Add more uses for luxury resources.

personally I feel that luxury resources don't really feel like luxury resources. they feel like strategic resources that can't be used in guns. in real life, luxury resources are consumed by the general populace to increase their quality of life, and, locally, anyway, they kinda seem to work like this. but considering resources are being shored up instead of being consumed, not really. the local boosts you get are fine, but what if you also wanted to provide the boosts to get on one system in another? such as colonizing a system on the other side of the galaxy that contains dark glitter so the people in your capital can enjoy jewelry shipped in from the new colony. sure, there's the colony upgrades, but these are flat one-time costs, and I find it odd that hundreds of generations of horatio can make due with only 40 eden incense.

I feel what could work would be a system improvement that costs resource upkeep. the building unlocks the second you get your hands on the resource, or alternatively after building your first trading company and collecting the relevant resource, and consumes, say, 3 of said resource every turn. if there's no resource to consume, the building turns off and provides no benefits. so if you gather 40 eden incense and build an incense factory, you get to enjoy a boost for 40 turns, but after that the building provides no benefit to the system, meaning it's only really useful if you have a steady supply of the stuff (which trading companies can help with)

the obvious downside/risk to this is that generation isn't infinite (well, without trading companies anyway). if there are only 20 nodes of bluecap mold, this means you can only support so many structures before your output exceeds your input and your structures begin to fail. so until you can afford to spread it around, you need to decide who needs it more - your industry system that's at max pop cap probably doesn't need any hydromiel, but they could certainly use some voidstones.

as for the bonuses, you could make a 2-tier system. the first building simply provides the local bonus, but across the entire system (planets that already have the resource get no benefit from this, so this can be disabled for systems where every planet already has the resource). the second building is unlocked via tech, much like how uncommon and rare techs are locked behind tech, so common tier 2 buildings are unlocked at the 3rd tech tier, uncommon at 4th, etc. the second building has a heftier maintenance cost, but provides a larger boon to the system, potentially one not provided by the first tier or the colony upgrade menu (sure, super spuds are better potatoes, and such a great source of food, but like potatoes, they also make excellent batteries! a cheaper alternative to conventional batteries, saving minerals for better uses, or allowing more machinery to function at the same cost! or something like that)

by allowing buildings to consume resources passively, you can give unused resources a purpose other than selling en masse on the galactic market (I'm looking at you, uncommon base resource tier). This also gives the trading company a greater purpose aside from dust generation since you can use the resources generated by your late-game 5 lvl 20 trading companies to further boost your system's FIDSI.

of course, for AI weighting, it should be ensured that the AI don't try to build this unless they have passive generation with a decent cushion (so if a building costs 3 per turn, they won't build one until they are making at least 13 of that resource every turn to ensure they can still upgrade their colonies or sell on the market)

Edit: I should've expected this. bleh. sorry for the wall of text.

Well damn, 3 million votes. 

the boost system FIDSI is a good option, it was already in endless legend and would give us something to do with extra luxuries other than just overflowing the market

P.S. Forgot to add if the cost is calculated by number of planets in system or current population it could make it more interesting 

Another potential Luxury sink would be to give them to heroes for a minor power bump. 

Something like -.1 hydromeal/hero level/turn to heal 1 turn faster and +5 food per system level. 

You would not want players to be constantly switching to the hero screen to toggle it so add a small fixed cost to turn it on.

Nothing game breaking or build around, just something small to have the flavor of your heroes using your luxury resources more directly. Sort of a soft Abundance mechanic from Endless space 1 for when you have enough that you dont care about the resource. I can't count the number of times i have sold 200ish Redsang to the market for pennies because I literaly have nothing to do with it.

The hero level tree seems to have tons of room for UI elements and already has a space for listing miscelanious effects. So a small toggle for each resource shouldn't be that hard.

I made a quick mockup.

Applying a short boost to one of your system.

 - Here's  a neat example. If I have tons of luxury resources but I haven't got  the tech for system development yet, it would be nice if I can pop open  my luxury resource and not have to wait around for 20 turns or so. The  boost should be short and not too strong so that system developments  won't be ignored.

The boost should not be to a particular system, it should affect the whole empire. Otherwise, it would be more tedious to manage.