Edit; Before you read the rest, I'd like to hear your opinion from a gameplay point of view, although realism considerations are valid also.
Hey all.
Just throwing out an idea; what if resources, be it in the form of asteroids, minerals on planets or galactic resources (amoung other possibilities) were able to be exhausted? Different sources of resources could have varying amounts of them to start, while building things which take advantage of them would use up a certain amount per turn. This would eventually lead to depletion, which would cause new resources to spawn elsewhere, mandating that you either seize new resources by force from others, or harvesting them yourself through a "second colony rush" (Or negotiate for it, but pshaw to that.) I can see this being applied to much of the new, anticipated "Galactic topography" that's been hinted at as well.
For instance, a planet would only have a limited amount of raw material needed to manufacture things, asteroid fields would be destroyed by space miners, gas nebulae would lose their helium and hydrogen etc... The point I'm driving at is that this idea has no constraints, and can be applied to as many or as few things as possible.
A post explains this very adequately in terms of realism:
Quoting John Falkenberg, reply 12You dont have to 'run' out of physical ore or energy source or whatever your extracting for it to become uneconomical to continue extraction efforts.Since there is clearly a lack of understanding of the basics here. Humans, and (aliens) always go after the 'low-hanging' fruit first. The easiest (cheapest) and highest-quality reserves will be exploited first. That would be on planets with breathable atmospheres.Next to go, would be marginal planets with poor atmospheres, moons, high gravity whatever.After that-closest metal rich asteroidsThen-you go for most distant and miserable asteroids and hunks of rock in your solar system. Once those go marginal(even more so than they were al-ready), you start to look at transporting raw materials over inter-stellar distances. Once you get to this point, the final cost of a ton of refined metal will be literally, astronomical to end-users.Anyone that thinks it is 'impossible' to deplete non-renewable resources clearly has zero eduction in the matter. Once a ton of metal costs more to mine, refine and sell to end-users than the economy can afford to pay, the resource is 'depleted' for all intents. Even at that point, there will be 'lots' of metal still in the ground, or in asteroids or whatever, but they will 'stranded resources'. The definition of which is resources that are too diffuse, too low in quality, or take far too much energy to extract and refine profitably, and bring to market. A game like Galciv could fairly easily model resource depletion. It would be certainly make things interesting as stellar empires with vast fleets and trade networks and 100s of billions or citizens would be consume non-renewable resources at ferocious rates. Very few 4x games tie resource DEPLETION into there models. I think this is because a lot of us assume (incorrectly) that resources are either infinite, or that technology and say secondary efforts like recycling can extend resources infinitely. None of the assumptions have any basis in truth. The only game I can think off the top of my head that featured resource depletion, if in a limited way, was Homeworld. Asteroids were mined for materials to build ships with-and they DID deplete so you not only had to go out-harvest, guard the harvesters themselves, but no matter how good your 'tech' was, you *would* run out of resources eventually.
