(09-18-2018, 06:03 AM)Mr. Mortius Wrote: "Require constant maintenance, so you can't just get "enough" and never worry about it again"
This would work fine for certain empires that produce a single ship every few years, and makes sense from that perspective. Anything else, and the maintenance for tech would probably just prove to be tedious if it required direct player involvement.
Yeah, that was poorly worded I guess. I didn't mean that a player should be forced to press a button every day. I meant that it should constantly be supplied with government funds and resources, and if you stop that supply the technology advantage should slowly diminish.
For example if you stop producing tongs, you eventually stop being able to mine radioactives once the stockpile of tongs is gone.
That example is why I like tools being used for unlocking new resources. If extracting Magmex required Cryo Heatsinks, and mining Vulcanite required Magmium tools, then we would have an obvious line of progression that requires you to have and maintain control over those resources. Losing access to a resource in the chain would not be an instant lose, you would have a stockpile of tools to relay on.
Having a starship hidden in deepspace with a cargo hold full of Vulcium mining equipment might make rebuilding an empire after a total defeat a lot faster, but you won't have unlimited supply of them until you reach that level of advanced resources again.