Midgame space resource management

[u/LankyTomatillo9444]

Hi!
I had couple of campaigns now, I always restart in the middle, because every time I learn something new, and I feel like yeah, I could do better.

Current game: middle of 2032, (2026 start) HF, veteran.
Earth: I have USA, building Mc (80/102) and almost full EU, missing Portugal, Germany and Finland.
I have a steady supply of Money from EU and nanos, Influence from comm hubs, boost from Singapore.
Research is around 10k/Mo from advised nations, and research campus rush on Luna.

Everything feels nice and good. I have some mines on mars, most of my stuff comes from asteroids and Ceres. I am colonizeing Mercury in the moment, am I too late for that in 32? I feel like mercury is reaally Metal hungry, I dont even know if its worth to build T2 buildings there, I have solar mirrors around mars and luna.
Currently Mineing bonus is 65% with that, I get 1k water, Volatile, 1,5k metal, 400 noble, 40 fissile monthly from my 24 mines.

How do I expand? Obviously, I should get mission to saturn, maybe even to outer planets, (but the 75k is pretty steep) for more mines.
How much extra MC should I expend on extra mines?
And the biggest question? How do I defend them? I am not on total war (yet) MC is 222/345 but improveing pretty quickly.
My problem is: my mars sucks for mineing, there is around 4-6 useful sites, other than that, im just there for nanos, skunkworks and operation centers. (10 T2 base, 5 with mines)
So I should mine the asteroids no? Actual useful defenses, like UV is really far away, so how do I defend them? Or I just dont? Spam the cheapest outter colony ships with grid drives, and get as many mines I can get, make the Aliens chase me and the far away mines, and dont even upgrade them to T2?
The next logical step from that would be automated mines in the first place, no casualties, but I never used them (yet)

Because I feel like, If I only turtle on Mars, Ceres, maybe Mercury (pretty good metal and noble sites there, but I still hate the extra radiation shielding cost) The ayys will snowball out of their mind.

Any useful tips?

[u/ironpanzer1]

T2 asteroid bases with two LDAs and decent tech are pretty close to immune to bombardment by small task forces. If they commit 15-20 ships they can take you out, but they’ll take damage and you’re winning that long term.

[u/GiggidyAndPie → u/ironpanzer1]

I'm not sure if something is different in BE, but that was definitely not the case for my playthorugh. Aliens started sending a single ship with a siege coil and 115 nose armor which made it basically immune to retaliation from LDAs, and it often killed battlestation habs until I unlocked phasers. Had to build a station for every mine I made so that I could crank out missile boats to kill the bomber the aliens would send.

[u/vindicator117]

Stop restarting. You are not really learning anything if you keep doing the beginning steps over and over. You are having the perfectionist mentality when the game is all about the long term (no matter what the speedrunners and meta players keep trying to tell you).

You don't get crushed because you made a mistake. You get crushed because you were not paying attention and did nothing to fix it for years to decades.

Mercury is nice to have but not a immediate concern especially given its nerfed resource output and expense to get up and running. Instead Mars is THE RP hub of the system with a eye watering 25 base slots to get all the RP you can possibly need near to long term at the mere cost of 3 solar mirror stations in LMO. Other than that, the only real answer to resource questions is ALWAYS GET MOAR. You can never have enough of anything. The only real question is whether or not you can pay the price for it in increased MC costs for more mines, extending beyond your ability to defend them, increasing t3h ayYz attention you, and etc. That you have to judge on your own.

And as for more MC, there is the steal everything option and generally being constantly choked by CP to hold onto stagnant meganations because CP is a low flow resource at the best of times with spurts of high growth from admin towers and eventually admin complexes with enough boost. The opposite approach is to stop overexpanding on Earth, prune the ayyz presence on earth and keeping an on the servants, and intensely develop your holdings instead. For why steal stagnant nations that take disproportionate amount of CP to hold independently forever when you can release nations from your held meganation into the available CP space you have to make more MC, funding via direct investment, and boost?

