Author Topic: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them  (Read 5077 times)

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Offline Stormtrooper (OP)

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One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« on: April 04, 2021, 02:06:29 PM »
So... Aurora has 11 types of resources (plus fuel, msp and population), right?... Well... Except from my personal experience there's only one that matters. Gallicite. As you start building warfleets, you need a lot of ships with a lot of good engines, and each engine consumes a lot of gallicite, especially at higher tech. As if this wasn't bad enough, gallicite is also very important resource in missile production, and in case you somehow still had a tiny bit left after all this expenses, brace yourself, maintenance supplies incoming.

I'm fine with not every resource being equally important as having to care about all 11 of them all the time would be tiring, but I feel like the game currently is so damn heavily skewed towards gallicite and I can't stop wondering about it.

You can say that another very important resources that are consumed a lot are duranium and corundium, and that is technically right, but duranium and corundium have far better spawnrate and accessibility, so while you consume a lot, you also can get a lot easily, meanwhile gallicite has same spawnrates as the rest of minerals it seems.

After doing nothing but looking for more sources of gallicite and spamming more mines at the ones already discovered, with great sadness I turned maintenance off, but even then I was still looking pretty much exclusively at gallicite sources when colonising stuff.

I kinda don't know what I want to achieve with this post, I feel like the most interesting thing for me would be to just as you how are you all doing with it. Do you also keep looking at nothing but gallicite once you're past initial crisis that might happen depending on your homeworld minerals roll? Do you play with maintenance on or off and how do you manage having to build ships, maintain ships and on top of that build all the missiles those of you who claim "missiles op" probably need to feed mostly missile-based fleets?

I'm just wondering if it's me doing something wrong, me being unlucky with my current galaxy somehow or is it really just "gallicite is the only mineral in game"?
 

Offline kilo

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #1 on: April 04, 2021, 02:32:07 PM »
One of the largest sinks for Gallicite is missile engines. Single missiles might be cheap, but thousands of them can easily put a dent in your reserves. In the last games I played, I dit not build any missiles and Gallicite has not been a problem ever. I ran into a Corrundium, Neutronium and worker problem later, which stopped my buildup of mines and construction factories at some point. 25% growth of both is not sustainable for more than 50 years.
 

Offline Zap0

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #2 on: April 04, 2021, 02:34:14 PM »
You play a very high-tech game, and (part of) the problem is that Gallicite requirements are proportional to engine power. This makes Gallicite more important as one advances along the tech tree, as advances in engine tech allow you to cram more and more Gallicite (= engine power) in the same amount of ship. The same may also be true for other components, but it's vey noticable with engines.
A Nuclear Pulse warship that goes 3k km/s will always require exactly half the Gallicite of a Magneto-Plasma warship of the same size and engine proportions that goes 6k km/s.

It is my proposal to make the Gallicite cost of engines not directly proportional to engine power. One could make them directly proportional to component size, but then Gallicite costs would not rise between ship generations. Currently each engine tech gives around 25% more power and therefore raises costs by 25%, we could decouple Gallicite costs from engine power and make them dependent on component size instead and add a 10% premium for each engine generation instead.
 
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Offline misanthropope

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #3 on: April 04, 2021, 02:45:49 PM »
because peacetime tends to go on for decades, the drag you get from duranium mismanagement adds up to a major crisis by the time action rolls around.  but the other nine are pretty redundant.

speaking to kilo's point:  with default research speed, keeping a fleet board-meta-fast is extravagant in gallicite, and lots of missile scows work pretty well.  with low research speeds and consequently not needing to replace engines every couple years going all-beam can be highly gallicite efficient.
 

Offline Bremen

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #4 on: April 04, 2021, 02:46:23 PM »
I actually like the current scaling of gallicite, because it provides a way to shift costs to other minerals. If your fleet speed is 5000 km/s and you're short on gallicite, you could design your next generation of ships with a fleet speed of 3500 km/s, use the rest of the tonnage on other stuff like armor or guns, and you'll save on the gallicite. Or invest more heavily in defense platforms/stations that can be towed into place. Currently the "meta"/perceived best designs in Aurora are pretty engine/speed focused, so obviously gallicite tends to be a crunch point, especially when it comes to rapid military expansion.

I usually run into shortages of three minerals: Gallicite, as above, Corundium for mines, and Duranium for everything. Corundium can be somewhat worked around similar to gallicite - it's also used in energy weapons, so I tend to go railguns and gauss instead of lasers/other energy weapons, which lets me divert almost all my Corundium to building mines. Duranium, though, there's really no alternatives to duranium and it can't be worked around, which makes a duranium crunch much less fun.
 

