Mineral Generation

[Blogaugis]

TN minerals condense in gravity wells - how about a late tech techline to construct Dyson Spheres? They could become TN collectors - and with a construction cost of 35.000.000 Duranium , 55.000.000 Neutronium and 19.000.000 Corbomite - they come as cheap as it gets and produce infinite renewable TN minerals 

The endgame tech. Heh.
I approve.
Coupled with the storage facility rules, this also can be extra-hard to achieve.

Also, to add a bit to the storage facilities - what happens if it is destroyed, and You have too many resources on the body? They return to the body as minable elements - so in order to get them back, rebuild storage facility/cargo ship in orbit and put mines or automines.

[ArcWolf]

TN minerals condense in gravity wells - how about a late tech techline to construct Dyson Spheres? They could become TN collectors - and with a construction cost of 35.000.000 Duranium , 55.000.000 Neutronium and 19.000.000 Corbomite - they come as cheap as it gets and produce infinite renewable TN minerals 

Ohh, maybe something like star-lifting, the Denser the star the better? Though i would not say "infinite renewable" but more of "We found another large pocket of minerals"

 Of course if you want to go with infinite renewability, make it a new tech line with increasing "production" (for lack of better words) like how mining currently works. The first level will give you a set amount per year, say 50K for simplicity, the next level increases it by 5% and so on.

[RougeNPS]

Steve's Design philosophy kinda goes against anything being "Infinite" because it doesnt drive expansion anymore then.

I prefer the Star Lifter idea if im being honest and i think it fits.

My proposal: Have three new techs. 1 is a solar survey to find stars with TN materials.  2 is the Star Lifting module itself. 3 is the module's efficiency/production tech. Make it a late game tech. Say they have very high accessibility but very low yield of certain things. Its just a steady stream of some of the rarer materials. Make them generate with a substantial amount but not infinite.

They could function like Orbital Miners only for Stars. This would give Stars a purpose and make Binary systems far more interesting to have control over. Imagine what could result from you fighting over a Binary system with an NPR because one of the Stars has a material you need in high amounts.

You could also have a fourth tech now that i think about it. One that is for the different kinds of stars, meaning you have to make different modules for different kinds of stars.

[Blogaugis]

Steve's Design philosophy kinda goes against anything being "Infinite" because it doesnt drive expansion anymore then.

Which I agree with on the first galnce, but it does not work in reverse:
since you cannot regain all the elements used when scrapping ships/structures, I have to argue that this design philosophy is flawed or otherwise incomplete.

I wouldn't mind not getting all the wealth back - it is a renewable resource, to a certain extent (population as well).
But, I DO MIND when I lose non-renewable resources, without a way to get them back!


Back to that infinite... not all players even want to expand indefinitely - so why force this on us all?
I mean, sure, generally empires can only exist when they are expanding and acquiring new resources, and once they stop, they enter the start of collapse phase.

We don't really have any idea of how ecologically and environmentally (un)friendly the TN element mining and exploitation efforts are, I guess for most of the players the environment issues are at the bottom of their priority list, but we're dealing with a simulation here, and environment is important.


Lastly, even if the resources are made renewable, you can still make that you gain them in so little amounts, that you have to expand regardless, since the amount you acquire via renewable means are next to irrelevant. So, I believe you can still have both.

[RougeNPS]

Honestly most games lag to a halt before getting to the point when you run out of resources in all the systems you have surveyed so its not exactly a problem persay.

[Blogaugis]

Honestly most games lag to a halt before getting to the point when you run out of resources in all the systems you have surveyed so its not exactly a problem persay.

Most, but not all.
Besides, I prefer to at least have a safe assumption, that everything will work out until year 9000.

So this lack of an even sign in the resources management gets on my nerves... 

Also, indirectly, it can be seen as a bit of an insult - what a terrible game, that can't even run for a thousand years! 

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I have no plans to introduce renewable resources, beyond the amount returned via the existing scrapping functions, because finding new resources is one of the drivers for expansion. If anyone desperately wants full environmentally-friendly resource recovery, they can always SM the minerals.

Besides, if you don't find resource management to be fun, then you picked the wrong game

[RougeNPS]

I mean my idea for how i think the Star Lifter idea should function isnt related to renewable materials.

I just like the idea of a late game mining tech.

