Oh yeah I know the marketplace will play a huge role, however to devils advocate that situation:

1. I don't know if cravers will have the same issues with the marketplace that they do with diplomacy.  If so i'd still have been screwed.

2. Assuming a smart AI/human player, if they knew what i'd done (not sure theres any way to know though) they'd be foolish to sell to me for anything less than a system, and even then, as locking someone out is so huge, so I hope there's some incentive to help facilitate deals.

Really the main point of that story though is that even with the market, it is very easy right now for a beginner to miss a vital tech, and then mess it up and not be able to use it.

samsonazs wrote:

I have a feeling that the income from trade companies will get reduced as currently it is overkill.

Getting stuck on a resource you don't have might be the aim. It forces you to diplomatic trade or conquest to be able to enhance your system. (or just ignore it and play without it if you can afford that).

As to lo_fabre I agree it would be better to not know what is comming in resources but since both approaches has it's merrits the best solution would be a switch at the start of the game that would allow or disable this.

I'm guessing it's artifically high to compensate for the fact that the AI currently doesn't use trade at all.

samsonazs wrote:

 

As to lo_fabre I agree it would be better to not know what is coming in resources but since both approaches has it's merits the best solution would be a switch at the start of the game that would allow or disable this.

Probably this switch and highly customization options will be far better for lots of aspects in the game. It should reach as many public as possible if we want Amplitude earning money enough to continue making good games. So I recommend devs to take it into consideration (not only in this, all we know the MF in homeworld and others).

I have a feeling that the income from trade companies will get reduced as currently it is overkill.

Getting stuck on a resource you don't have might be the aim. It forces you to diplomatic trade or conquest to be able to enhance your system. (or just ignore it and play without it if you can afford that).

As to lo_fabre I agree it would be better to not know what is comming in resources but since both approaches has it's merrits the best solution would be a switch at the start of the game that would allow or disable this.

Hi,

Don't want to open a new thread for this. Just look at this screenshot:

There's a "?0" below influence. I found this in every game, corresponding to resourced you didn't found yet. It gives you clues about what's on the galaxy. I like it because I can plan ahed, but on the other side, I would prefer it wasn't, because it gives you too many clues about what you'll found next era, and spoils a bit the curiosity system.

What do you think?

----

Far from previous, I have the feeling that with new Era IV, lvl 3 systems, and marketplace, lusuryes are getting more interesting, and near what probably was original plan.

Trentius wrote:

Romeo wrote:

Why don't they make it a plain "You mine x amount per turn" system? That way, if you find yourself without a lot of a particular resource, you're not screwing yourself permanently, just until you've mined enough to level up the system. Also really like Vieux's idea of giving them alternative uses, such as on ships.

It's currently like that, but the output is generally too low by itself, so you can't really get all your systems upgrades from the output of 1 or 2 planets. Trade Routes generate almost as much as deposits on planets right away and later they start to produce insane amounts.

They really should bring back using luxuries as boosters. Making them be used in systems rather than on empire, like suggested previously, would really be great, as well as the other suggestions (political actions, heroes, fleets, etc...). I'd like them to be even more worthwhile in regards to system development, but having improvements that require luxuries to build would be frustrating, like how advanced hulls require strategic resources to be built right now, so you can't go for medium ships without the necessary technologies for E1 strategics.

Anyway, my idea is that certain improvements could have added bonuses when a luxury booster is used in a system. So, one improvement might go +10 Dust per Population type, +10 Dust per Planets when Dustdciduous Trees booster is in effect. Maybe group luxuries togheter by 'column' or something, so these bonuses wouldn't be denied completely when a certain luxury is not available on the map (at least, I think they're not always there, depending on abundance and galaxy size).

