Re: The War In Heaven: The Epic Role Play , the ideas thread
Posted: Thu Apr 26, 2012 7:05 am
The benefit behind Rare materials being something specific, rather than a product comes down to the fact that if you can produce it with bulk plus energy, then you can easily harness that in game as is, by charging a heap of those two, making the resource worthless!
Rare materials are KEY resources, limiting features that would vary from system to system, place to place, even time to time due to bottlenecks in processing capacity.
Platinum is a highly rare, and highly versatile catalyst with a heap of other useful properties.
There are MANY situations where the only sensible catalyst is Platinum, thus why I referred to it.
Gold is precious because it is turned into wonderful jewellery.
As such it was considered to have value and be something wonderful and precious...
Thus vaults of the stuff are held by a variety of banks around the world.
In modern terms it is almost useless compared to something like aluminium.
Rare materials might be highly concentrated in one system, then a high tech society will rejoice, being able to harness as much resources as possible while there, but they will starve in lesser systems, while a low tech society might struggle to find enough use for it given their industrial capacity, but will be far more comfortable with supplying themselves in lesser systems.
Also a high tech society would burn through stores of such quickly, while a low would utilise them for far longer and far more easily.
Another aspect is that while bulk materials will often be utilised and wasted during the research process, most of the time rare materials will be used, but NOT CONSUMED due to the intrinsic worth and value of the materials, as it will be worth recovering them.
This means that even science will require access to a certain quantiity of your limiting nutrient even while in dead systems where access to a small quantitiy of rares could mean a couple more starships to win or lose a battle forcing players to make choices... not to mention if you have spent all your stocks of spares you cannot just increase research due to the limiting nature of the 'allocated stocks' of rares in the science sector.
Finally: energy can be utilised in different manners, such as construction (boosting ability to process and build), mining (collecting bulk and rares), research, and maintenance (things like growing food, protecting craft, simply repairing starships and so on)
If you over-allocate the improvement of energy and construction infastracture you won't be mining enough to utilise them, if you overdo mining your stores will full quickly but you won't be able to use many of them, if you over-allocate to research you won't be building up enough or mining sufficently to properly harness your developments, and as your population and development grows it will cost you more and more to maintain and repair your fleet, not to mention feeding all the poor children.
Rare materials are KEY resources, limiting features that would vary from system to system, place to place, even time to time due to bottlenecks in processing capacity.
Platinum is a highly rare, and highly versatile catalyst with a heap of other useful properties.
There are MANY situations where the only sensible catalyst is Platinum, thus why I referred to it.
Gold is precious because it is turned into wonderful jewellery.
As such it was considered to have value and be something wonderful and precious...
Thus vaults of the stuff are held by a variety of banks around the world.
In modern terms it is almost useless compared to something like aluminium.
Rare materials might be highly concentrated in one system, then a high tech society will rejoice, being able to harness as much resources as possible while there, but they will starve in lesser systems, while a low tech society might struggle to find enough use for it given their industrial capacity, but will be far more comfortable with supplying themselves in lesser systems.
Also a high tech society would burn through stores of such quickly, while a low would utilise them for far longer and far more easily.
Another aspect is that while bulk materials will often be utilised and wasted during the research process, most of the time rare materials will be used, but NOT CONSUMED due to the intrinsic worth and value of the materials, as it will be worth recovering them.
This means that even science will require access to a certain quantiity of your limiting nutrient even while in dead systems where access to a small quantitiy of rares could mean a couple more starships to win or lose a battle forcing players to make choices... not to mention if you have spent all your stocks of spares you cannot just increase research due to the limiting nature of the 'allocated stocks' of rares in the science sector.
Finally: energy can be utilised in different manners, such as construction (boosting ability to process and build), mining (collecting bulk and rares), research, and maintenance (things like growing food, protecting craft, simply repairing starships and so on)
If you over-allocate the improvement of energy and construction infastracture you won't be mining enough to utilise them, if you overdo mining your stores will full quickly but you won't be able to use many of them, if you over-allocate to research you won't be building up enough or mining sufficently to properly harness your developments, and as your population and development grows it will cost you more and more to maintain and repair your fleet, not to mention feeding all the poor children.