Here's an opposing viewpoint:
Quoting joeball123, reply 17I disagree with this. Presumably, even marginal worlds have gravities similar to the gravities of inhabitable worlds, yet since they are marginal , you wouldn't expect heavy industry to be present. Therefore, you'd need to get the ores off of these marginal worlds in order to make good use of them - and getting stuff off of a planet with a gravitational attraction similar to that of Earth is expensive. The stuff located on moons of developed planets and the stuff located in nearby asteroids is far more easily accessible because it takes much less energy to move to the point of use. Moreover, depending on the actual atmospheric conditions, it may actually be cheaper to set up mining operations in hard vacuum than on one of these marginal worlds with poor atmospheres - just look at Venus. It's much harder to deal with atmospheric pressures tens of times greater than normal in conjunction with temperatures in excess of 700K than it is to deal with low temperature conditions with poor heat transfer and little to no gravitational attraction.The ideal location to go after you deplete your most easily available sources of a resource are those areas which allow you to most cheaply move the raw material to its point of use. That is emphatically not a completely different planet, especially if that planet has a gravitational attraction sufficiently similar to the homeworld for it to be habitable (and the higher the gravity, the worse the planet is as a mining prospect). By the time you're looking at other planets as sources of raw materials for your industry, you may as well be relocating your industry to the planets that have the materials, because it's very unlikely to be economically feasible to get the stuff moving at escape velocity or higher, move it to the world which represents the point of use, bring the stuff down to the planet's surface, turn it into whatever you're trying to make, and put it back into space again. Moving something that's already in space over to the point of use cuts out one of the three surface-to-space transitions, which are likely to be the most expensive stage of transporting the materials.The asteroid belt in this system, according to Wikipedia, is estimated to have about 1 million asteroids of diameter greater than 1 km. The volume of an asteroid modeled as a sphere of 1km diameter is a little over 500 million cubic meters. If we assume that the largest classes of GCII ships can be modeled as a rectangular box of dimensions 1kmX0.5kmX0.5km and are 80% hollow, then just one such asteroid has enough material for at least one such ship given that the volume of usable material produced from the asteroid is equal to 10% or more of the asteroid's volume.Thus, if we assume that only 10% of the asteroids of diameter greater than 1km are useful as sources of ore, and that only 1 ship of the largest class can be built using the materials obtained from a single 1km diameter asteroid, our solar system has enough material for 100,000 such ships. I don't know how your games go, but 100,000 ships of the largest size category seems to be significantly in excess of the total number of ships I build in a game, and I would say that it's several orders of magnitude in excess of the number of ships of the largest category that I build in a game.Even though GCII has enormously fast production times on all sorts of things, it doesn't provide you with the economy to sustain that rate of production for a sufficiently significant time period for it to be reasonable to even consider that you might deplete a single system's asteroid belt (our own), nor does it provide you with the economy to make it feasible to consider having that much stuff in service at any point in time.Additionally, according to Wikipedia the global annual production of steel is ~1.3 billion tons. Assuming that the tons referenced here are short tons and that the density of steel is 8050 kg/m^3 (the high end of the density range listed on Wikipedia), the volume of steel produced annually on Earth is about 150 million cubic meters - enough new steel to produce three ships of the largest size category per year, as modeled earlier (I will grant that not all of that would be suitable for use on starships, nor would all of it be available for such, but this is nevertheless an indication of the current capacity with just a single planet's resources).Yes, it's reasonable that eventually you'd run out of resources in certain areas. It may even be reasonable that you could eventually deplete a star system of its economically viable resources. However, on the time-scale of GCII, and given its production levels, it is unreasonable that you could deplete planets and asteroid belts in a time frame which can impact the game, unless GCIII turns represent years and models actual mines rather than mining operations that make use of large asteroid fields.
I can see it now. "You have just exhausted all of the approval resources you were mining. All of your planets' morale has dropped below 30 and they are all at risk of rebelling."
lol
I was thinking more along the lines of minerals and stuff; food, research and other "immaterial" or renewable stuff wouldn't be affected. I hope.
why would food be finite? Assuming you have farms that plant smart and harvest correctly, this should be renewable therefore infinite, I could see you being hit by a plague that's eating crops and lowers this temp, or for a short time, or a drought or some other natural disaster but, this would most likely be limited to a planet or system, not your empire.
research that should be only finite to the amount of technologies in the game, how is that different from Galciv2?
minerals, fine you may have something there, but in my empire, I have "Star Trek" replicators, although they are limited to base materials, I have all the resources I'll ever need, all I need is energy which I have so much of w/ nuclear fusion and anti-matter/matter annihilation that, it's more a matter of how fast I can replicate something and assemble it vs how much of it I have.
Either way I'm fine with an economic structure very close to the way Galciv2 was. with a few tweaks which I'm sure they will expose us to in due time
The game would have to take place along a longer timeline than previous games. Even on huge galaxies the game time that took place wasn't that long-certainly not so long that one would exhaust the resources of an entire solar system or even planet.
Not to mention the game has been complex enough that one shouldn't have to worry about running out of something, I could see them adding something to the game in addition to what we know of it from past games that could be finite but I'd rather them focusing on other things than this.
