No no, i understand what your saying but i think your problem is that the sliders have nothing to do with the amount of money you actually make. To me the sliders are almost like an independant budget system if you want to spend all your budget on one area then it will obviously cost you else where and in that i find it makes sense. If you could set all the sliders to 100% then i dont think there should even be any sliders as there really wouldnt be any need to adjust them.
I'm still not sure the problem is clear. I'll rephrase the essence of it. In a sensible system, you will have the choice of spending 100% of your resources on research (or production, obviously), or roughly 50% on research and 50% on production (or anything in between). In this system, your choices are:
1. Spend 100% resources on research. So far, so good.
2. Spend
25% of your resources on research and 25% on production. It doesn't take a math degree (which I have, if anyone is interested) to understand there is something very wrong here.
3. Build only research buildings, set research slider to 100%, focus planet on production, and receive 75% research and 25% production. This is not just unintuitive and illogical, it is simply unfathomable. There is no way any player who tries to play strategically, rather than game the system, would ever come up with that. And there is no way any player would feel like they're doing "the right thing" when doing this. And it makes it unnecessary to have production buildings\technology to have, well, production. And it still doesn't allow you to split your resources equally.
The first step is to find a system which is not broken. Once there, we can choose how to tweak it. For example, in Alpha Centauri, you can choose how to split your income between cash and research, and are encouraged to do a balanced 50%/50%. If you do choose to focus on research, you get penalized, so you can only go as far as, say, 80%/0%. Something similar can be implemented here, or the reverse, if it is preferred - say, 100%/0% or 40%/40%. But 25%/25% without exploits is just absurd.
One thing needs to be made clear. I love the way your resources are measured in BC, and your industry\science buildings only determine the rate at which you can convert money into the respective output. So far, StarDock has done great, and this is where the game is "different", in a good way. But then we go on to investigating the specifics of the slider\planet focus system, and find that this part is broken and needs to be changed. It's too bad that StarDock can't come up with a good system, but even the simple fix I have mentioned to the sliders will be enough.
Commenting on some points raised - Yes, with this fix the sliders will normally be all set on 100%, but the option to decrease them should still be there if the player wants to temporarily decrease spending. And, while it may seem like the fix increases the productiveness of the player, in reality, if people currently just do the focus trick, the net effects are simply that they won't need to game the system to get 25%/75%, and that they will be able to go all the way to 50%/50%.
