Suggestion for Mining Galactic resources.

Hah!  One more strain on our overtaxed homeworld shipyard!  I like it!

I amend the idea:

• You get advantages not related to war, i.e. they pump stuff other than your ships' ability to kill other ships.

Resources and mining are placeholders, right?  We know there are at least 2 other resources coming, plus the carrier components will guzzle them.

• What does it mean for a tech to require e.g. "1 Durantium"?  Does that mean that mining 1 per turn allows you to build one instance of that component (fleetwide)?  Or can you build any number of ships with that component?  (If so, then why mine more than one?)
• Resources currently don't stockpile.  If they did (mining adds to your empire-wide total, builds subtract from it), that might be reason enough to go for them early.

Thats the Point Gilmoy, currently if you mine and have ONE resource node you get ONE which means you can build ONE SHIP that requires ONE durantium or such. It is NOT fleetwide.

Currently I feel the amount of production and money spent GETTING a resource not do not weigh against the value of the end result..ie, an augment for a ship WAY off the tech tree.

Now I know we are getting MORE resources, but realistically we should have a reason to say to ourselves, OMG there is an ELERIUM over there, Im gonna mine and be GODMODE for a short time till the AI gets some!..

I am going to bump this post. 

Does anyone agree or disagree that there is ZERO reason even AFTER our game is released to go out and rush mine resources?

Again if I rush out to get Elerium or Durantium, I will see ZERO benefit for all the time I wasted getting TWO constructors out and mine the resource until I am IN The AGE OF WAR....

AND

The augment itself has shown to be of ZERO value when added to a ship, we dont even get an increase to over all damage as far as can be seen. 

Well I've been playing Skyrim with modd... sorry for the delay and I've been working.

Resources do suck. You don't need a magic 8 balk to tell you this either. There isn't a reason in the beginning and the benefit is to stringent to matter on a large map. Larsenex's method is a possible solution to this. People care so now little that only two people have posted! This needs to be fixed fast! Lol

Also I believe Paul thinks that one resource can't be enough to supply a navy hence the one ship limit, the thing is we don't care about realism here. We want to be able to use resources vs not using them.

I believe augments should make weapons better without penalties for all ships that apply.

DARCA

Darca, that nails it. 

Beta 1 mining is a placeholder

• Starbase Manage screen is only ~1/3 complete.  Many extensions are already in the queue.
• They could completely change mining equations in unforeseen ways.  Making it add to empire-wide unbounded counters (and changing components to per-turn upkeeps, or per-build raw materials) would suffice.

Ship combat is a placeholder, too.  So augments are not worth griping about now.  (They might suck, but so do Beta 1 ship defenses.)

• Paul commented in a dev stream that augments are one way to win the rock/rock match-up.  e.g. if you both took missiles and chaff, your equal fleets just flip a coin.  One side with mining stockpiles could take the range augment, where you sacrifice damage for CCG Firststrike capability (which is what range becomes).  If that lets you eliminate 1/2 of the enemy fleet before they can even shoot once, then you get -25% damage, he gets -50% damage and hp, you win at both ranges, you win.

Actually, this sounds like a good question or three for the Fri 09/19 Dev Stream.

• Will there be incentive to mine early?
• Will resources be(come) commodities?  (i.e. stockpile, be tradeable, negotiable, and -- pirate-raidable)
• Will augments win anything else other than the rock/rock duel?  (actually if he took ranged rock, I might need ranged paper for the same reason)

Again Gilmoy you clarified my concerns. Thanks very much for the reply. 

Gilmoy it only works for ONE SHIP in a entire galaxy! Also without the same weapon and defense senario it still makes augments useless because the bonus effect is to small to matter in a battle with variables every round and the penalties are to great. IMHO

DARCA

I also agree that  mining resources Is not as crucial  as it should be .  I totally agree with the initial proposal and would like to see resources as a commodity and tradable, those additions alone would make it a lot more attractive to players to " rush out " and secure resources earlier in game. this would be especially appealing to economic players if they were stock piled / traded . I honestly cant think of any better suggestions then already stated sorry . 

