Resource Storage: the solution to many problems?

[DavetheGreat]

So one of the biggest flaws (imo) is that in this game losing a planet means nothing. I was thinking one day and an idea came up, and I thought I'd share it.

Right now when you get minerals and energy, they instantly go to some imaginary bank. If you have 10k minerals and lose all of your planets except 1, you still have 10k minerals. Planets create income, but if you were to try and find where all the income is going it doesn't actually exist.

What if it did? What if you had to build mineral and energy silos on your planets as your economy grows? What if losing the planets holding them meant losing those mineral and energy reserves until you took it back?

Suddenly planning what you build on world's and how you protect them becomes very very important. Maybe you build all your silos on a few core world's so you can easily guard them? Or maybe you do the opposite, spreading storage everywhere so the loss of a planet has minimal impact.

Defense armies stations and planetary shields now have a purpose - helping to guard your "bank" worlds to buy time for the fleet to arrive.

I think it would be a very simple change that would totally alter the game, esp war. Now occupied planets would shrink your enemy's economy until they were retaken. A clever conquest could starve his fleet of maintenance before he can bring it to defend.

Trading minerals for energy so your doomstack can keep rolling through my system? Better make it quick, you have 1/2 your mineral silos on one planet and my gene warriors just landed.

When Paradoxs decides to implement trade? Now we have a way to measure a world's wealth.

25 tile planets can now become massive vaults for interstellar empires.

Building tall could mean building your storage in space.

I can think of loads of other examples of things that would be completely altered by this one fundamental change that makes the game a little more realistic.

Thoughts?

 

[DavetheGreat]

Bump

 

[Lothmar]

I mean there already is a mineral silos, you used to be able to spam them and i'd make a tomb world storage depot that raised my cap by 50k but now with only one per planet, yeah i feel this.

Admittedly I would love a power grid/reserve system that worked the same, I hate having like a triple digit K mineral cap but only a 10k energy cap.

 

[DavetheGreat]

I think you misunderstand what I mean. We've always had mineral silos to add some to our cap, but that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about every mineral and every energy has to exist on a planet somewhere, and if that planet is lost you lose the resources kept on that planet.

 

[krios41]

So one of the biggest flaws (imo) is that in this game losing a planet means nothing

ofcourse!
what is losing one planet if you have hundreds of them anyway. <- obvious exageration is obvious
It's like losing a penny...

Unles you're a poor sod who only has a penny... then losing that penny is desastrous

 

[terrycloth]

So one of the biggest flaws (imo) is that in this game losing a planet means nothing. I was thinking one day and an idea came up, and I thought I'd share it.

Right now when you get minerals and energy, they instantly go to some imaginary bank. If you have 10k minerals and lose all of your planets except 1, you still have 10k minerals. Planets create income, but if you were to try and find where all the income is going it doesn't actually exist.

What if it did? What if you had to build mineral and energy silos on your planets as your economy grows? What if losing the planets holding them meant losing those mineral and energy reserves until you took it back?

Suddenly planning what you build on world's and how you protect them becomes very very important. Maybe you build all your silos on a few core world's so you can easily guard them? Or maybe you do the opposite, spreading storage everywhere so the loss of a planet has minimal impact.

Defense armies stations and planetary shields now have a purpose - helping to guard your "bank" worlds to buy time for the fleet to arrive.

I think it would be a very simple change that would totally alter the game, esp war. Now occupied planets would shrink your enemy's economy until they were retaken. A clever conquest could starve his fleet of maintenance before he can bring it to defend.

Trading minerals for energy so your doomstack can keep rolling through my system? Better make it quick, you have 1/2 your mineral silos on one planet and my gene warriors just landed.

When Paradoxs decides to implement trade? Now we have a way to measure a world's wealth.

25 tile planets can now become massive vaults for interstellar empires.

Building tall could mean building your storage in space.

I can think of loads of other examples of things that would be completely altered by this one fundamental change that makes the game a little more realistic.

Thoughts?

I'd rather keep it abstract, but having a successful invasion steal minerals and energy from your empire stores (to represent what happened to be on the planet at the time) would be reasonable.

Like, for each planet take pops+power output for energy and pops+mineral output for minerals, and divide by pops+power income and pops+mineral income for the entire empire, and that's the percentage of your stores you lose of each if that planet is taken.

You could have a similar calculation (with pops = 0) give a small raiding bonus for taking out mining stations.

