Once minerals are cleared on earth massive deindustrialization happens
. Surely you can move over into other areas, but I find it hard to keep everyone employed on earth. So I was wondering if adding an additional step for mineral refinement could "solve" this problem (by generating jobs) as well as provide additional strategic elements:
Mineral Refinement!
ATM minerals have accessibility, which leads to them being mined slower than what a mine at max level could do. The mine essentially does two steps: carve the mineral out of the ore and extract the TN mineral from the ore. This way you get 5t of minerals out of 50t of ore if the accessibility is 0.1.
How about splitting this up: the mine just mines the ore. So you get 50t of ore @0.1 accessibility. You then have to move that ore to the new "Mineral Refinement Plant" which converts the 50t or ore to 5f of mineral. So once ore on Earth is depleted you can switch your economy from mine to Refinement Plant and let the people of Earth keep on working.
You surely wouldn't build refinement plants everywhere (very labor intensive!). So you have to ship the ore to the refinement places - which become weak spots in your empire that need protection. So new strategic elements would be introduced into the game. Find enemy refinement places and hit them hard - if you can... .