So first of all, this is going to be a very long post, I will try to summarize the main arguments at the end.
This post mainly inspired by my own dissatisfaction with how samey and 'bland' the galaxy ends up feeling during a game, the new sprawl changes coming in 3.3, and from conversations and posts on this forum (especially the
planet design thread currently ongoing).
As sprawl can no longer be directly mitigated, there is a serious opportunity cost associated with acquiring systems - however, the vast vast majority of systems currently are incredibly uninteresting, usually just giving you a handful of base resources and maybe some research. With sprawl punishing your edicts, traditions, and research speed, this is likely to result in a kind of 'Swiss cheese' meta where players only take the handful of systems where the economic gain are thought to outweigh the sprawl penalty.
A way to fix this is to change how the galaxy map is created. On map creation, have the galaxy be partitioned into
pre-defined sectors of systems. Hyperlanes will be generated in such a fashion that each sector behaves as a kind of 'closed bubble' with only a few hyperlanes in and out, but with a relatively dense hyperlane network connecting the systems within the sector. This will make a sector
actually feel like a sector - it is its own little microcosm in the galaxy. An example can be seen
here. Now, when fully in control of all systems associated with a sector, the empire will be rewarded with a bonus to the sprawl from that sector's systems - something like a 25-50% reduction, as well as perhaps additional bonuses (such as being able to hire a governor for the colonies in that sector, and being able to release the sector as a vassal, etc). A sector system like this will also have the bonus of encouraging empires to develop their borders along the 'natural terrain' of the galaxy's hyperlane network, and it will stop players from 'Swiss cheesing' their borders. It will also give clear and well-defined war goals for the AI and the player, as both will now compete to be fully in control of a sector that may be contested.
However, the problem now perhaps becomes instead of only picking up the valuable systems, the player will just not bother expanding much at all beyond 1-2 sectors, as anyway the commitment to take another sector is too much effort for basically no real interesting outcome. This is where rare resources come into play. Each sector will also be roughly balanced to contain a set number of valuable elements. This can be special planets like Gaia and Relic worlds, unique systems (like the tiyanki breeding ground, etc.), broken megastructures, wormholes, L-gates, Alien Enclaves (Curators, Artisans, Traders), but most importantly
rare/strategic resources.
I only started playing Stellaris about 2 years ago, long after the 2.0 rework, so I was kind of shocked to read
Pancakelord's post on how diverse the resource system actually used to be. My suggestion is to perhaps make a merge of the old and the new. Resources could be divided up in the following way:
Basic resources - made by worker jobs who extract them from planets' natural resource stores and commonly found in deposits in space:
- Food (very rare to find in space, only from anomalies).
- Minerals.
- Energy Credits.
Basically keep things as they are now, more or less.
Manufactured resources - made by specialists in refineries/districts:
- Alloys - made from minerals in industrial districts (same as now).
- Consumer Goods - made from minerals in industrial districts (same as now).
- Advanced Polymers - made from food and energy, made in refinery buildings by chemist specialist jobs.
Advanced Polymers replaces the current Exotic Gasses, Volatile Motes, and Rare Crystals as the upkeep resource for upgraded job buildings - research and unity production is now purely driven by raw resources and conversion of those into more advanced resources from refining jobs. Another goal here is to diversify a bit the basic resource economy. Right now minerals are far and above the most important resource, with food basically being worthless (the recent changes to use food for Cloning Vats and Catalytic Processing are a welcome change). Needing food for Advanced Polymers may be problematic for Robotic/Lithoid empires - but maybe that's OK? (at minimum just give them access to hydroponic farms).
Basically all these resources are the backbone of your main resource economy, and are not anything that should prevent you from expanding your colonies and developing regularly. My next suggestion is then to include a set of rare strategic resources that will be essential to promote your empire's economy to the next level. This is achieved by them being essential for your Ascension paths, required for the most powerful ship components, required for species modification and terraforming, running powerful edicts, etc:
Strategic resources - only found rarely as planetary features and deposits in space (each sector rarely has more than 1 or 2 rare resources inside of it):
- Neutronium Ore - found from neutron stars in space. Required for building the highest levels of starbases. Also a component in ship armor from lvl 3 and up. Powers an edict that improves ship hull and armor strength by a +%.
- Lythuric Gas - found from brown dwarf stars in space. Required to build planetary shield generators and a starbase shield upgrade module. Also a component of ship shields from lvl 3 and up. Powers an edict that improves ship shield strength by a +%.
- Orillium Ore - found in asteroids and planetary deposits. Required for building explosive weapons (missiles/torpedoes) above level 3. Powers an edict improving explosive weapons.
- Teldar Crystals - found in asteroids and planetary deposits. Required for building mass drivers (basic kinetic weapons) above level 3 (and any level of autocannons and launchers). Powers an edict improving kinetic weapons.
