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Should Tier 2 Production Buildings Not Require Strategic Resources?
- Thread starter Amorenkaire
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All buildings which have energy upkeep already do convert energy to other things.
Lol. Fair enough.
I've never considered upkeep as conversion, considering the building or sector could do absolutely nothing, yet still cost you the same.
Think of it as the building converting "resource X and energy to resource Y".
Consuming 1 strategic resource is an overkill. It means I must have a separate planet for mote\crystal\gas production ONLY
The technology randomness is an issue, but otherwise I can live with how it is. Maybe it's not perfectly balanced, but whatever. My goal isn't to instantly swim in all sorts of resources. There's some minor annoyances - like I check how many +x rare resources I have, then go through my planets one by one and upgrade and build new resource production as needed, but as these things take time to upgrade and build and have workers, I can't instantly track the change and with lots of planets and lots of upgrades it gets a bit easy to not know whether you still can upgrade 1 more or not - so I usually err on the side of a little bit of caution.
Even if I could just buy it from the market. And -1 is not going to run me dry anyway with those huge stockpiles. But whatever; nobody likes red, negative numbers. ^^
Even if I could just buy it from the market. And -1 is not going to run me dry anyway with those huge stockpiles. But whatever; nobody likes red, negative numbers. ^^
This has not been fixed in the beta as of yesterday evening
The problem isn't that you get the mining tech before the synthesize tech. the problem is that the tech chain goes: Building upgrade (eg: T2 lab) > mining / synthesize. You research the labs, only to find you have to wait an arbitrary amount of time to actually be able to use the damn T2 building since there is no possible way to build the upgrade.
This is also why the calls of removing the T2 upkeep make sense: the tech system is inherently random, and there is no other mechanic in the game that relies on tech from multiple chains to pop up in the right order to get going (the only possible exception to this would be mega engineering, but that's so far down the tree that if you really want it there are plenty of rolls for it, and you're usually playing a science focused empire).
So, Either they need to fix the tech (maybe make the mining and synthesize techs baseline? moves "rare" from "unknown" to "difficult to acquire") or remove the T2 upkeep and increase the energy costs to compensate.
I think T2 buildings should use strategic resources, as you'd have the same issues as before and run around upgrading all of your buildings after researching a T2 tech if that weren't the case. I think T1 buildings should provide a few more jobs though. I need to build a civilian industry on every single world I colonise at the start of the game. That may need a bit of tweaking.
I don't agree. You'd upgrade your buildings to T2 as needed, since they eat into your mineral / CG income quite harshly. You also need enough pops for the jobs that are created, which you won't have in the early game, so choice is still there.
A partial solution might be to artificially create jobs, by marking a building to offer e.g. +50% jobs while giving only 10% more output. It could be a planet decision where the government "just wants to keep people busy". Then again, there are already clerk jobs for that, so I don't know.
You can't mine strategic resources in space until you have the tech to mine them.
But yeah I think the order of seeing techs should probably be: techs to mine these resources, techs that make buildings that use them, techs to synthesize these resources
You are meant to produce most of your basic Strategic Resources I think. The few you find is just a little help if you are lucky to find some (the same way you can be lucky in other ways too, like finding rich mineral systems, good planets or ruined megastructures).
You are meant to have a good working basic economy before starting to use advanced buildings at a huger scale. This works very well for the game as far as I can see, after playing lots of games now after release. One just have to change ones mindset from earlier versions where upgrading buildings was almost a non-brainer choice.
I admit I had to play a few games before I understood this myself.
Tip: The Merchant "Curators" now sell strategic ressources on a per month basis. Another way to be "Lucky" is to meet one of these rather early.
You are meant to have a good working basic economy before starting to use advanced buildings at a huger scale. This works very well for the game as far as I can see, after playing lots of games now after release. One just have to change ones mindset from earlier versions where upgrading buildings was almost a non-brainer choice.
I admit I had to play a few games before I understood this myself.
Tip: The Merchant "Curators" now sell strategic ressources on a per month basis. Another way to be "Lucky" is to meet one of these rather early.
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The tech order of strategic resources is really messed up. You can not trade strategic resources until any of the techs let you actually get them first. There's no point in unlocking a building which requires a resource that doesn't yet exist.
Luck should not play a part in the basic economic functions of your empire. You should be able to get a working economy going without being baffled by design choices like we are currently. It's just super counter intuitive that you're supposed to produce most of these "rare" resources, but then don't get that tech until way too late into the game
I don't get how it's counter-intuitive. "I don't have this resource so I'm not going to build anything that uses it" seems about as basic as any 4X game gets. This is nothing like figuring out which fuel your fleet needs in Distant Universe or whatever ^^
"I know from this research how to build this upgrade to my nanoforges, given that I have a material that I might not have seen, might not know exists, and have totally no idea how to mine, refine, and use"
That's like saying I know how to solve all of earths energy problems if I can just harness unobtanium (from the Avatar movie) in a desk sized power plant. While technically true, it also doesn't have any value whatsoever as a "scientific" breakthrough.
This is what the current research order actually "says" in the game. That is what makes it so counter intuitive. It's not a "I don't have X so I can't use X" like running low on CG or something
Yesyes, the tech dependencies could be improved, but that's not the same as saying that you shouldn't have to produce these resources as a basic part of your economy. It's no different from converting minerals to alloys for military use, as you convert them to other uses to improve research (indirectly, by enabling more research jobs) or whatever you are using them for.
so, either improve the tech dependencies (which is really hard to do with a random tech system like this unless you put a hard lockout on T2 tech until you research mining / synthesize tech), or remove the rare resource dependencies on T2 buildings, thus ensuring enough shuffles of the tech deck that you'll get the mine / synthesize tech before you get T3 structures.
I personally think the latter option would make for a less frustrating game all around, since there's no chance you get shafted by RNG
I personally think the latter option would make for a less frustrating game all around, since there's no chance you get shafted by RNG
The RNG research system already has existing mechanics to fix the tech problem. It's obvious that the strategic harvesting cards are a bit too rare and the cards which demand resources you don't have are a bit too common. Adjusting the weights will definitely smooth things out.
I find it really weird that i can learn building upgrades that require rare resources before i've learnt how to collect the rare resources........just seems so backwards.
We do that today already. We imagine things we could do with, say, room-temperature superconductors, and then try to find a way to make some.