Frankly, given how the system now supports the notion, you should probably have at least 1 STO weapon on every colony along with a small force of infantry, just to force enemy invasion groups to invest a little rather than just showing up, flipping the colony, and leaving.

I'm reading (with delight) the campaign and I'm to the point where Taranis fell.

It has perhaps been discussed in one of the 156 messages of this thread, but somehow I don't feel like backtracking into all of them, sorry 

So the question is. Why the Empire has no STOs on each major colonies? That's bordering criminal! Plus, with STOs, you add entrenched troops. It should be part of the budget when setting up a colony. You should not just spread like a kind of mold on every habitable or near habitable planet and not defend it.

Is it because the price to defend the colony far out weight their importance? Is it criminal negligence and the culprits must be punished? The Emperor can't be liable to anything, so the fault are on the governors or sector administrators! 

There were STOs on some colonies, just not that one. I intended to fix that for the future, especially now I have particle lances available.

Refactoring mining from 'full mining rating, all materials, multiply by availability' to 'total mining potential, weighted share of minerals by availability', which would produce 10 times as much of a 1.0 mineral over a 0.1 availability mineral, or 'total mining potential, weighted share of minerals by availability, fractional loss of potential according to total of ((number of minerals)-(sum of availability))', which would make body with a small number of high availability minerals very valuable over a planet with one or two high availability minerals and low availability on the others because the mining potential loss fraction is so much lower.

Although in that case you want the ability to focus efforts on mining a certain mineral as a planetary/colony policy, or a technology that lets you lower the availability penalty.

All of these would pretty majorly impact the economic of the game though.


This post will also be posted in the C# suggestions thread.

Great campaign going on here, Steve, and I'd love for it to prosper. But I'm not sure it will. A major issue I'm seeing it coming up hard against is Gallicite.

Gallicite has always been critical in Aurora. Can't fire missiles or close to beam range without it. As determined by Steve, and represented in the revised supply costs, you need very roughly as much Gallicite to build typical warships as you do Duranium. So, now the Empire also needs bunches of Gallicite merely to maintain a fleet.

We're not just running into a issue for a specific run, but rather into some long-standing game design features.

1. Gallicite is no more common than other TN materials, Duranium excepted. More generally, supply and demand of TN materials has always been at least somewhat out of wack. Gallicite is systematically the worst offender, followed by Duranium.

2. Mines produce a set amount per TN material, and don't specialize. A world with abundant, high-accessibility reserves might well be worthless if it doesn't also have sufficient reserves of other TN materials of interest. I have always felt, and here again propose, that this is a major misfeature hurting the game in multiple ways.

3. Mining and transport doesn't produce and move materials based on need. The mines produce some of whatever's available and - barring explicit (manual) orders, the game doesn't attempt to first satisfy current and near-term consumption before toting all that excess Boronide around.

4. Civilians don't pick up the slack enough for most TN materials. They need to be heading out, especially to small bodies too tedious for official miners to mess with and digging their little hearts out, - getting paid by (a little bit of) Wealth. Right now, they're all about the Duranium and Sorium, and not laser-focused on whatever's most needed and lacking - and therefore profitable. Conversely, if an empire has abundance, prices paid to civilian miners should automatically drop and their efforts should diminish.

Is that smaller sized fuel tanks I spy on those fighters?

Great update, and good to see the FAC strike being held off. I have to say the level of collateral damage on ground assaults is still feeling high to me. If most of the population and the facilities are getting destroyed it really removes a lot of the incentive to launch ground attacks.

Yes, thanks for the update! 

The Imperium also seems to be in a pretty major mineral crunch, not just availability (eg gallicite) but also distance - the good mining sites are far away from the industrial center.  This wouldn't be as much of a problem if certain aliens didn't now have the desire to show up and piss in your collective Cheerios whenever they feel like it!  Really liking that change btw!

How are you liking the particle lances as a beam weapon?  The slow cycling must be rough, but being able to icepick into enemy ships' creamy centers must feel pretty good when they do hit!

(btw I'm assuming this in the Firestorm IV description:

Valentinian Precision Armaments V12-240 Particle Lance (1)    Range 64,000km     TS: 5,333 km/s     Power 37-5    ROF 40       

is a typo)