Offline Stormtrooper (OP)

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #5 on: April 04, 2021, 03:18:05 PM »
One of the largest sinks for Gallicite is missile engines. Single missiles might be cheap, but thousands of them can easily put a dent in your reserves. In the last games I played, I dit not build any missiles and Gallicite has not been a problem ever. I ran into a Corrundium, Neutronium and worker problem later, which stopped my buildup of mines and construction factories at some point. 25% growth of both is not sustainable for more than 50 years.

Actually you pretty much confirmed my experience which is why missile ships play a role of occassional support only in my case. But if this is how things look like, then why the hell is everyone constantly talking how "op" missiles are if they require such huuuuuge resource investment?
 
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Offline Stormtrooper (OP)

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #6 on: April 04, 2021, 03:22:44 PM »
You play a very high-tech game, and (part of) the problem is that Gallicite requirements are proportional to engine power. This makes Gallicite more important as one advances along the tech tree, as advances in engine tech allow you to cram more and more Gallicite (= engine power) in the same amount of ship. The same may also be true for other components, but it's vey noticable with engines.
A Nuclear Pulse warship that goes 3k km/s will always require exactly half the Gallicite of a Magneto-Plasma warship of the same size and engine proportions that goes 6k km/s.

It is my proposal to make the Gallicite cost of engines not directly proportional to engine power. One could make them directly proportional to component size, but then Gallicite costs would not rise between ship generations. Currently each engine tech gives around 25% more power and therefore raises costs by 25%, we could decouple Gallicite costs from engine power and make them dependent on component size instead and add a 10% premium for each engine generation instead.

How do you know I play high-tech game? :D I started conventional, I swear! :o

But yeah, I also noticed gallicite costs grow with propulsion tech, but gallicite problem existed for me ever since I designed my first combat ship and it's been foreshadowing my entire campaign, suddenly reminding about itself every once in a while, even when I thought I had a lot of it.
Sure, at lower levels I needed less of it because cheaper engines, but also had lower mining capabilities so I was getting less of it - different scale, but same old problem...
 

Offline Vivalas

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #7 on: April 04, 2021, 03:24:49 PM »
all the missiles those of you who claim "missiles op" probably need to feed mostly missile-based fleets?

I like that you point this out and I think it's important to consider that heavy gallicite costs is perhaps a very import aspect of balancing missiles.
 

Offline Stormtrooper (OP)

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #8 on: April 04, 2021, 03:26:16 PM »
With low research speeds and consequently not needing to replace engines every couple years going all-beam can be highly gallicite efficient.

Honestly haven't thought about low research playing a role here before, but given how many players love those 20% for whatever reason, then how the hell can they say "missiles op", when in their cases good beam fleet is even cheaper? I'm even more confused than I was before about this.
 

Offline Stormtrooper (OP)

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #9 on: April 04, 2021, 03:30:13 PM »
all the missiles those of you who claim "missiles op" probably need to feed mostly missile-based fleets?

I like that you point this out and I think it's important to consider that heavy gallicite costs is perhaps a very import aspect of balancing missiles.

Yeah, but what am I missing here with seemingly every veteran player claiming "missiles op"? What do they know that I don't that makes them say so while for me basing main bulk of firepower on missiles would get me killed quickly due to gallicite costs?
 

Offline Droll

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #10 on: April 04, 2021, 03:53:32 PM »
With low research speeds and consequently not needing to replace engines every couple years going all-beam can be highly gallicite efficient.

Honestly haven't thought about low research playing a role here before, but given how many players love those 20% for whatever reason, then how the hell can they say "missiles op", when in their cases good beam fleet is even cheaper? I'm even more confused than I was before about this.

I'm in the "missiles OP" camp because I usually play high tech games. Missile damage and in particular hit rate against faster and better PD defended targets really goes up later on, because of this you end up not needing the 1000s of missiles which really reduces the amount of gallicite being used. People also seem to be ignoring the fact that the engines on missile ships are usually cheaper since they don't really need to be boosted (exception being missile fighter-bombers). In my experience the gallicite cost skyrockets if you rely on AMMs more and not on gauss for PD defense, since you will literally shoot 10s of thousands of really fast missiles as PD.

