Rebalance Strategic Resources

[methegrate]

I love the new strategic resources, as well as the basic implementation.

However I've found that in my games they aren't ever a practical limitation. Once I research the synthesizer technologies I'm pretty quickly swimming in them. In my last game I replaced all of my generator districts because by mid-game I could just fund my empire by periodically selling motes and crystals.

This also makes resources on the map kind of unimportant. My refinery world cranks out so many crystals that the relevant edicts are permanently on and I still have 2,300 in storage so...

I suggest keeping strategic resources exactly as they are, but rebalancing them in the following ways:

- Make synthesizing them much more expensive. Honestly I would suggest by an order of magnitude. This would make them rare again and would make finding a patch of resources on the map a big deal.

- Use them in earlier generation technologies and weapons. Linking strategic resources to advanced technology is terrific, but it takes too long for them to become relevant on ships. It isn't a factor until relatively late in the game.

Instead, strategic resources should be necessary for advanced technology by the third (or even second) generation of components. This would help create early distinctions between empires.

- Make ship components more expensive, or include strategic resources in the upkeep cost.

The costs are great, but they're trivial. Even if I don't have a supply of exotic gases I can easily buy enough from the market to pay the 1 unit cost per ship for building advanced shields. Costs should be raised and balanced with production so that this is a real bottleneck.

Again, I really do love the new system. I just think it needs to be balanced around scarcity so that getting access to a resource, and which resources you can access, is a big deal.

 

[Volapyk]

Eh making them both so expensive that pretty much no one can afford to synthezise them and making them a must to build anything beyond lvl 2 components sounds like a terrible idea to me. It will mean either you luck out and find good deposists of them, or your millitary will never advance beyond using level 2 components.

If you want to make them more valuable/rare perhaps one should look towards making building slots more valuable instead, so you don't have room to just spam the syntheziser buildings.

 

[methegrate]

Eh making them both so expensive that pretty much no one can afford to synthezise them and making them a must to build anything beyond lvl 2 components sounds like a terrible idea to me. It will mean either you luck out and find good deposists of them, or your millitary will never advance beyond using level 2 components.

If you want to make them more valuable/rare perhaps one should look towards making building slots more valuable instead, so you don't have room to just spam the syntheziser buildings.

I'm not suggesting making them so rare that "no one can afford to synthesize them." But they should be rare enough that finding deposits on the map matters, and rare enough that players have to make meaningful choices about what to build and where.

In my games, I haven't had to spam refineries. Usually two or at most three produce far more than enough for an advanced empire.

Personally, I'd like it if they were expensive enough that an average empire had to choose which resources to synthesize. I think the game would be much better if you could never have everything but had to choose what to have and what to give up. Tbh, I think the same thing is true of weapons and components. I think it would be a feature, not a bug, if you had to choose which components to specialize in and which to let languish. If one empire has kick-ass missiles and armor, but sputters along at level 2 shields because that's how they invested their resources, that seems like a best case outcome to me.

And sure, some empires would luck out and get a bunch of deposits on the map. Those are the breaks. That's what keeps a game interesting. Sometimes you get a terrific starting position, sometimes you have to fight an uphill battle against a bigger, badder enemy.

 

[icon41gimp]

2 or 3 refineries produce enough for an advanced empire? I have entire worlds devoted to refining the stuff to fund the factories and labs I'm running. Each deposit you find off world is already worth when you consider the minerals, job, and building slot saved.

 

[methegrate]

2 or 3 refineries produce enough for an advanced empire? I have entire worlds devoted to refining the stuff to fund the factories and labs I'm running. Each deposit you find off world is already worth when you consider the minerals, job, and building slot saved.

That's fair, perhaps we've simple had different experiences. I have one world with two crystal buildings, two mote buildings and two gas buildings. I have one star with two crystals on it. From this, my empire has more than 1,000 of each resource.

Perhaps it's just the games I've played, but I've played two games to mid-game since the update and that's been the case both times. But if it's just my luck of the draw, maybe there's no problem to fix.

On the other hand, if my experience is more representative, I'd return to my original point. Abundance kind of defeats the point of having the strategic resources which (imho) should be to force players into making real decisions with limited resources.

That only happens when there aren't enough resources to go around though. Players should have to choose which resource to synthesize because it's too expensive to produce all of them in sufficient quantities. Otherwise it's not "what do I pick" it's "which do I do first," and that's a much less interesting decision.

 

[Roddo]

Indeed. My last game felt really unimpressive. Finding crystals and motes close by early on made me happy in my pants, that until I realized you could just spam them anyway.
They are not strategic right now, more like lvl 2 regular resources, or power ups for regular production.
In a nutshell, I wouldn't go to war with an equal power enemy over a strategic resource system alone, and that's about it.

 

[methegrate]

Indeed. My last game felt really unimpressive. Finding crystals and motes close by early on made me happy in my pants, that until I realized you could just spam them anyway.
They are not strategic right now, more like lvl 2 regular resources, or power ups for regular production.
In a nutshell, I wouldn't go to war with an equal power enemy over a strategic resource system alone, and that's about it.

That's been my experience too. They're fun power-ups, but were still in the same place where everyone can have everything. So no empire or play-through can feel distinct, because they all follow the same pattern of "get every resource, build every thing."

Spoiler

But the core idea, again, I think is great. It has tons of potential for that kind of distinction! It just needs some balancing to make sure that in any given game you can't have everything. What I would like, personally, is to see the resources rebalanced so that:

- Finding a system with strategic resources is a big deal, and potentially worth fighting over.

- Synthesized resources are prohibitively expensive in large quantities. Empires should have to choose which they want to produce in an environment where it's simply impractical, if not impossible, to spam all of them.

- Components and technology rely on resources at a much lower level, so access to resources influences strategy and decisions much earlier on.

Personally my best case scenario would be a game where one empire focuses on massive shielding tech because they had access to crystals, and another one builds small, fast ships because they decided to go all-in on synthesizing volatile motes. I'd like to see choices and an empire's entire identity driven by resources in an environment where (barring extraordinary good luck) it's all but impossible to have everything.

 

[AaronWaterhog]

I rather like the current system, personally. Before I could synthesize them, and up until I had enough minerals to do so without worry about bankrupting my empire, they felt decently rare. But eventually my empire grew up, became a powerhouse, and the previously-rare resources got shoved in every ship and every building. It felt like a good growth arc of a major space empire on its ascent.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

Honestly I was going to say almoast the oposite. Make instances on planets rarer, but when they do crop up, richer.

Right now, theres no equivelent to Arakis, to the desert planet Dune which was given over, whole economy, to the harvest of just one resorce. Nor is there ever a case where you have enough to trade if you have a large empire.

Rare, but rich planets take on a flavour of their own, like Dune, like Pandora, become places to fight over and whose posession (If the market is ever fixed to be less generous) shapes galactic history.

 

[Baqar79]

I thought it was odd that deposits you find aren't that much better than refineries; but I think one idea around making them feel a bit more valuable without making it any more difficult is to reduce the building requirements and production output by 90%.

Chemical plants would then produce 0.2 motes, but Alloy plant upgrades will cost 0.1 motes, so you shouldn't notice much change there if you are relying on refineries to power upgraded buildings.

However finding mote deposits on a planet or in a system should become a much greater deal, since 1 mote will allow you to supply 5 fully upgraded Alloy refineries, or the equivalent of 5 chemical refineries worth of production.

(On another note, I would love to have decimal control on the Market for selling rare resources...selling in integer numbers is not enough granularity if you only have a single Living metal deposit for example).