[dmm]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
I wish there was a 'fourth resource' -- call it 'labor' since 'man hours' doesn't work for aliens. If population produced 'labor' and components needed 'labor' as well as the three resources we could balance production much more realistically.[/QB]

That is such a great idea! ("Conquest of the New World" has that feature, BTW.) But you couldn't have any Labor Storage facilities. (Except maybe Temporal!) Wouldn't it be fun demanding Labor from your beaten adversary?

Also, population should use up Organics every turn. If you ran out of Organics, people should starve.

And since I'm suggesting: A planet that is blockaded can't contribute anything to your economy. Makes sense. So, why can a blockaded planet with no mineral mines or storage still produce stuff? A blockaded tiny domed planet with only a SY shouldn't be able to emergency-build defenses out of nothing.

As a corollary, a blockaded planet with no Organics should slowly starve to death. (Although they should riot/surrender before that happens.) This is a huge facet of warfare that is totally ignored by SEIV. If you have the naval power to blockade with impunity, you should be able to take a planet by siege without invading, unless it has been designed to be self-sufficient. Before they surrender though, they would scrap other facilities to build Farms. But then what if the planet has lousy Organic value? Imagine the poor starving slobs pulling apart their Rad Extractors for Minerals to build a Farm, only to realize that they need 10 Farms just to feed themselves on such a barren rock!

And you'd have to add another ship order, "Run Blockade," so supply ships could keep the blockaded planet going.

In fairness to the planets, though, perhaps ships should also have to carry Organics for the crew. Or maybe the supplies can be converted freely into food? (In which case, ships would use small amounts of supplies just sitting there.) But then in fairness, planets should be able to do the same sort of supply conVersion thing. Hmmm ... come to think of it, ships and planets in SEIV use totally different resource systems, with the ship system being quite simplistic.