Brigthblade, I do know that resources will be trade-able when we get Diplomacy and trade up and going in Beta 2. Thanks for the support. I do think a slight immediate increase in correlating weapons/defenses upon securing a resource would make them MUCH more valuable. 

Again these have limitless possibilities. I still think the 'penalty' assigned to the augments is not needed as the increase you get from the augment is currently not even worth the effort of getting the resource (for now). 

I do think these are great questions for the dev stream..

I agree that resources have little benefit, atm. Slightly buffing a single ship isn't a particularly compelling benefit for the fragile and expensive investment of a starbase.

The way I envision resources working is something like this:

I think you should tie resources to shipyards the same way we allocate planets to shipyards.

Shipyards linked with resources would automatically provide slight buffs to the ships they build, so there would be an immediate benefit to harvesting the resource. They could also (as now) build ships with specialized engines, sensors, weapons, and/or defenses. Of course, those specialized ships would still be more expensive/build slower (but you would be able to speed them up by allocating multiple resources to the shipyard).

I think it should also provide a buff to the planets associated with that shipyard (the buff would decrease at distance).

That is a pretty good idea. The bonus to ships built should not have a distance to shipyard penalty. I like more 'connector' lines such as trade routes from GC II so this would make me happy and help with a reason to get the resource. 

We'll just have to wait and see but considering mining resources use to be empire wide bonuses I dont see why they still cant be empire wide? the only problem I forsee is if you have ships that depend on having access to certain resources what happens to your ships if your mining base gets blown away? do they revert to non-bonused forms or just simply self destruct?

The reason the strategic resources won't just give empire wide bonuses is that the game will have a separate thing that does that: precursor artifacts. The resources are meant to be limited and consumed. The developers have also talked about having more diverse and earlier uses for the resources, but it sounds like they're still tossing a lot of ideas around, so we probably won't see any changes before beta 3.

I use mine-able resources as places to put a starbase near, and I don't bother hooking up the mining right away, saving a constructor.  I just use it as a way to extend the range of my ships into that area.

Mined elements should eventually become depleted. After building so many ships with Elerium, your Elerium deposit runs out, and you need to secure another one. That's both realistic and makes mine-able resources quite valuable.  It doesn't really matter if the effect is fleet wide because the effect is finite, i.e., temporary.

Blue oyster the only issue is that you would need to change the upper tier mining techs. So if you have say 1 elerium, and you can build only 5 ships with it before it runs out, then mining techs that increase the amount you get only allow you to run out faster. 

The way it is now, I would totally wait till mid to late game to even bother building a mining base an then only if the augment effect outweighed the investment. I mean I can have a ship with 'slightly' longer range and reduced firepower (and only ONE ship mind you) or I can just keep on building ships that have far more firepower and have no penalty or hindrance to production. 

Really the augments MUST have a MAJOR if not HUGE impact on the ships effectiveness to even justify building it. It really needs to make the ship 100% more effective over the same base model of the same tech it derives from, otherwise there is zero reason to even equip them. 

I think that the defense penetration will be a big deal. There will literally be no way to build defenses against augmented ships.

I have to admit, I haven't even tried to mine anything (didn't see the pressing need), but do the resources stack/store?  If so, you might want to mine early to use later just in case.  If they don't, I'm with everyone else... just ignore them.  Pretend they don't exist until way later in the game when they actually have any kind of value.

IMHO - they should be storable commodities that could even be traded.  then there is REAL value.

Jbbrower, if you set up a mine an start mining you will get ONE of that resource from that point on. No more, no less. Furthermore should you build a single ship with the one resource augment, you will now have ZERO of that resource until that ship is either destroyed or upgraded to another design without that resource. So you spent TWO constructors to acquire ONE resource for the ENTIRE GAME only to use it one ONE SHIP after you build the ONE SHIP. 

