Hey everyone, first contribution here. I would like to share some of my ideas regarding resources (I am aware that this is a beta and the good people at stardock may have these or other ideas in the works , also, I apologize if this has been brought up before).

1. Consumable resources

I think that the current weapon resources (antimatter, durantium and elerium) should provide a steady stream of that resource when collected by starbasses, until they are exhausted. For example; if I am mining 1 elerium spot, I should be awarded 1 elerium resource every 10 turns for 50 turns, and so each resource node would have a total of 5 elerium.

Additionally; if a ship that has an elerium component is decommissioned in my ZOC then I should be refunded the resource. However, if destroyed in combat, it should leave an anomaly that would provide the equivalent elerium resource to whoever explores it.

Other consumable resources could also be introduced, but used in constructing unique buildings; like a special power plant would require a special mined resource, but provide a significant boost to production (versus a 'regular' antimatter power plant) once built on a planet. Or the resource could be 'added' once any regular factory is finished to enhance it.

Obviously the balancing/amount should be tweaked, but my aim is to make these resources something that you would have to go for soon in order to stockpile before your opponents. They should be quite powerful, but vulnerable to being captured by your opponents.

2. Nebula's, asteroids, black holes, etc

I like that there is more 'stuff' now in galciv3, but it is not currently doing anything. I should be able to use the asteroids/nebula/feature themselves for enhance production (somewhat like it galciv2), or trade (wealth), or charity (influence/approval), or experiments (research). They could be mined the same way as anything else, via starbasses, but would provide a constant bonus as long as they are controlled.

This feature may just add more clutter and micromanagement however. They could instead provide different features such as hiding ships, or defensive positions instead. Basically, they should do something.

3. Uncolonizable planets

Similar to 2 but I like this idea (), an uncolonizable planet should still be something valuable. Its still massive and contains resources right? Developing these resources would be much more expensive however; you would require a fleet of constructors and you could then build a ring around the planet for raw resource development/extraction. This massive station would then sponsor a planet for wealth/production/research/influence/(one of these or a combination?)... I would not want this to occur on every planet though, this should be something that is usually not worth the credits. So this would require high maintenance and an initial cost to setup, or you could only build a set number, etc.

For example; 4 constructors in a fleet could build a ring around mercury to provide 10 to production, 1 to wealth, and 4 to research to a single planet withing 20 tiles (likely Earth), at a setup cost of 500BC and a maintenance of 40BC a week.

Thanks for reading, I look forward to reading your replies.