Great work, thanks!

Your chart is very helpful. While I like the resource distribution imbalance, it's good to know what's valuable.

Honestly.....    The trade resources in Crusade are basically taking the WORST part of  Civilization 3 and pushing it into a modern game.

In Civ 3 if you didn't have say saltpeter in your territory, you couldn't build military for an entire age.... sometimes you had to skip like two or three generations of troops until you could build something due to the lack of ONE resource it was super flustering for the player and it is one reason why Civ 3 is generally looked on poorly in comparison to CivII or Civ 4-5...


Given that currently population is the largest driving thing in the game for everything....   Monsantium and Duranium become the two most important resources period.

I recently played a game on a large map where I found 5 total planets that had monsantium.     THREE of which were in one system.

This is horribly flustering...  it turns the game into a game of resource management....



Suggestion....     the TRADE resources  should be something that the player BUILDS   


How it should work...

Player builds a  Farm this upgrades to either a better farm, or a Monsantium, or  Glow tree farm or other type of production facility.

Player builds a Mine.. this upgrades to a resource extractor.....    etc



Give every single planet a list of  trade resources that might be able to be harvested there.

perhaps  Snuggler Colonys can only be built on dessert worlds... or Arnor Spice can come from dessert worlds etc...  but make it something strategic that the PLAYER can control...

The current resource system is broken cause it is completely random and luck based....      it removes skill and kills enjoyment.

Im sorry i cant leave this alone. Maybe in the tech tree buildable, but not easily researched, and slower to build. I would have to think about resources. 

I agree thulium is not used much second is elurium, but i have noticed that other planetary resources are also not used. 

I would like to see maps balanced. I liked civilization 3. I like the idea of resources to build stuff.

Full disclosure, I enjoyed the crap out of CivIII though I didn't think it was as good as SMAC...  

I don't want to get rid of the resources.  having resource scarcity increases challenge.   However I think the resources should/could be balanced better.

So to expound on my earlier idea...

So we have the planet traits:  Ghost world, Bountiful, Dessert, Scenic etc etc...  and then the planet types, Normal, Aquatic, Frozen, Radioactive Etc...

So here's my thought....    Leave the random planetary tiles in the game, but make the individual bonuses much much bigger.   Take Monsantium for example...  how about a 25% increase to food production on top of being +3 food...    

Return these tiles to being area tiles like "The Grasslands" etc from GC2       So rather than building a Monsantium unique building on this tile you build a farm..  through research you can choose to upgrade your farm into a farm that also produces Monsantium either in replacement for food, or in addition to the food.

Moving further, if you give the Planet traits some sort of tie in to the trade goods one could then make things a bit more of a player choice item.
Lets stay with Monsantium.  Lets say that in the "wild"  Monsantium can only grown/harvested on breadbasket worlds.

Lets say that  Arnor Spice and Epimetheus Pollen are also only tied to  Breadbasket worlds....     Choose ONE Trade Good Production option...    They are planet unique when not built on a special tile.

If we tie the world types to the stuff they can produce in addition to the unique benifit of say higher research, or wealth...   then again the choice of which planet should I go for becomes also relevent.

Currently the choice is pretty simple...   Biggest planet wins...  Rarest resource comes next....    

There is sooo much more that can be done with the trade resources to open up game plan and strategy that is currently not being used...  and the complete randomness of how often you will find resources and what they get used for.... Some of them are LITERALLY used for nothing while others seem to be used for everything  really makes the game feel broken...

In real life countries have a dif mix. Sometimes some of the mix is 0.

As said before randomness adds to the game.

Yes. I do like to use Ludicrous maps.

Yah, and I think that's why our early and mid-game is probably a lot different than people who feel the resource scarcity acutely.

I know it's going to be a while before my production and resource machines are churning at a high level so I find it to be a "feature" of the early game on Ludicrous rather than a bug.