Quote from: Father Tim on May 22, 2020, 07:14:02 PM

Quote from: BasileusMaximos on May 20, 2020, 03:01:09 PM

It would be cool to combine more resources with a modifier that slows research and speed. It would mean you spend a lot of time in Sol and distances remain large until the endgame. Just stuff to make space feel 'bigger' in general would be nice.

It would and it is and it's easily done by reducing the global research rate (or by restricting the number of labs per scientist -- I like to use '1') and editing the minerals on your homeworld and/or how system.

Dumping a bunch of minerals on Sol isnt the same thing. You want more minerals spread out all over the galaxy. Surely, if you're ok with your starting planet getting loaded up with resources what wrong with having the spread around?

Spread it around also benefits NPRs, which manually adding to Sol can't do.

If I were to pick at this and its mostly from an RP point of view I wish the other planets were more like Earth.  It seems unrealistic that Earth is so unique even in the Solar system.  I don't even mean that the minerals should be more abundant just more even in distribution, for instance I would like it if Mars, Venus, Mercury etc. always had all 11 minerals the quantities could be greater or smaller even just a few hundred of something. 

Then turn on SpaceMaster, go to the System View window, select Mercury (or Venus, or wherever) and click the "Add HW Minerals" button to give the selected body all eleven trans-newtonian elements in small(ish) amounts and reasonable accessabilities.

A global modifier for how common survey potential is would also be very nice.

You could get by with a relatively small subset of minerals I think.

If I were to pick at this and its mostly from an RP point of view I wish the other planets were more like Earth.  It seems unrealistic that Earth is so unique even in the Solar system.  I don't even mean that the minerals should be more abundant just more even in distribution, for instance I would like it if Mars, Venus, Mercury etc. always had all 11 minerals the quantities could be greater or smaller even just a few hundred of something. 

For me this would make Steve's TN lore more realistic as all the planets would accumulate some of all the elements and it wouldn't even be necessary to have the ultra huge deposits of something like we have now, you could still have some pretty big ones just not the excessive you're set forever that some of the planets seem to have now.  I am also cool with only sorium being available on gas giants, my thinking would be that the other minerals are actually there just completely beyond reach due to the nature of the body.  As an aside that could make for an interesting expansion of the mining mechanic with special Geo Survey equipment and mines necessary to extract the other minerals from the gas giants.

I second having a more even distribution of minerals similar to Earths.

I'd make it so planets have all the minerals most of the time and are relatively abundant but are harder to access. Asteroids should only have 1 or 2 minerals but are far more accessible.

Sorium, which I always interpreted as Hydrogen, should be in extreme abundance on gas gaints with there only be trace amounts anywhere else with awful accessibility. To compensate, the Conventional engine tech you get at the start of a Conventional Start should be 'refueled' automatically from conventional rocket-fuel that isn't represented in the game and is functionally limitless. Its not like you're going to be using those engines longer than you have to anyways, just long enough to pull your first gas station to Jupiter.

It would be cool to combine more resources with a modifier that slows research and speed. It would mean you spend a lot of time in Sol and distances remain large until the endgame. Just stuff to make space feel 'bigger' in general would be nice.

If mineral generation [is] effected everywhere then it wouldn't be unbalanced.

Except it's also random everywhere.  There's no guarantee anyone's home system will have a gas giant with millions of tons of Sorium, and the difference between having one and not having one is huge.

If you have plenty of minerals in your starting system then so does the other guy and the difference would be who expands more quickly.

Difficulty would remain the same but you'd have more of a margin of error to do new things, experiment, and fail which is important in a game like this.

Except you are not guaranteed 'plenty of minerals' -- and the possibilty of a superabundance of one or two has massive implications for expansion.  C# Aurora now features NPR AI with the philosophy of "explore everywhere, as fast as practicable" and "only explore new systems when one or more minerals run low."

I would counter that your margin for error is overshadowed by randomness.  The problem is akin to the folks who insisted that wealth generation was easy & limitelss and building Infrastructure was foolish. . . because they always played Sol starts and colonized Luna and subsidized shipping lines and sat back and watched the money roll in and the free Infrastructure materialize by the thousand.  Those of us playing conventional starts in random systems had a very different experience.

I am very concerned that any 'universal mineral abundance modifier' would have significant -- possibly catastrophic -- effects on NPR AI & behaviour.  Remember the VB Aurora 'difficulty modifier' for NPRs.

Huge pop games can eat through minerals like crazy with proper tech (my CP is idle 99% of the time due to resource bottleneck). So a global resource % modifier would be awesome, we have Earth now, which I find nice, but way less important (other than RP reasons).