Should you research better mining techs, then you can add more constructors which in turn will give you ONE MORE, per tech researched. Thus both the Resource and the techs are (currently) not even remotely worth investing the RP to be useful. 

Remember once you GET the resource you then have to RESEARCH the proper tech to be able to build the ONE AUGMENT part you will place in your ship. Your fragile easily destroyed ship of ONE out of the fleet of 6 or 10. 

Also the shield leach augment which is the 2nd one you can get has a mass of 20. Good luck fitting that bloated energy hog on anything less than a HUGE ship. 

Again there is absolutely ZERO need to rush for (tactical) resources early in the game as you cannot even see a benefit from them till MID way through age of war!

There's clearly issues with balancing resources, but all the resources aren't even in the game yet.

I think, in general, the bonuses from mining need to be more substantial and/or have a wider area of effect. A single ship getting a slight buff (though the buffs I've seen don't seem particularly great) is ridiculous.

On the other hand, I think that there's an interesting mechanic here with resources having discrete benefits. If a faction is falling behind militarily  but they could take their mined resources and generate a single "experimental" ship that was far more powerful than anything else in their fleet, that would be cool.

I'm not really sure what the tactical battles are going to end up looking like (come on Stardock! can't you give us a hint?!) but if we end up with direct control, I can see having those "experimental" ships being a champion type unit, with special attacks and the like.

But then we get into what the hell are they going to do with tactical in this game. If you have thousands of planets, that means in the end-game there are going to be way too many ships.

We will not have direct control on the ships for combat. However we 'may' be able to issue orders to ships or at the minimum I would imagine select a stance or attack/defense postures for some ships in a fleet. All that information is currently in Brad's head and only he knows how he wants it to play out. 

In previous incarnations of Gal Civ we had zero control and simply viewed the battles via a nice combat viewer much like Endless space. That got old quick and I would watch the fights about 1/2 the time depending on how many I had on the map.

Let me state for the 20th time. We need to make augments using tact resources much better than they are or using base model ships will always be better. 

Maybe this is deeper than making them better or global... Imagine every other ship having some special combat ability in weapons or defense or both. It would make combat suck as you would have to find out if the ship your about to fight is augmented or possibly lose every time. The idea of augments is becoming very convoluted really quickly no matter if its for one ship, global.

DARCA

I (and I think the original author) are trying to say that there needs to be a reason to claim the resources earlier that late game.

If the resources were collected and maybe tradable, that would be a motivation.  If having access to them early game gave some kind of passive bonus in general to empire ships or production, that would be a motivation. If getting it early give an offence/defence awesomeness to the station itself (maybe that's how we discover the resource has strategic value), that would be a motivation.

We just need some motivation to get early before they become the mega strategic resource of end game awesomeness.

This is correct Jbbrower. At launch there 'seems' to be zero reason (other than trade) to go out and secure the tac resources. Even then the investment in time and production to get them means the trade value should be good. If not I would not bother. 

As it is even late game Jbb,  there really is no value to even research augments. I predict unless the effectiveness increases dramatically these entire arms of the tech tree will be dead until there is nothing else to research.  Its just easier and more effective to build ten regular ships of late game tech then to build a few augmented ones. 

Unless they are really effective in a fleet, in which case you still will not rush for them and just buy them from other AI players rather than waste the time and investment of building a mining station. 

As I said, right now in Beta there is Zero reason to rush the Tac resources for game sake. No bonuses and there is no way you can utilize them till Age of War which makes the idea of mining them early entirely pointless.

 What I would like:

I want to see (2) resources and I want a lance of PAIN to go through my spine as I agonize on which path I commit to in the game. I want my choices on using them to be important and potentially painful if I suddenly try to retool to another type of weapon.  I would like a choice that rewards me to go down it and slows me down if i choose another path..

One can hope..

I hope they do something. The current iteration reminds me of asteroid mining in GCII, almost worthless.