Finite resources or not?

[Ed Kolis]

I prefer unlimited resources just because even the thought of limited resources sounds constricting - what if everyone runs out and it turns into a stalemate where everyone has so many defenses and not enough attack fleets? Still, maybe I should give it a try sometime, given my penchant for joining PBW games with "unusual" twists

[Desdinova]

i tried a few games with finite resources. i noticed the first turn after completion of a mining base it would show several hundred thousand in resources as being mined in the empire status window. but then would reduce to what that facility would actually produce on the next turn. has anyone else noticed this.

[sparhawk]

There was a game hosted by 1fstcat called Limited Resources. The idea was that on a map with 8 players and only a few planets, resources would become very valuable in the end.
But in the end everyone had enough of them and only 5 % of my mines were depleded.
So it ended as a normal hack and slash SEIV game.
Although yuo had to make some efforts in designing a race, much more focussed on maintance, mineral/organic and radioactive mining.
We are now starting with limited 2 and I'm really curious if we can deplete our mines faster and get a real fight over resources.

Sparhawk

[Wanderer]

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.

Unless I am very much mistaken, the AI can upgrade facilities, but not replace them. Those planets it fills with mineral miners in the early game will remain like that...

Between human players it depends a lot on maintenance reduction bonuses and careful planning.

Space vessels are not run on abundant charcoal and saltpeter. I imagine they run on things like uranium

Current space ships (e.g. the Space Shuttle) use hyrdogen fuel cells (hydrogen + oxygen & a catalyst = electricity + water?) and solid oxygen fuel. Hopefully in the future they'll have nuclear fusion working - as fusion only requires hydrogen, which is rather abundant in the universe.

A technologicallly advanced race (e.g. Asimov's First Foundation) would be able to work out how to use dwindling resources efficiently.

[PvK]

The AI is no good with finite resources.

It also doesn't make direct representational sense to be able to mine a planet down to zero in a matter of years.

However, I think it does make more interesting multi-human-player games using the unmodded game set. I have seen a couple of these in advanced stages, and they limited fleet sizes and development practices in interesting ways.

You can still get unlimited resources when playing finite resources games - you just have to build enough Value Improvement Plants.

I think it may tend to have a side-effect of creating lots of research planets, and zipping through the tech tree, so I would recommend using High research costs.

It's also lame that the resource total replaces the extraction rate multipliers, so every planet extracts at base rate, so you lose the interesting detail of having some planets more productive than others.

But if I had to play an unmodded game, I'd want to play PBW (no AI) with limited resources.

PvK

[atari_eric]

Originally posted by Wanderer:

quote:

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Space vessels are not run on abundant charcoal and saltpeter. I imagine they run on things like uranium

Current space ships (e.g. the Space Shuttle) use hyrdogen fuel cells (hydrogen + oxygen & a catalyst = electricity + water?) and solid oxygen fuel. Hopefully in the future they'll have nuclear fusion working - as fusion only requires hydrogen, which is rather abundant in the universe.

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Yes, but what do they build the reactors out of? Do they need, say, Technetium catalysts?

[Rollo]

I think a key to limited resource games is playing them on ancient maps. That will make the planets a lot more valuable.

jm2c
Rollo