In the early game missile power seems to be quite limited, as your agility tech is low and even most of the missiles that get through PD will be misses. Also the armor penetration of early missiles against NPRs is terrible since a large warhead is going to compromise hit chance whereas in the late game you can downsize the overall warhead space and still do tons of damage.

However it isn't as bad as I make it sound through text, it's literally that missiles scale better than their equivalent defenses in a high-tech game. The reason why a lot of people say that missiles are OP is because of the offensive potential that spoiler/NPR AMMs have which outlast fleet reserves and shut down any beam attack.  A spoiler can literally have 100s of thousands of AMMs that they can fire in salvos that can easily reach multiple 100s in size. Of course there are ways to defeat this with shields or just tons of armor but it can frustrate people who don't like to over-specialize ships for RP reasons.

And I think thats the crux of the issue, sometimes people want to build specific ships that they want to use because aurora lets them but find that they get wrecked because of one specific thing that is supposed to be a defensive tool and get frustrated.

However max-tech missiles are absolute monsters that the AI can't really deal with, not even invaders (20-30 years active in a 100 year game and 200m diameter rift) can intercept them. One of the reasons is missile ECM-10, which completely nullifies PD in my experience. I have designed missiles that never get intercepted by the aforementioned spoiler. Combine that with good warhead tech and you'll consistently be overkilling enemy ships at ranges of 100-200m. This is further exasperated by the fact that any additional gallicite cost isn't a problem because if your at max tech, chances are you've got plenty resources in general so you'll find yourself obsoleting beam fleets unless your RPing.

I should also add that I have not yet encountered an NPR with more than ECCM-4 and have never encountered swarm.
 

Offline Stormtrooper (OP)

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #11 on: April 04, 2021, 04:11:08 PM »
Well, it seems you focused mostly about end-end-game missiles, but I still can't wrap my head about them being "op" in general use cases.
 

Offline misanthropope

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #12 on: April 04, 2021, 06:46:23 PM »
i mean, there is a tendency to view everything through the lens of pvp, even a game which supports pvp in only the most marginal way, and "missile OP" is in my view coming from that pvp perspective.  equal-bp, equal-tech bring-a-battle kind of thing, you got missile fleets and you got mono-focused missile-soaking fleets.  otoh, castle-defense scenarios with endless waves of bots favor sustain over alpha strike, and that's your situation.
 

Offline Stormtrooper (OP)

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #13 on: April 04, 2021, 06:49:10 PM »
That'd explain something, but given the state of "pvp" in aurora it'd argue it can be misleading if someone says "missiles op" thinking about pvp, because that doesn't take into accounts factors not appearing in pvp, but appearing in regular playthrough.
 

Offline nuclearslurpee

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Re: One mineral to rule them all, one mineral to find them
« Reply #14 on: April 04, 2021, 07:13:10 PM »
I agree with the general consensus that duranium, gallicite, and corundium are the minerals I have the most trouble with at various points in a campaign.

I do suspect, however, that a lot of players (myself included) tend to under-specialize their economies with respect to these minerals, because intuitively it's difficult to accept that mining an asteroid with 100,000 tons of 1.0 gallicite, for instance, is better for your economy than mining an asteroid with 100,000 tons each of 0.8 accessibility gallicite, uridium, tritanium, and boronide. The latter asteroid is more resources per mine, but if you're running a deficit of gallicite and a surplus of the other three that indicates that you don't need the other three, but you definitely need the gallicite. Unintuitively, when it comes to mining often less is more.

I for example tend to experience a crunch relatively early in a game because I am reluctant to move infrastructure away from Earth while it's still producing 5.0 or 6.0 of total mineral accessibility, even though duranium might be down to 0.6 and gallicite down to 0.5 while my stocks of the "other TNEs" are sky-high and don't need the help.

That said, for gallicite particularly I think there are more creative ways to solve the problem. If the main consumption of gallicite comes from engines, one approach is to not build engines - often it will be fine to refit a ship with older engine tech with new weapons, armor, etc. and it will still have sufficient speed to do its job (particularly if one plays mainly against NPRs which tend to have atrociously slow builds). One can also use lower-cost engines or even commercial engines for many warships, for example large missile battleships or carriers do not need to have high speed in a battle, while PD escorts or fighters may need more speed but are small enough not to be too expensive to put fast engines on. I think it is good that the game economy incentivized creative fleet design and forces players to make decision between an optimized fleet or an affordable fleet, this keeps things interesting as the game goes on.
 
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