By the way, this is going back to 1.9 rare resources, funnily enough.
The 1.0-1.9 era will always have a place in my heart.
Andor's deep substrate foliated kalkite with no good synthetic alternatives made me again miss Stellaris's previous versions of rare resources. I'd love to find a way to have the best of both worlds. Reintroduce rare stuff that's exciting to find, keep the common stuff needed for production chains.
I like this idea, as long as the genuinely rare resources aren't needed for things you'd like to mass produce. Going to war to control a system that gives you a resource that gives you, say, +100% empire-wide building speed would be interesting. If that resource were instead needed to build ships with normal T3 weapons, it would just be frustrating.
Also, would need to be genuinely rare, something on the order of 2-5% of systems, so that you could have strong enough bonuses to make them worth fighting over.
I would not want any
actually rare versions of rare resources to be needed for ship component/buildings that you mass produce as that would get annoying quickly. But maybe actually rare resources could be used for coating the reactor lenses of Titan and Colossus superweapons as those will always be in very limited numbers.
I think this sounds right, but at some point it would be useful to have a conversation about what role they're intended to play, and through what stages the economy should develop, like @DrFranknfurter said earlier. I'm not sure that there are clear benchmarks for, say, researching T2 by 22XX and T3 by 22YY, and transitioning to an advanced building economy (i.e. strategic upkeep) by 22ZZ. In practice the RNG nature of the tech progression can make a difference of literal decades for when I hit these milestones, and that ends up making a pretty big difference in your economic progression for the rest of the game.
It would be helpful to know what the developers' expectations are here.
I would like to know what the developers expectation are. Nothing feels right to me about the production/consumption numbers, tech timing, building balance etc.
When everything looks wrong I honestly don't know what's an oversight, a bug, poorly designed or placeholder for a future rework.
Looking at that same save, my timeline of rare resource Techs I had access to:
Buildings that need rares as my 3rd tech
Buildings producing rares as my 9th - 14th techs
Arc Furnace as my 33rd engineering tech
Ship components needing rares as my 42nd physics tech
So I have buildings needing rares before they're invented, then I mass produce rares, decades later they get used in ships.
10 research worlds rare resource upkeep use less than half the production of a single world ...before even building an Ancient Refinery.
An Arc Furnace (5k alloys and 6 years of construction) can double the rare resource output from space deposits to a dizzying +3.33 crystals - not enough to support a single planet's engineering building + engineer upkeep.
Planet deposits similarly cannot support even a single world (I see my vassal is making +0.33 motes from mining... that's a rounding error).
It needs some serious balance work.
Does the current intel system even let you see which systems in another empire have strategic resource space deposits?
My expectation for "deposits are the dominant way to produce strategic resources" is that it would just make taxing vassals (an already dominant playstyle) even more so.
Good point. No you can't really see other empires that well without 90 or possibly even 100 intel (high or full economy I assume). Even my own subjects with +135 trust sitting at 67.5 intel from trust and I can only see the systems I surveyed before being making first contact.
It is rather hard to fight over something when you can't even see it exists. Space deposits shouldn't be that hard to see.
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