I can agree with some of what your saying. When I play, I tend to stripmine a planet down to 0/0/0 and turn it into a research/intel facility after that. If I want to keep mining that planet, I can build a value improvement plant. Perhaps, the AI should build more of those.
If one feels the AI should mine more asteroids, that is fine and the problem is in how they handle remote mining, not with finite resources.
As for planets running out of resources too soon, in years terms, that I won't argue. That is a balance issue imo, and not an AI fault. The game is too mineral intensive and support too high and mining capabilites too excessive for any kind of realism. A planet's resources being depleted in 20 years is not as silly as being able to mine 1% of an entire planet's resources with one mining facility. However, there are other facilities in the game that counter that.
OTOH, depleting rare minerals is not that far off base. Space vessels are not run on abundant charcoal and saltpeter. I imagine they run on things like uranium (how do you think the uranium gets "depleted" for DUC weapons). If earth had to build a fleet of space vessels that used that, not running out within 20 YRS would be an amazing feet. Plutonium, Gold (circuit Boards), Diamonds, Kryptonite (some as of yet undiscovered mineral), ect. There are a number of examples that one could use that are limited on "this" planet. Just because currently the demand for use in not there, does not mean they become infinite when a demand is created. Esp, in the needed quantities portrayed in the game.
As for modding the game, I would prefer to keep this topic on the most current Version and not some tweak. That has it's benefits for both sides of the argument. I personally prefer to play games that are not modded. the exception being to fix bugs. IE: starting resources choice of 1000kt and only a base 500kt storage available. Whether you choose to fix the starting option or the base storage value is a matter of choice. (I chose the base storage value)
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See, I have. It was hard to build up enough of a fleet to take a planet from the AI. It kept beating me back. When I finally could however, I saw it had nothing left. I took over all the AI's and saw they were broke.
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Exactly, you both spent a lot of resources on a war. Both races suffered the cost of that war. Not only was the AI broke, but you were too. Correct? And if not because you built value improvement planet, ect., and the AI didn't, then the problem is in the AI build priorities.
Regarding the other topic, I don't have a problem with Gold being an expansion pack, as it was a considerable amount of time after the SEIV release. The ones that piss me off are the ones that come out with the "expansion" pack 2-3 months after the game is released. All they are doing is splitting the game in half to make you pay double of a single game. That CLEARLY is not the case with SEIV. Don't get me wrong, I am glad I didn't have to hunt down an original copy of SEIV to use the Gold expansion, but there were enough changes made that you can't play SEIV against a SEIV gold player. there may not have been a lot of major changes, but there were enough. And an "expansion pack" should be able to "update" and original release. That is why I said it is #5 and not 4.5. Of course, if they called it SEV, people would complain there were not enough changes. lol. Guess it's just a matter of perspective. 