Hey, loved the game prior to this current expansion; the game is currently unplayable for me now until the resource problems are fixed. I actually made an account just to give feedback on this.
The game has turned for the worse into a resource bouncing game, and is your primary concern always. The biggest threat to you is no longer other empires, it's the internal management of resources that you have to walk a tightrope on or immediately lose the game.
1. I can't control where a citizen goes: They pop into whatever building or district they please, and I can do nothing about it save turning off the building and waiting 5 years for them to get off space welfare and off to the farm. At first I thought I could force them by only having one district type open at a time, but then your planet overcrowds because you don't have housing, at which point you have to either build a crappy apartment building in your limited building slots, or continue building more districts....I hope you have an open district slot of the same type open, or you're now dealing with random distribution of pops. This could be fixed by allowing me to move workers within a strata, or by increasing resources gained by said structures.
2. You are constantly out of something critical: Every game I have played so far has been an exercise in delaying the inevitable. Eventually, your lack of resources cascades until one of several things happens that ends the game:
--A. Your energy starts to deplete, either because of all the other crap you're forced to build to give you resources, or the ships / army you have to get to stave off invasion. If you are invaded, this exacerbates your energy depletion as your systems are taken to the point where you get -75% damage to all your ships, ending the game as your crap fleet is eradicated; my favorite part is when it happens between jumps when I'm about to attack a fleet. You are unable to build more, because alloy makers take energy which you don't have any of.
--B. You lose consumer goods, either because you don't have minerals or you're trying to stave off the much more critical energy depletion by shutting down your citizen manufacturing centers. Suddenly your entire population flips out and starts invading your own planets. I hope you've been putting 10+ armies on that planet, because otherwise its gone. While I like this gameplay element in theory, combined with all the other ridiculous resource restrictions it's excessive.
--C. You can't afford alloys, which require both a crapload of energy upkeep, plus a crapload of mineral intakes, and a ton of citizens to unlock the building slots in order to actually make the damn things. The amount of alloys you need for ships, colonies, system expansion, etc is obscene compared to slow sluglike pace you generate them at. Attempting to speed up this resource generation will result in one of the other cascading economic effects that result in you getting wrecked by another civ.
3. The above problems might be fixable, except for the fact that the pops grow at a snails pace, and the first pop you grow is a useless ruling administrator who does nothing. I also love that I have 3 useless clerk slots in my capital that also do nothing. I don't want their crappy luxury goods or whatever useless crap they generate, I want to send their asses into the mines to get me some shiny rocks, or the local nuclear plant because I'm -5000 energy trying to make alloys.
It would be great if Paradox could address these issues. There's promise in a lot of the new gameplay, but right now the amount of micromanage-y crap that I have to deal with now (which still results in cascading economic game loses) is ridiculous.
The game has turned for the worse into a resource bouncing game, and is your primary concern always. The biggest threat to you is no longer other empires, it's the internal management of resources that you have to walk a tightrope on or immediately lose the game.
1. I can't control where a citizen goes: They pop into whatever building or district they please, and I can do nothing about it save turning off the building and waiting 5 years for them to get off space welfare and off to the farm. At first I thought I could force them by only having one district type open at a time, but then your planet overcrowds because you don't have housing, at which point you have to either build a crappy apartment building in your limited building slots, or continue building more districts....I hope you have an open district slot of the same type open, or you're now dealing with random distribution of pops. This could be fixed by allowing me to move workers within a strata, or by increasing resources gained by said structures.
2. You are constantly out of something critical: Every game I have played so far has been an exercise in delaying the inevitable. Eventually, your lack of resources cascades until one of several things happens that ends the game:
--A. Your energy starts to deplete, either because of all the other crap you're forced to build to give you resources, or the ships / army you have to get to stave off invasion. If you are invaded, this exacerbates your energy depletion as your systems are taken to the point where you get -75% damage to all your ships, ending the game as your crap fleet is eradicated; my favorite part is when it happens between jumps when I'm about to attack a fleet. You are unable to build more, because alloy makers take energy which you don't have any of.
--B. You lose consumer goods, either because you don't have minerals or you're trying to stave off the much more critical energy depletion by shutting down your citizen manufacturing centers. Suddenly your entire population flips out and starts invading your own planets. I hope you've been putting 10+ armies on that planet, because otherwise its gone. While I like this gameplay element in theory, combined with all the other ridiculous resource restrictions it's excessive.
--C. You can't afford alloys, which require both a crapload of energy upkeep, plus a crapload of mineral intakes, and a ton of citizens to unlock the building slots in order to actually make the damn things. The amount of alloys you need for ships, colonies, system expansion, etc is obscene compared to slow sluglike pace you generate them at. Attempting to speed up this resource generation will result in one of the other cascading economic effects that result in you getting wrecked by another civ.
3. The above problems might be fixable, except for the fact that the pops grow at a snails pace, and the first pop you grow is a useless ruling administrator who does nothing. I also love that I have 3 useless clerk slots in my capital that also do nothing. I don't want their crappy luxury goods or whatever useless crap they generate, I want to send their asses into the mines to get me some shiny rocks, or the local nuclear plant because I'm -5000 energy trying to make alloys.
It would be great if Paradox could address these issues. There's promise in a lot of the new gameplay, but right now the amount of micromanage-y crap that I have to deal with now (which still results in cascading economic game loses) is ridiculous.