With that being said whatever they do I'm sure it will be great being we know that Stardock, unlike some other companies care about their customer/fan base, creating quality products that work, and keep players playing for years.
The Civilizations in the game consume trillions or quadrillions of tons of metal in the course of the game if the "tonnage" measure in the ship view is correct. This would vastly outstrip every easily-available source on multiple planets like Earth.
Quoting Seilore, reply 3why would food be finite? Assuming you have farms that plant smart and harvest correctly, this should be renewable therefore infinite, I could see you being hit by a plague that's eating crops and lowers this temp, or for a short time, or a drought or some other natural disaster but, this would most likely be limited to a planet or system, not your empire.research that should be only finite to the amount of technologies in the game, how is that different from Galciv2?
I excluded renewable things such as food/research/misc, that would be pretty ridiculous :3
That assumes their not fabricating metals using energy-matter conversion, which seems to be the basis for the mass driver weapons in late game. You know, tech magic.
I just had a Mass Effect 3 ending flashback... Damn you!
But seriously, perhaps such advanced technology could serve as a partial solution to the problem, making the resource depletion more of an early-mid game phenomenon.
Not really. Extracting the metal content of entire asteroids seems to be within the tech limits of the game civilizations; getting 10^18 kg of metal out of a few dozen large asteroids per system isn't too far fetched.
Um, in order to deplete metal, you would have to of had chemical changes to all metals in the galaxy so that they are no longer metals... this is by far the most stupid threads ever, any of you that has taken chem of any level know that there are such things as "physical" change and "chemical" change, ones that are reversible and one that is not. I am sure aliens wouldn't be stupid enough to burn precious metals like oil and gas.
A far more realistic feature of depletion is the opposite.... space pollution etc. from battles, star bases or whatever you can come up with. The only solution would be to send ships to collect all the wasted scraps and recycle them.
I also ridicule this idea because fusion allows for smaller atoms to be come bigger atoms, so I am sure that you can turn anything into gold if you really wanted to, besides By the time they exhaust all non renewable resources in the galaxy the humans would probably have destroyed the galaxy already...
Uhh, but that doesn't mean the the source from which the ore was derived wouldn't be depleted. Mines are played out all the time on this planet because the ore runs out. The metal's still there, but the source is long gone. Think a bit before you call someone's thread "stupid."
A lot of the commenters here clearly dont understand issues like EROEI and depletion rates. You dont have to 'run' out of physical ore or energy source or whatever your extracting for it to become uneconomical to continue extraction efforts.
Since there is clearly a lack of understanding of the basics here. Humans, and (aliens) always go after the 'low-hanging' fruit first. The easiest (cheapest) and highest-quality reserves will be exploited first.
That would be on planets with breathable atmospheres.
Next to go, would be marginal planets with poor atmospheres, moons, high gravity whatever.
After that-closest metal rich asteroids
Then-you go for most distant and miserable asteroids and hunks of rock in your solar system.
Once those go marginal(even more so than they were al-ready), you start to look at transporting raw materials over inter-stellar distances. Once you get to this point, the final cost of a ton of refined metal will be literally, astronomical to end-users.
Anyone that thinks it is 'impossible' to deplete non-renewable resources clearly has zero eduction in the matter. Once a ton of metal costs more to mine, refine and sell to end-users than the economy can afford to pay, the resource is 'depleted' for all intents. Even at that point, there will be 'lots' of metal still in the ground, or in asteroids or whatever, but they will 'stranded resources'. The definition of which is resources that are too diffuse, too low in quality, or take far too much energy to extract and refine profitably, and bring to market.
A game like Galciv could fairly easily model resource depletion. It would be certainly make things interesting as stellar empires with vast fleets and trade networks and 100s of billions or citizens would be consume non-renewable resources at ferocious rates. Very few 4x games tie resource DEPLETION into there models. I think this is because a lot of us assume (incorrectly) that resources are either infinite, or that technology and say secondary efforts like recycling can extend resources infinitely.