System improvements are very powerful currently, one might consider nerfing them a bit by making part of their bonuses tied to the resource booster for the chosen luxury, or consuming a certain number of units per turn (negating the bonus when the luxury is unavailable). However, we could also go the other way, so that system upgrades makes a booster permanent, so to speak. Along with the added bonus of the system upgrade (and/or the associated luxury booster), the system improvement would permanently enable all the luxury bonuses of improvements related to the chosen luxury. In my previous example, making a system upgrade with Dustciduous Trees would make the +10 Dust per Planets bonus always active.

It was? Man, I need to start another playthrough now that I'm back.

The rest of your post makes perfect sense to me, but we'll see how it goes.

Romeo wrote:

Why don't they make it a plain "You mine x amount per turn" system? That way, if you find yourself without a lot of a particular resource, you're not screwing yourself permanently, just until you've mined enough to level up the system. Also really like Vieux's idea of giving them alternative uses, such as on ships.

It's currently like that, but the output is generally too low by itself, so you can't really get all your systems upgrades from the output of 1 or 2 planets. Trade Routes generate almost as much as deposits on planets right away and later they start to produce insane amounts.

They really should bring back using luxuries as boosters. Making them be used in systems rather than on empire, like suggested previously, would really be great, as well as the other suggestions (political actions, heroes, fleets, etc...). I'd like them to be even more worthwhile in regards to system development, but having improvements that require luxuries to build would be frustrating, like how advanced hulls require strategic resources to be built right now, so you can't go for medium ships without the necessary technologies for E1 strategics.

Anyway, my idea is that certain improvements could have added bonuses when a luxury booster is used in a system. So, one improvement might go +10 Dust per Population type, +10 Dust per Planets when Dustdciduous Trees booster is in effect. Maybe group luxuries togheter by 'column' or something, so these bonuses wouldn't be denied completely when a certain luxury is not available on the map (at least, I think they're not always there, depending on abundance and galaxy size).

System improvements are very powerful currently, one might consider nerfing them a bit by making part of their bonuses tied to the resource booster for the chosen luxury, or consuming a certain number of units per turn (negating the bonus when the luxury is unavailable). However, we could also go the other way, so that system upgrades makes a booster permanent, so to speak. Along with the added bonus of the system upgrade (and/or the associated luxury booster), the system improvement would permanently enable all the luxury bonuses of improvements related to the chosen luxury. In my previous example, making a system upgrade with Dustciduous Trees would make the +10 Dust per Planets bonus always active.

Why don't they make it a plain "You mine x amount per turn" system? That way, if you find yourself without a lot of a particular resource, you're not screwing yourself permanently, just until you've mined enough to level up the system. Also really like Vieux's idea of giving them alternative uses, such as on ships.

Or the small amount of luxury resources could be used somewhere else, like for enhancing your ships before a battle, or getting small boost in diplomacy or etc.

I think the idea of permanently tying your infrastructure to a specific luxury isn't really a great design from the get-go.  

A) if you ever lose access to it, you're boned.  

B) It makes the small amounts of luxuries found on surface missions completely useless.

I think there's a big missed opportunity by not encorporating them somehow with the trade routes.  If you think about the whole point of a trade route, it's to profit through bringing luxuries from people who have excess to those who don't.  Silk from china, spices from India, etc...  Having them separated mechanically is a shame.

Returning to this post, after some testing, I've seen that each resource type has a tier 1 luxury resource, that gives you +50 of one FIDSI, or another kind of bonus per turn, and a tier 2 that gives you a +10 FISDI per pop and per turn (didn't check non-FIDSI bonuses in tier 2).

With actual game pace, what happened to me almost every game, is that i found myself with a fixed system upgrades (the colony and settlement) using tier 1 luxury resources (the ones that give flat bonuses), and some turns after that I discovered tier 2 luxuries (the ones that give per pop bonuses), which seemed to be far better, at least I'm sure that with my systems with more than 5 pop at this time I could get a bonus better than the flat +50 FIDSI, but had no place to use them, and no way to go back and redefine system upgrades to use this new resources.

