Quote:AnrDaemonNo.
Please elaborate. The idea of refining resources for a reduced but higher quality output has been suggested before. It was usually rejected because it was too wide-ranging, turning infinitely abundant lead into gold; but a quality-averaging system is much more limited in scope. Since it is actually the current system and no one has strenuously objected to that aspect of it in the year we've lived with it, I think it needs more than a one-word dismissal. I'm sure you're able to provide one, but you haven't yet.
Quote:It lets large empire grow even larger with little to no effort.
Sorry, but this is just not true. Until a year ago, you were able to achieve the pinnacle of technological development with any of 8 qualities, 248-255. We are now proposing to slash that to just one, Q255. You are suggesting that under the TL system, finding resources was 8 times too easy, and that it is currently 2 times too easy: "little to no effort". And look at the quality curve - even the difference between 254 and 255 is significant. Empires which formerly had access to everything at Q248 were suddenly no longer able to reach maximum volume, crew berths etc., through no failure of their own. They had to grow larger, scan more systems - is that really so great? You seem to be against that, in principle.
Notice that a very small number of empires have much over 100 worlds. The standings page is down now, but I think it's 2 or 3. That means that a tiny number of players have more than 2 or 3 high quality copies of each shipbuilding or strategic resource. Your comment would be truer if large empires actually raced to control dozens of copies of everything, exploiting every possible candidate; but simple experience shows that players prefer to find one or two good sources of everything, and are content with that. Making high quality resources more readily available does not reduce the amount of city building you have to do. It just reduces the amount of AFK scanning. Is that such an important part of gameplay, a great example of meaningful difficulty?
All my proposal does is allow empires to reach full capacity while scanning fewer systems, which makes our lives less grindy and reduces the number of systems which need to be held in memory. It gives some value to having "high technology", cultural expertise. Everyone who originally said that 32 tech levels had just been replaced with 255 tech levels should understand the value of this. You could achieve the same effect by reducing the number of Q levels, but that wasn't part of the original proposal and would constitute another major upheaval. I'm trying to make suggestions within the parameters we've been given and people have supported: eliminate process Q, keep averaging bonuses, find use for Mass Media.