting anything in social production.

It's a workaround anyway.

Uhm, there is no way to tell whether it's a bug.
In fact, since it's hard not to notice (and devs commented on it before, so they know about it), it is a "feature" and the manual simply is wrong/outdated.
I don't know why they chose to do it the way they did, but I guess it has to do with balancing.

Besides, it rarely happens that you build nothing on your planets and if it does, then it's only logical to change your slider and stop social spending altogether or reduce it significantly (you can still focus on it for single planets and build buildings).

You need to either consider your social improvements and research such that every planet is always upgrading to something new, or strike a balance between building improvements quickly on lesser developed worlds and not wasting too much production on the rest.

Research is not relevant, since research production all goes in the global pool. What's impossible to balance at present without massive wastage is military and social production. Basically to produce big social buildings you need temporary production facilities (liveable with almost), but for larger ships you need to increase manufacturing facilities and then set social to zero, reversing this when finished, and without being able to produce buildings anywhere else in the mean time. And you are saying this is part of the design and not a bug.....can't help thinking terms like fanboy but I'm new here.

Lol, waving the "fanboy" flag won't help you here.

I think you are confusing two things, anyway: What you describe in your last post has nothing to do with whether social spending is on or not. Even if you didn't have to *pay* for unused social spending, you still had to adjust the sliders to balance between military, social and research. So what you write - "for larger ships you need to increase manufacturing facilities and then set social to zero, reversing this when finished, and without being able to produce buildings anywhere else in the mean time"- would still be true. You'd just save some credits, not actually build more military or research.

As the devs once stated it: The best player will be the one who knows his whole empire best and is able to balance it, not the one who is best at micromanaging (ie. adjusting each and every planet).

It still might be a bug, of course, but considering the history of GalCiv and the statements of the devs I'm pretty sure it's meant to be this way.

If you want a consistent concept, I'd rather have it changed so that military spending is wasted as well.

I wasn't talking about research points generated on planets. What I said was, "you need to either consider your social improvements and research such that every planet is always upgrading to something new." Which means making sure to pick up, or trade for, techs that allow you to upgrade facilities that you have on your planets from time to time.

Only my most productive planets (Mfg. capital and one or two others perhaps) EVER have idle social production no matter what I set the values to. This is because they are the only ones that can churn out the new improvements before upgrades become available. Paying attention to when you'll have upgrades available and when you'll run out of things to build is important because it keeps your empire at its most efficient.

And I am certain that paying for idle social production is part of the design, and not a bug. Not because I like the game (which I do) but because it's entirely consistent with the first GalCiv, with the Betas, and with the design philosophy that's been expounded on by the developers for years.