Of course the fail may be mine, because knowing it in advance I should planned it in the long run, but I'm afraid to do this for two reasons: first I have no idea of what tier 2 luxuries I will encounter and if they will match my needs, secondly I upgraded systems before getting enough tier 2 resources, because I needed the flat bonuses to keep the pace of other factions.

Not sure if this is intended, or has to be fixed, or if there's anything to fix at all. Just wanted to make you aware of this situation, as I'm sure other players have experimented it.

My Ideas:

Luxury + Trade route

Have a bonus so that if you have a trade HQ on a system with luxury resources, that bonus gets spread along the trade route (a lesser bonus of the same type).

System Policies

Short term uses of ~10 luxury resources on one system, to generate a bonus.  Ie: use 10 of the science luxury resource to get 5-10 turns of increased science production on one system.  Similar to the EL1 method, but it would allow usage of resources found on expeditions and would allow us to tinker with systems is a non-improvement way which is currently missing.

Tied to the politics system:

• Using science drugs on a populace would dramatically increase their science vote next election.
• A pacifist or ecology law that gives bonus policy length/effect.

Having a less politically impactfull set of policies that didn't require luxury resources but was dependent on influence would be nice as well to help handle troublesome systems while the infrastructure is being built.  Things like 

• tax relief  -50% gold, +20 happy, industrialist increase
• conscription -100% food, +100% manpower, -20 happiness, pacifists increase
• government housing +25% food, -100 gold/turn, ecology increase
• tax free churches -30% gold, reduce penalties due to unhappiness by 50%, religion increases
• war spending -80% gold and science, +40% ship building gears, industrialist and military increase

I'm a little confused on what the use/planned use of luxury resources is outside of leveling up systems.  

My concerns:

1. System development plans seem vital to gameplay.  I thought at first they might be the "go tall" tech but they seem so good that skipping them in era II isn't even close to an option.  HOWEVER, if you use a resource that you can't get access too consistently you will completely lock yourself out of ever using the rest.  For example I used the dust resource figuring I could find more, but the only systems were smack dab in craver territory and already depleted, making them basically impossible to get (cravers won't trade, and it's not worth a war of occupation for depleted planets).

Now that's mostly a screwup on my part, and I like that you can get locked out, and I don't like the idea of having to min max my system improvements because you keep changing them to fit situations, but I do see this as punishing beginners pretty hard.

2. Trade routes feel very "eh".  I went through quite a bit of effort to get them going, and I felt in the end it would've been easier and cheaper to just build science and dust upgrades on my systems.  I had two decently upgraded routes going (one across the galaxy thanks to a well assimilated minor race, which was a really cool interaction), and the outputs were ok, but the main draw seems to be getting much higher luxury yields.....which are useless if you aren't using them in your development plans?  Even if the dust and science yields might have been better if I'd done something different, I feel that routes getting luxury resources is a good thing and should be encouraged as something to look for (also can you get strategic from it?).

I know the marketplace is yet to come, although I doubt the cravers would play nice there either for issue 1, but mostly I'm just hoping they'll have more uses in general to make them matter.  As it stands once you've figure out which resources you have access too, and made your development plans, you basically don't care about anything you wound up not using in those plans.

1. System development plans seem vital to gameplay.  I thought at first they might be the "go tall" tech but they seem so good that skipping them in era II isn't even close to an option.  HOWEVER, if you use a resource that you can't get access too consistently you will completely lock yourself out of ever using the rest.  For example I used the dust resource figuring I could find more, but the only systems were smack dab in craver territory and already depleted, making them basically impossible to get (cravers won't trade, and it's not worth a war of occupation for depleted planets).

Now that's mostly a screwup on my part, and I like that you can get locked out, and I don't like the idea of having to min max my system improvements because you keep changing them to fit situations, but I do see this as punishing beginners pretty hard.

Don't forget the marketplace should give you access to whatever you need. Such scarcity would give more incentive to use the marketplace apart for buying heroes.