 

[DavetheGreat]

Like, for each planet take pops+power output for energy and pops+mineral output for minerals, and divide by pops+power income and pops+mineral income for the entire empire, and that's the percentage of your stores you lose of each if that planet is taken.

That system takes control of where resources are away from the player, removing the choice - and with it any strategy - the playerror might make.

Being able to store most of your goods on a fortress world is a large part of the appeal.

 

[terrycloth]

That system takes control of where resources are away from the player, removing the choice - and with it any strategy - the playerror might make.

Being able to store most of your goods on a fortress world is a large part of the appeal.

If you can just hide your resources it takes away a lot of the strategy because you can just ignore the enemy invasion again.

 

[Makiavellist]

If you can just hide your resources it takes away a lot of the strategy because you can just ignore the enemy invasion again.

This is why the game seriously need espionage and/or recon system. Even implementation of stealth ships/modules can greatly improve this aspect.

 

[Legendsmith]

I totally agree with this. I think resources need to exist somewhere. At the moment, they just exist in a mystical galactic stockpile that is inaccessible to your enemies. I've already thought on this a little bit.

Espionage and or recon isn't necessary for this, just some method of deciding how much of an empire's economy is accessible from a certain planet. For a theory I'll say that the percentage of production that a planet contributes to an empire's monthly production is also the amount of the stockpile that is stored there; so if a planet supplies 20% of an empire's mineral income, then 20% of the stockpile "exists" there. This is then modified by the actual mineral storage silos; those should be filled 'first.'

If an enemy captures that planet, they also capture 20% of those minerals. I don't think they should be all stolen or destroyed, that could be too crippling, especially to smaller empires. Instead they should simply become inaccessible. The occupying armies are preventing the use of the minerals in storage as well as denying additional income. When the planet is recaptured the minerals are regained.
A similar system can exist for energy credits too, perhaps, and even more terrifyingly, food.

However, as good as this all is, it's still not enough to prevent doomstacks, or encourage this, since recapturing the planets still reverts things to business as usual. A portion of the minerals could be stolen or destroyed. I'm not sure how much. It could be half, and then with tech that could be increased. The problem I can then see is that what happens when a planet is captured, reclaimed, and captured again? Can you destroy another 10%, or is it only once per planet?
Maybe there should be a cooldown on it so there's no incentive to bounce planets, but there's still incentive for a defender to protect a planet again once it's been reclaimed once.

I think this has potential to be great. Protecting your resources, protecting your industrial centres, that's what happens in wars in the real world. If you've been managing your food supply really well so you've got only a small buffer, and have a few 'farm worlds,' those can create a weak point, a high value target for an enemy to exploit. That makes the game interesting! What if they take that planet, burn the crops, and smash the silos? You can't let them.

I still don't think this enough to stop ubiquitous doomstacks, but it would be a gigantic leap along the path to doing so.

 

[s4098429]

So one of the biggest flaws (imo) is that in this game losing a planet means nothing. I was thinking one day and an idea came up, and I thought I'd share it.

Right now when you get minerals and energy, they instantly go to some imaginary bank. If you have 10k minerals and lose all of your planets except 1, you still have 10k minerals. Planets create income, but if you were to try and find where all the income is going it doesn't actually exist.

What if it did? What if you had to build mineral and energy silos on your planets as your economy grows? What if losing the planets holding them meant losing those mineral and energy reserves until you took it back?

Suddenly planning what you build on world's and how you protect them becomes very very important. Maybe you build all your silos on a few core world's so you can easily guard them? Or maybe you do the opposite, spreading storage everywhere so the loss of a planet has minimal impact.

Defense armies stations and planetary shields now have a purpose - helping to guard your "bank" worlds to buy time for the fleet to arrive.

I think it would be a very simple change that would totally alter the game, esp war. Now occupied planets would shrink your enemy's economy until they were retaken. A clever conquest could starve his fleet of maintenance before he can bring it to defend.

Trading minerals for energy so your doomstack can keep rolling through my system? Better make it quick, you have 1/2 your mineral silos on one planet and my gene warriors just landed.

When Paradoxs decides to implement trade? Now we have a way to measure a world's wealth.

25 tile planets can now become massive vaults for interstellar empires.

Building tall could mean building your storage in space.

I can think of loads of other examples of things that would be completely altered by this one fundamental change that makes the game a little more realistic.

Thoughts?

Great Idea!

