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!..

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

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)

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

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..

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. 

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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..