[Blogaugis]

I have no plans to introduce renewable resources, beyond the amount returned via the existing scraping functions, because finding new resources is one of the drivers for expansion. If anyone desperately wants full environmentally-friendly resource recovery, they can always SM the minerals.

Besides, if you don't find resource management to be fun, then you picked the wrong game

I do find it fun... though, could You elaborate, on what is resource management, from Your point of view?
I understand resource management as deciding where to put your limited resources for the highest efficiency.

And these limits, where you don't get back resources, work rather discouragingly on me - if you think you might want to build something, and that something costs limited resources AND you can't get 100% them back if you change your mind after building - I end up not building anything, and just save resources, until I 100% need them. 

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

And these limits, where you don't get back resources, work rather discouragingly on me - if you think you might want to build something, and that something costs limited resources AND you can't get 100% them back if you change your mind after building - I end up not building anything, and just save resources, until I 100% need them. 

Unfortunately, that strategy means that by the time you realise you '100% need them', it is generally too late to build them. At some point, you will need to spend those limited and non-renewable resources on something you might need, rather than something you definitely need, or risk being left defenceless when hostile aliens turn up. If you could simply reverse that decision at any point and convert the result back into resources with no loss, then it wasn't really a decision in the first place.

[ArcWolf]

Well, forgetting the "Renewable", what do you think of star lifting? A mid to late game tech that would be akin to a cross between sorium harvesting and orbital mining?

Stars generate with minerals based on the Steller class. A brown dwarf would have near enough to 0 while a white dwarf or neutron star would have the most. No accessibility, each star lifting module would have a set yearly production rate that can be increased through research(say starting at 200/year) & each module would be large (100k tons minimum), expensive and only available on stations.

[nuclearslurpee]

As another famous 4X game developer once said, a game is a series of interesting choices.

Aurora is a 4X game, even if on the surface it is easily mistaken for a logistics simulator.    To wit, the game mechanics need to support 4X gameplay - eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. This is the core problem with adding any form of passive, renewable and thus infinite resource generation into the game, because at some point it becomes possible to build enough of this generation capacity that there is simply no motivation from the game mechanics to play the game. If I can generate infinite resources for all time, why bother with the 4 eXs? The only reason is if I am feeling bloodthirsty and want to kill something, and I can just play CoD if that's all I need out of my gaming time.

Fundamentally, Aurora is a game about resource scarcity leading to interesting stories about how different races ensure their survival. Adding renewable infinite resources detracts from that idea.

[RougeNPS]

Exactly.

Thats why the Star Lifting idea is such a good one.

As i said before, imagine you and an NPR fighting over a binary system high in resources. it would be great.

Im not a proponent of having the stars regenerate these resources. I think they should be finite.

[ArcWolf]

Exactly.

Thats why the Star Lifting idea is such a good one.

As i said before, imagine you and an NPR fighting over a binary system high in resources. it would be great.

Im not a proponent of having the stars regenerate these resources. I think they should be finite.

Agreed, my original post was not about infinite renewable resources (finite is a good thing) but about more mining options.

Currently with resource generation Venusian type planets generate with potentially 100s of Milions of Tons of .1 Accessibility minerals. We could lower the maximum resources that can generate on them, maybe up the accessibility to reflect the drop in total resources and then add those resources to Stars. Net result would be slightly higher amount of resources, slightly better accessibility on Venusian worlds, but the largest pools of resources would be in the stars requiring new tech & large infrastructure projects to extract it.

I don't know about other players, but i almost never touch Venusian worlds, the gain is seldom worth the investment, save a few cases. For example in my current campaign (where i am not in Sol, i have NPR Humans) Venus generated with 30mil Corundium @.9. That would be well worth the investment of auto-mines, but in most cases where i might even have 100mil Corundium @.1 it's just not worth it.

[Blogaugis]

If you could simply reverse that decision at any point and convert the result back into resources with no loss, then it wasn't really a decision in the first place.

You would have used the resource, that we for simplicity's sake, call time. So, I disagree with Your statement.
If converting resources into useful objects, and doing reverse would not take any time - I would agree with Your statement. As it is now - no, because these 2 operations would still take some time to accomplish. In normal game rules, 5-10 days, when construction cycle finishes 1 or 2 times - 1 for using resources in the object's construction, 2 for disassembling it and getting the resources back.

Time is a finite resource as well.