None of the assumptions have any basis in truth. The only game I can think off the top of my head that featured resource depletion, if in a limited way, was Homeworld. Asteroids were mined for materials to build ships with-and they DID deplete so you not only had to go out-harvest, guard the harvesters themselves, but no matter how good your 'tech' was, you *would* run out of resources eventually.
I could see the in space resources like asteroids depleting over time. Of course then new ones would have to pop up as well... Maybe you would need to get better and better mining tech to unlock more asteroids when your old ones deplete.
I really like this idea because it makes maps more fluid and alive. So say your asteroid mine runs out so you research the next level only to find that the nearest one is just on the other side of a border. Thus you have to start a culture or physical war to claim it. Or maybe purchase it from them. This would really help with static late games.
what about going the other way having a resource that is infinite but you can only collect a finite amount per turn
focusing crystals required for building lasers on your ships each laser requires 1
each crystal mine/asteroid produces 1 crystal per turn
if you collect 10+ crystals you can attempt to research an artificial crystal thereby eliminating the cost allowing you to sell or trade your remaining crystals or use them on different tech research related to the laser line
Doesn't StarCraft have finite resources? Of course that game is only meant to be played in 15 minutes, at least the Koreans play it that way :0
This is what I'm getting at, but better written lol. Being born speaking Italian is a huge liability sometimes.
But again, this post is my thoughts crystallized :3
EDIT; I am not of the same mind as I was before...
I disagree with this. Presumably, even marginal worlds have gravities similar to the gravities of inhabitable worlds, yet since they are marginal , you wouldn't expect heavy industry to be present. Therefore, you'd need to get the ores off of these marginal worlds in order to make good use of them - and getting stuff off of a planet with a gravitational attraction similar to that of Earth is expensive. The stuff located on moons of developed planets and the stuff located in nearby asteroids is far more easily accessible because it takes much less energy to move to the point of use. Moreover, depending on the actual atmospheric conditions, it may actually be cheaper to set up mining operations in hard vacuum than on one of these marginal worlds with poor atmospheres - just look at Venus. It's much harder to deal with atmospheric pressures tens of times greater than normal in conjunction with temperatures in excess of 700K than it is to deal with low temperature conditions with poor heat transfer and little to no gravitational attraction.
The ideal location to go after you deplete your most easily available sources of a resource are those areas which allow you to most cheaply move the raw material to its point of use. That is emphatically not a completely different planet, especially if that planet has a gravitational attraction sufficiently similar to the homeworld for it to be habitable (and the higher the gravity, the worse the planet is as a mining prospect). By the time you're looking at other planets as sources of raw materials for your industry, you may as well be relocating your industry to the planets that have the materials, because it's very unlikely to be economically feasible to get the stuff moving at escape velocity or higher, move it to the world which represents the point of use, bring the stuff down to the planet's surface, turn it into whatever you're trying to make, and put it back into space again. Moving something that's already in space over to the point of use cuts out one of the three surface-to-space transitions, which are likely to be the most expensive stage of transporting the materials.
The asteroid belt in this system, according to Wikipedia, is estimated to have about 1 million asteroids of diameter greater than 1 km. The volume of an asteroid modeled as a sphere of 1km diameter is a little over 500 million cubic meters. If we assume that the largest classes of GCII ships can be modeled as a rectangular box of dimensions 1kmX0.5kmX0.5km and are 80% hollow, then just one such asteroid has enough material for at least one such ship given that the volume of usable material produced from the asteroid is equal to 10% or more of the asteroid's volume.
Thus, if we assume that only 10% of the asteroids of diameter greater than 1km are useful as sources of ore, and that only 1 ship of the largest class can be built using the materials obtained from a single 1km diameter asteroid, our solar system has enough material for 100,000 such ships. I don't know how your games go, but 100,000 ships of the largest size category seems to be significantly in excess of the total number of ships I build in a game, and I would say that it's several orders of magnitude in excess of the number of ships of the largest category that I build in a game.
