[Sinapus]

Since the amount of resources is limited by storage, the real value for a facility that generates resources isn't "paying for itself" it's value is in getting your resource production so it isn't negative anymore.

You use your stored resources for crash building of various items that takes up more resources per turn than you are generating. Like building brand new WPs for all of your planets, things like atmosphere converters, huge fleets of ships and units. Ring and sphereworlds.

A monolith is useful on worlds where you have pretty much equal values for all three resources. A Monolith III provides 900 in each resource while the resource-specific facilities' lvl III ones provide 1100. Use the mineral, organic and radioactive facilities for near-immediate gain on worlds with high-output in one or two resources. For long-term investment (since it takes a long time to build monoliths) build them on some worlds, and put in a value improvement plant or five as well, til the value reaches 250% in all three.

Keep the planets with all mineral miner facilities for most races and all organic and all radioactive extraction facilities for races w/organic and temporal. Oh, and build lots of storage on planets w/low value, along with research and intelligence centers. Or divide planet types among the low value planets towards what you need. Eg, some are all research or all intelligence, others are all storage and such.