Simple things like this are what makes a game compelling and fun.

So many suggestions to various problems involve adding obscure multipliers. Games should be fun and intuitive, not a study in arithmetic.

 

[Ingros]

I still want full local stash... i dont like this magical availability of resources anywhere in your empire... it takes fleet several month to fly from one side to the other but thr minerals are can be used anywhere
With local stash the proposed system above would even make more sense... take a rich planet drop not only troops but get your freighters also to pick up the goods and bring them to your fleetbuilding starport

Btw. Setting a queue to build even if you dont have the minerals yet would be nice also...

 

[osvil]

And what about taking those stashed minerals/energy when conquering (occupy) the planet? Have orbital bombardment make those resources unavailable (blockade). Resources could even be destroyed by bombardment.

 

[erneiz_hyde]

Suddenly I am envisioning an Anno game on a galaxy-wide scale. Maybe in the future.

As for this particular topic. I think such level of complexity would just plain break the game because AI will obviously fuck it up. They can't even manage their resources properly in the current version.

 

[DavetheGreat]

Suddenly I am envisioning an Anno game on a galaxy-wide scale. Maybe in the future.

As for this particular topic. I think such level of complexity would just plain break the game because AI will obviously fuck it up. They can't even manage their resources properly in the current version.

I think it would help the Ai, it would give the computer an easy way to figure out what planets are important and what one's aren't.

The only way to know for sure would be to try it, which I would love to, but a modder would have rewrite AI behaviour and all sorts of stuff, which would take a LOT of work.

 

[Slapstick83]

I actually think the game would be more interesting if minerals were stored as an item on the planet that mined it, and you needed to ship it around to your spaceports for building your ships. However you should be able to funnel some of the minerals to "infrastructure budgets" for buildings and stations and not have to worry about local availability. Add a game option for planets to have a finite amount of minerals extractable, with a high variance factor between planets. Some will have lots, some little.

Then supply lines would be important war targets, or even sabotage targets. Worlds who do the ship construction would be incredibly important targets because you would a) hamper their productive capability enormously, and b) gain a ton of resources you need yourself. Defensive targets are then clear. If you play with "finite resources" on, certain planets will be worth fighting over because they hold massive mineral deposits. Maybe developing robots and settling that 20% habitability planet is a must because you're mineral starved. A war of attrition will at some point end, because someone will run out of minerals. Trade becomes really important. A mid/late game tech for a slow energy->minerals conversion could allow stagnated empires to keep a fleet presence, but losing it will be dangerous.

I know it won't happen now that the game mechanics are all set in stone, but I still have fingers crossed for a mod being able to add this at some point.

 

[CocoCincinnati]

It's an interesting idea but I see three problems. First, it makes it harder to play tall, even if you introduce storage space stations that you can build around planets, then the wide empire will do that too and always have a huge resource advantage.
Secondly, it would make that initial fleet engagement even more decisive. Right now, the winner of the first doomstack battle basically wins the war, but the loser can start rebuilding in the hopes that the enemy doesn't finish them off before they can put some semblance of a fleet back together. If you start losing large stacks of your already produced mineral and energy resources during this phase it makes it even harder to rebuild. And a smart enemy will simply split their fleet at that point and destroy as many space storage stations as possible and then start taking planets making the problem even worse. Even after the war, the loser is going to be easy pickings for other empires while they have to recreate their storage before they can recreate their fleet.
And third, it could really cause a problem for the AI, both your enemy and your sectors. I just think a human player could really take advantage of the AI in wars in a way that the AI would never be able to duplicate. And you think people are upset with sectors now, just wait until somebody loses 4000 already mined minerals overnight because the sector governor wanted a symbol of unity on that tile.

I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of abstract system put in place that could reduce the stockpile somewhat, or at the very least give a penalty to the income (or both). Whether that be blockades or strategic bombing or espionage missions or anything else you can think of. Even with this though, if the AI can't use it, then it won't be a good change. (or if the AI can use it too well, that would also not be good.)

 

[Derp]

this is a dumb idea tbqh

if I actually need the resources I'm spending them long before they can pile up to sizable quantities
if they actually are piling up I don't need them and won't miss them

 

[Legendsmith]

@Derp Someone stealing some of the accrued minerals for your next battleship, as well as disabling or stealing some mineral production doesn't matter? I can't see how that could possibly be the case.

 

[Tokolosk]

Love the idea! It also has potential for so many additional features linked to this.