Even though GCII has enormously fast production times on all sorts of things, it doesn't provide you with the economy to sustain that rate of production for a sufficiently significant time period for it to be reasonable to even consider that you might deplete a single system's asteroid belt (our own), nor does it provide you with the economy to make it feasible to consider having that much stuff in service at any point in time.
Additionally, according to Wikipedia the global annual production of steel is ~1.3 billion tons. Assuming that the tons referenced here are short tons and that the density of steel is 8050 kg/m^3 (the high end of the density range listed on Wikipedia), the volume of steel produced annually on Earth is about 150 million cubic meters - enough new steel to produce three ships of the largest size category per year, as modeled earlier (I will grant that not all of that would be suitable for use on starships, nor would all of it be available for such, but this is nevertheless an indication of the current capacity with just a single planet's resources).
Yes, it's reasonable that eventually you'd run out of resources in certain areas. It may even be reasonable that you could eventually deplete a star system of its economically viable resources. However, on the time-scale of GCII, and given its production levels, it is unreasonable that you could deplete planets and asteroid belts in a time frame which can impact the game, unless GCIII turns represent years and models actual mines rather than mining operations that make use of large asteroid fields.
I'm not sure how well this idea will hold up in regards to recycling or developing new materials for resources. I mean, the civilizations in GalCiv are supposed to have been around for thousands of years. If they could deplete all the low hanging fruit, they should have done so already, a great many times over.In regards to developing new materials, lets take a look at carbon. It could be used to make diamond: it is clear, hard, and has poor electricity conductivity. Carbon could also be used to make graphite which is the opposite: it is soft, non-transparent, and a good conductor of electricity. Carbon nanotubes (still in development) is a synthetic material stronger than even diamond. Further more, carbon is one of the most abundant materials in our galaxy, so it would be difficult to run out.So asking "What could you make with carbon?" is a bad question. A better question is "What couldn't you make with carbon?". I imagine that in the future, more such advanced materials would be possible.
My problem with this idea is this.
This type of game has a massive scope. That requires a certain level of abstraction. Depleting resources doesn't really fit that scope. It's something more suited to RTS or something (say Jon Shafer's game that's in dev where using, finding, and relocating around resources is a focus of the game). I wouldn't say it's really appropriate for a game of the scale and scope of GC3.
I would rather instead see something more in tune with the GalCiv way - have at least one random event that can affect your resources (like your resource nodes you build starbases on). You could have an event where the resource does just go away - used up - and you're prompted to scrap or leave the now not as useful starbase. You might have events that cause new resources to appear (to counter them vanishing). You could have an event where a comet or space monster plows into your resource base and knocks off most of the mining modules. You could have events that alter the potency of the resource node (if they work similarly to how they did in GC2, that is).
While the last thing I'd ever want is to see GC3 be less complex and deep than GC2, I also don't think it needs pointless further complication, and I don't think depleting resources really adds all that much.
I understand those concepts just fine, but I also realize we're discussing a game.
My thoughts exactly (last 5 paragraphs).
Your response really gave me pause, I appreciate it!
But responding to you on the realism front, you should keep in mind that we wouldn't use resources for just ship building in this setting, we would consume vastly more building space stations, improvements on planets and in research, completely ignoring "off-screen" consumption building cities and consumer items. This alone would increase resource consumption tenfold, if not more. Also, don't forget that just because resources are present, doesn't make them economical to procure; just something to keep in mind.
But to my question; what do you think about this from a gameplay point of view?
I'd also like to ask you, since you seem to be a reasonable forum goer; what do you think about this gameplay-wise?
I think it's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it's workable or a good fit for this particular game.
You do realize that this is Galactic Civilizations right? All the ships basically use magic to travel faster then light. Not only that but the very idea of space combat using what amounts to naval ships transported into space is ridiculous beyond belief. There are thousands of reasons why that is totally absurd. Do you know how long it would take for humans to build up a population of millions on a colony planet? Thousands of years, if ever considering the population growth rate of every advanced economy is negative. So seriously why are you picking out depleting asteroids as unrealistic. Galactic Civilizations is basically fantasy in space.
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