True, but I generally just play on the defaults for that right now, as I assume that's what's being balanced for.

Eji1700 wrote:

 

1. I think the best thing about luxuries is that right now they're the ONLY resource that i'm not certain I won't have plenty of by mid game, and I don't know which ones.  Hyperium and titanium (thought strategic) i feel are almost too easy to find and exploit, so I can build a strategy/open around having them becuase I don't think i've ever had a game where I didn't have both in my opening turns.

 I think it can be solved by tunning the parameters in galaxy generation, I'm refereing when selectin if resources are scarse or abundant.

jhell wrote:

Hi guys,

Thanks for the feedback! Funny that you should talk about this since we had a meeting a few days ago about this very subject (luxuries), and we're in the process of refining systems on additional uses for those, so don't hesitate to throw out ideas.

lo_fabre wrote:

Now I got 5 trading companies with 7 subsidiaries, and bought some ships/efficiency for each of the, let aside I build the improvement that gives 50% from trade in each HQ and subsidiary and the one that gives 100% in one system on my best company HQ. they're producing 1000+ dust per turn, plus science and some strategic/luxury resources.

Looking at this, if Amplitude balances it well, trade may become the base of your economy in ES2. Eager to see next update.

Can I ask approximately around which turn you reached this setup for your trade?

Thanks,

Yes, i think it was around turn 140 I started looking at this (since then only two trade companies. I leave two screenshots from different turns. Also my last savegame (the only I could recover with this on it.

Consider that I wa playing on normal difficulty, the last save is breaked (all factions except me dissapeared for unknown reason, and I kept playing to test various things) and I'm not an exceptionally good player plus couldn't put more than 20 hours in this game.

Lumeris - 2.zip

Maybe luxuries should be used for the influence system in general?  Of all the ways to take over an empire, influence push seems like the sort of thing that you either were prepared for (because you built a bunch of influence buildings) or are going to lose to (because it takes forever to actually generate influence and then push it back).

I'm just going to copy and paste from my feedback:

Luxury Resources

• This feels like the worst instance of luxury resources in the endless series.
• They provide no bonus when gotten, or if you already upgraded everything.
• Bonuses are pretty boring (FIDSI only, both ES and EL had cool other options)
• Choosing only 1 upgrade plan does not create meaningful choice, but reduces it. You end up just choosing whatever resource you have the most of, unless its particularly useless.
• Ex : Both food and science resource in your empire. It would be nice to use food on large system that need population growth, and science on other systems. Since we can only choose one, will probably just take whatever is more common, or science since it is useful everywhere.

Proposals

Luxury  

• Allow plans to be customized when being built. 
• Re-examine bonuses given by luxury resources. Examples include ways to influence invasions, combat, heroes, or senate. This wouldn't be necessary if the next suggestion is used.
• Give luxury resources another way to be used - perhaps they could be applied to trade routes, hero equipment, stockpiles (as in EL), turned in for passive bonuses (as in ES), affect the senate, etc.

I think the best bet is to both allow for customization of luxury plans, and give luxuries a secondary use.  Make sure these secondary uses include some more interesting effects rather than just FIDS - for example ES and EL both had combat and XP bonuses.

More details on how I think a secondary luxury resource system could work:

