Should specialized Strategic Resources be more useful?

[The Exile]

I generally quite like the strictures of needing the three main strategic resources in ship components and advanced buildings; it makes these resources feel more tangible and, well, strategic. However the late-game, more specialized SRs don't seem correspondingly more powerful and valuable but, well, sort of under-utilized. It just feels weird to have at long last tapped a powerful new substance, which will now... simply accumulate in storage.

I'm talking here specifically about Zro, Dark Matter, and Living Metal. Now, maybe I just don't have enough experience with them in their 2.2 forms (ie, stripped of their static bonuses) and their roles make perfect sense to others; I'm genuinely curious here.

• I often find a lot of Dark Matter in particular. I can sell it, sure (to FEs, I guess?) -- but it seems like until I get to dark matter tech I ought to have some use for it. It used to passively buff physics research; why not at least have an edict to that effect that uses it?

• Living Metal otoh apparently only exists for a mega-structures edict. Why isn't it used in some crazy new ship components (perhaps researched separately, with LM as a prerequisite)?

• Zro is genuinely super-rare (maybe the only one actually worth going to war over!) but useless unless you go psionic; even granting that threshold, shouldn't there be more a psionic society could find to do with it than a single ship component that can take a while to get? An edict maybe, to reduce your "mustering psionic strength" downtime or something?

And there are no unique buildings or starbase modules that do something with any of these resources? Nanites, at least, have a unique building and ship component, so you can pretty much always be doing something with them.

Anyway, just curious what people think.

 

[Masoz]

Of all them, only Living Metal is of any real consequence to most normal empires, and only if you are going for megastructures. Dark matter tech comes too late to matter. By the time the timer for awakened empires starts ticking on default settings, you are counting down to victory.

I must admit I was pretty underwhelmed by the late game strategics myself. I thought we'd be using dark matter for those tier 3 research buildings, not more gases.