I know in the past this subject has come up, but I am not talking about resources as a whole. I just want to address the tie in with gravity devices. To lower the gravity I need dark matter. I have scouted 42 systems and found none. This is a large, so not a lot of systems left to check, most are already owned by others. I think having that sort of odds is a bit severe. An alternate choice could be to change the resource needed to something more common. Not sure why there is a desire to make it hard to alter the gravity. The tech is not early in the tree and planets with a gravity that is not suited for a given race is going to take a fair amount of time to get corrected. When you consider the time to research, the time to find and own the resource and then to build the device. Just wanted to toss out my perspective.
Dark matter can be mined from Boson stars, which need to be discovered with remote exploration or revealed by ruins searching (when map information is offered). Most of the strategic resources are found in hidden objects that need to be discovered with remote exploration. Helium-3 is the only exception, since it can be mined from gas giants. You can go the easy and fast way and research micro-grav generators, which alter the gravity for 1 POP. This can work ok when your colonies are young. If you want to go the long way, than yes, you can research planetary gravity generators or anti-gravity generators, but you need the resources to make it work. If they are owned by others than you can trade resources with them via diplomacy or simply grab them for yourself. Changing gravity is an investment but it can payoff tremendously, especially in worlds with a lot of population. That said, if we think that it doesn't payoff, then yes some tweaking is in order. Hope this helps. \Edit: This is one of those things where a tutorial or a hint system will do wonders. That will come to the rescue soon.
I knew all of that, except I had forgotten the Boston star. As it turns out I finally exposed one a few turns ago. This came after I could have won the election, so pretty far into the game. It would not payoff in nearly all cases, I would expect. I just wanted to see the process.
Are you reaching the final scanning level on most of your sectors? In many cases you will only reveal these types of special resources when you achieve the final scanning level.
Yeah starting to on some, it is a large map. That really just adds to my point, it sort of counterfeits any reasonable chance to lower the gravity.
I like the balance of strategic resources in-game. Most of the time I can find at least three out of the four, sometimes all four, with HE3 being the easiest. For me it would be pointless if there was an over-abundance of strategic resources, it would negate their value tremendously and undermine many sections of the game.
Well, if you invest in remote exploration early you should be revealing more hidden stars ahead of time so you can plan better. Of course, you may end up out of luck and without certain resources. Well, then it's time to adjust your strategy around that As I suggested above, you can always try to negotiate for resources or to take them by force.
I always go for negotiating...with some nice particle accelerators and a swarm of missiles being my diplomats.
Adam, you have no choice, but to use remote exploration right from the start. The only choice is to get a second one or not. It seems there is only one source and as it happened I only found it (had two remotes by then) as the game was nearly over and past when I could have won the vote. Only one races is still left and maybe 7 or 8 stars left to directly visit (large map). That is fine for optional things like some of the tech, not so fine for fairly critical tech such as gravity reducing or raising imo. To me that tech should be decoupled from such a scare resource. Probably should not require any resource, maybe Helium as it is common enough.
You can pick 2 remote exploration targets and you can also choose to accelerate remote exploration as a whole via another culture perk in the knowledge tree. That said, I see your point. You may end up with bad luck and not have access to key resources nearby and only find out 100 turns later. That's part of the fun and strategy, to try and get access to it through other means. However, I recognize this may be an issue for some players and we could think about having a resource distribution option where people could set a more balanced resource distribution, or more spread. We can think about that going forward.
I think the distribution is fine. It just that a fairly important function is tied to an extremely rare resource.
I mean it is fine to have it be very rare, as long as it is not tied to a critical function. There are 88 boxes and they need more than one pass to expose a Boston star, should one exist. I doubt many will prioritize getting all the perks needed to maximize the search. Anyway, I will stop beating this dead horse.
Perhaps there should be a tutorial popup on this saying that you need a Boson star. If this poster, who has been with the community for quite some time was not aware, I think that there must be others who would left unaware be as well.
There are two other ways to get dark matter that you may not be aware of: 1) Build galactic space port wonder grants you several (can't remember if 2 or 3) of each resource type 2) Taking the left choice of rank 5 of the wealth column of space culture grants 1 of each resource type. I much prefer the other option at that level, but if you haven't found any of a much needed resouce it could be worth it...