• Applied to trade routes - each time a trade route levels, we can spend some luxury resource. This could give a bonus similar to the luxury resource upgrade (eg a flat amount, or dependent on system population, across the trade route) This could also be made into a toggle system as in EL - rather than a one time on level up, applying this effect would cost some amount of resources per turn to continue.
• Applied to heroes: Heroes are currently pretty boring. Unique equipment (including passive govenment equipment) as in EL could help. Economic oriented bonuses could cost luxury resources to apply. Alternatively, we could apply resources on each hero level up (to add a passive +fids or +fids/pop, or for XP / combat bonuses in fleet).
• Applied as stockpiles : Just like in EL. A flat amount of luxury resources had is consumed either on a system or empire wide level to give an effect for a number of turns.
• Turned in for passive bonuses : This would replicate the original ES system, turning in a flat amount of luxuries for a permanent bonus (ex 100 bluecap gives +1% science, but less benefit or more cost each subsequent time). 
• Effects on Government : One of ES2 major issues is that controlling the senate is too hard. I suggested a method of allowing us to shape how ideology points are gained; this could be done through luxury resources. For example, we could use a science luxury resource to increase science ideology gained, or convert a portion of some other ideology gained into science. (Similar to the minor faction ideology traits). 

Finally, luxuries seem to be too clustered. Across my games, each constellation seems to have 1 or 2 luxuries exclusively, which are found nowhere else. This leads to getting a ton of one or two luxuries, but little access to others. I think the idea behind the original ES system was more interesting : luxuries were spread out, but there were bonuses for getting multiple of one type, adding a new element of strategy to your expansion and trade. 

Hi guys,

Thanks for the feedback! Funny that you should talk about this since we had a meeting a few days ago about this very subject (luxuries), and we're in the process of refining systems on additional uses for those, so don't hesitate to throw out ideas.

lo_fabre wrote:

Now I got 5 trading companies with 7 subsidiaries, and bought some ships/efficiency for each of the, let aside I build the improvement that gives 50% from trade in each HQ and subsidiary and the one that gives 100% in one system on my best company HQ. they're producing 1000+ dust per turn, plus science and some strategic/luxury resources.

Looking at this, if Amplitude balances it well, trade may become the base of your economy in ES2. Eager to see next update.

Can I ask approximately around which turn you reached this setup for your trade?

Thanks,

lo_fabre wrote:

Eji1700 wrote:

 

2. Trade routes feel very "eh".  I went through quite a bit of effort to get them going, and I felt in the end it would've been easier and cheaper to just build science and dust upgrades on my systems.  I had two decently upgraded routes going (one across the galaxy thanks to a well assimilated minor race, which was a really cool interaction), and the outputs were ok, but the main draw seems to be getting much higher luxury yields.....which are useless if you aren't using them in your development plans?  Even if the dust and science yields might have been better if I'd done something different, I feel that routes getting luxury resources is a good thing and should be encouraged as something to look for (also can you get strategic from it?).

Same feeling here at start. I won a score victory with Lumeris, but thanks to new patch, I decided to play until I could tests everything past Era II.

Now I got 5 trading companies with 7 subsidiaries, and bought some ships/efficiency for each of the, let aside I build the improvement that gives 50% from trade in each HQ and subsidiary and the one that gives 100% in one system on my best company HQ. they're producing 1000+ dust per turn, plus science and some strategic/luxury resources.

Looking at this, if Amplitude balances it well, trade may become the base of your economy in ES2. Eager to see next update.

About point 1, I partially agree with you. I have mixed feelings about it. We'll see what happens.

Maybe you can answer better then since i've yet to test it (i've only had two upgraded companies up), but it seems that it takes a TON of effort to get them to that point.

5 companies and 7 subsidiaries making you at least 5-7k a turn sounds nice, but I feel by that point (multiple techs, tons of turns of research and building), you could've just grabbed all the other dust techs (the +x for pop stuff mostly) and built it on your systems to have:

1. A similar if not better economy.

2. That cannot be disrupted by war and blockades.

I'm just worried that given all the hassle of setting up a trade company, and the fact that the luxury goods it gives are of mixed value (either great if it gives you something useable for upgrading your settlements or likely useless if you can't trade it), that it might wind up a sink that basically isn't worth it in the long run, since it takes so much time to payoff compared to just building standard improvements.

I do suppose that at the worst you still have dust and science coming from one investment rather than two, so maybe the value is there, but it does seem a little bit of a letdown if the luxury goods don't play a larger role.