Hi,

The nerfing of mining production for balance reasons obviously had a number of side effects, some of which were presumably intended, some not.

The AI's approach to resource trading has been hugely  improved but like the human players they now have far less of them so you can't make a large bulk buy - as you could in previous iterations - even if you have enough to trade.

Among other things, this has reduced the value of scientists since the  epiphany path, which was previously easily affected if you had access to Arnor Spice is now limited by supplies of prometheon - which on balance is a change which I personally like though others may not?

This also means that the starbase strategy of surrounding crcuial planets with droves of them is much less viable since you probably won't have the resources to upgrade them.

What I wanted to request here though was a reduction in the upgrade costs of mining facilities. Previously, each extra level  of mining added progressively more resources and now it's been decided to nerf this. Whether you like this or not, I'm suggesting that the upgrade should be commensurate with the gain.  

Going from a mining barracks to a mining headquarters still costs 2 durantium + 1 prometheon (+100 gold) which if you have a typical  mining base with one of each means that you'll break even in D after twenty turns and P after 10; while an extraction centre costs 3D + 2P (+ a probably by this stage largely irrelevant 200 gold). That means the same starbase  will take 30 turns to break even in D and 20 in P whereas previously when it added  0.3 (I believe) it was 10 turns and 7.

Anyway, I wondered what other people think about this and also whether Stardock had considered the effect when changing the output or if it was an unintended consequence?

Cheers,

Jon