- Engos Vapor - found in asteroids and planetary deposits. Required for building lasers (basic energy weapons) above level 3 (and any level of plasma launchers and particle launchers). Powers an edict improving energy weapons.
- Garanthium ore - found in planetary deposits and in asteroids in space. Required for building and upgrading megastructures.
- Terraforming Gasses - found rarely from gas giants as space deposits. Spent to terraform planets, powers an edict that speeds up terraforming, and an edict that increases habitability (basically give the resource a use before you unlock terraforming fully).
- Living Metal - found in planetary deposits or from molten worlds deposits. Needed to convert pops to synthetics (both for the ascension event and later assimilation). Powers an edict that improves resource output from synthetic pops in all job stratas by some small +% (basically supercharges a synth ascension economy).
- Directed Evolution Virus (DEV) - found in planetary deposits or from toxic worlds deposits. Required for organic pop modification, with the traits from the biological ascension path requiring even more DEV per pop modified. Powers an edict that improves organic pop happiness and habitability.
- Zro - found in planetary deposits or from broken worlds deposits. Required to access the shroud and for all psionic ship components. Powers an edict that improves colony stability and base intel on other empires.
The motivation behind locking features like advanced ship components and Ascension paths behind resources is to force empires to expand or trade with each other. It's no longer possible to just sit in a little corner of the galaxy and then come blasting out with the best most advanced ships, empires have to compete over the map (or form good trading relationships). It also potentially forces empires to specialize their ship designs more, as you most likely do not have access to build whatever ship components you want, which stop the samey cookie cutter ship designs (probably requires a rebalance of ship weapons, admittedly)
The final tier of resources to add would be a set of rare luxury resources, that while not essential, allows an empire to excel:
Luxury resources - found in planetary deposits that only spawn on 1 planet per galaxy, from alien trader enclaves, or from killing space fauna:
- Nanites - found in the L-cluster. Enables the nanite repair ship utility component (with the regen being %-based in 3.3 this is now very attractive), a +% bonus to research edict, and a +% construction speed edict for megastructure construction.
- Satramene Gas - Unique planetary deposit. Powers an edict that reduces pop sprawl and increases governing ethics attraction.
- Pitharan Dust - Unique planetary deposit. Powers an edict that gives +% bonus to empire unity production.
- Tyrian Fluids - Unique planetary deposit. Powers an edict increasing specialist output by a +% and increase pop happiness.
- Muutagan Crystals - Bought from trader enclave (discount if within your borders). Powers an edict that gives pop happiness.
- Riggan Spice - Bought from trader enclave (discount if within your borders). Powers an edict that give +% leader experience gain and + leader level cap.
- XuraGel - Bought from trader enclave (discount if within your borders). Powers an edict that gives habitability.
- Tiyanki Oil - Gained from killing Tiyanki space whales. Powers an edict that increases organic leader lifespan by +80 years. After killing the matriach, it becomes possible to make a synthetic version that powers an edict giving +40 years leader lifespan. Empires get a positive planetary modifier if unharmed Tiyanki are within their borders to not encourage their wholesale slaughter.
These are obviously not a comprehensive list and just some ideas (there could be a long list of resource, with only some spawning per galaxy to keep each game different). Ideally each resource should be powerful enough that empires would consider going to war over controlling the system/sector that produces it, especially if the empire holding control of it is not willing to trade.
Anyway, I promised to try and summarize everything at the end (thank you if you stuck around and read it all, by the way),
here's the TLDR:
- Make pre-defined sectors on map-gen.
- Give a bonus to an empire that fully controls a sector to encourage sensible galactic borders.
- Populate these sectors with special resources that are more or less needed to power an advanced economy to make them unique and encourage expansion, despite the sprawl penalty.
- Rare resources limit an empires defensive/offensive capabilities. This is done to encourage empires to compete more over specific territory and its resources, and to empower galactic trade among empires (not all resources will be useful for all empires).
- Luxury resources can be found on rare unique planets in the galaxy, giving the owning empire a big economic advantage from selling this resource (or just consuming it themselves).
Addendum:
I should probably also add, it will likely be required to implement some kind of trade interface, where the player can quickly see which empire has which resources, and can directly initiate a trade from that screen. Otherwise hunting down who exactly has what resource you need at the time will be unbearable. Likewise the resource names potentially need to be renamed to keep them more distinct from each other, otherwise you're probably not going to remember which kind of crystal does what and which one is it exactly I need, etc.
Edit 06/02/22:
Simplified manufactured resources by consolidating Exotic Gasses, Volatile Motes, and Rare Crystals into one advanced manufactured resource, "Advanced Polymers", which powers upgraded job buildings instead of the three distinct resources.
