quote:
Possibility #3: Low tech resource converting. Use Robo-rad extractors or Robo-farmers. Costs minerals in maint, but you would have a net gain in the resource you are extracting.
Problem: This is a possibility. It has not changed really. But it's not terribly efficient, and my experience has been that minerals are what I am in short supply on until later in the game. And by them my empire has expanded to the point where resources are not a problem.
I've been using this in one of my PBW games, where my race has Organic Manipulation and routinely runs surpluses in minerals and deficits in organics.
Another use is exploiting asteroids early in the game, long before you've researched the tech to build planets out of them.
A much rarer purpose I've used them for before is "scorched earth" denial of resources. If I can't colonize a planet type, and I want to discourage the AI from plonking down a colony there, I can strip mine it to make it less appealing.
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Cap'n Q
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"