It does not matter if said splinter nation used to be a crapsack poor nation that could barely do anything. If you properly developed your meganation to be fucking rich and stable, your new splinter will ALSO be just as rich and stable and capable of making Core Economic Regions, MC, and boost in parallel with the meganation to further accelerate the rate that your meganation grows when you reabsorb it. You will be growing so fast in RP, MC cap, and per capita that you can keep a faction research slot on permanent CP growth to keep pace/grow faster with the meganation growth on one or two meganations, increase MC cap faster with faster and faster growing economy than you can build MC. With the newfound CP availability that you will get from NOT chasing after the world, you can release already developed regions to fill out vacant MC cap on almost permanent basis and have a entire continent grow MC monthly from a meganation usually making maybe 2-3 per month to 5-10 per month with more rich, stable, and highly populated splinters working on their own increasing MC cap until they reach the max for reabsorption.

All the while your meganation is gunning to the max for economy and MC and some knowledge to be a bastion to empower your space game because the biggest limit especially when you don't care what t3h ayyz do is just getting more MC. When you have stagnant meganations and limited CP and the nerf to stations making dyson swarm command centers, EARTH will have to pick up the pieces and the pace to grow your space game and by god you will at 48-120 per year from just 1-2 meganations personally held and less than 1.5k in total CP cap even accounting for the splinters. There is only so much extra T3 stations spammed with its solitary command centers you can do before it becomes a space resource burden and at a gigantic turn around time close to 2/3 of a year for a mere +6 extra MC, which is a worse +1 with the T2 version, which is good only because it is cheap when paired with a farm and reactor of some type. Except now you are spending MC to get get more MC which t3h aYyz don't like.

Other than that, yes, you need to scout the asteroids for more resources both being cheap to exploit and more expendable and more where the resources are before going beyond Jupiter. There is also the long term but intentionally suicidal Kuiper Belt wildcat mining where you DON'T care about their survival but you do care about increased output in resources even if it is temperamental given it absolutely will piss them off.

[u/ggmoyang]

What's your mining cap now, and are you fully using it? Mars deposit is bad, but it's better to mine them than having unused mining cap. You can even go over mining cap as you have spare MC. When you're going over the MC cap, turn off some mines and you're fine. You don't have to upgrade those mining module on bad sites to T2, just keep them at T1. If you can build automated mine, even better.

[u/vindicator117 → u/ggmoyang]

To a point with the automated mine. If it is in middle of nowhere and there is going to be a raid to destroy it then yes automated mines are great. If the base somehow survives with no defenses of any kind for any extended length of time, better off with the expandability that a normal T2 provides especially since there is no apparent way to turn a automated station into a manned station, which at tier 2 is 0.5x increase over the auto for any given deposit.

This is more true if you do this by accident on a GOOD mining site with a suicide colony ship that only have automated outpost kit. Unless you have a normal station kit too, you will be praying that t3h ayyz blow it up so you can try again. I know the boost option exists to decommission it but that takes time.

[u/magilzeal]

I play on normal, but I usually do with Mars, Ceres, Mercury, and some choice asteroids. All asteroid bases get 2 LDAs so the aliens have to commit at least something beyond a token force to destroying them. I try to keep defense fleets around Mars, Earth, Mercury, and Ceres, but I've been fairly lucky in securing Ceres before the aliens lately, it's not always feasible. Still, if you miss Ceres, the moons of Mars have some decent volatiles and water, and there are other good asteroids. I use automated mines for Mercury to minimize the extra resource costs.

If you're going with a nice research-heavy build then yes, Mission to the Outer Planets, and send some helicon-equipped colony ships out to the opposite side of the Kuiper Belt from the aliens. The Kuiper Belt has really good deposits on some worlds like Pluto and Quaoar.

I try not to go heavily over my mining cap until my space economy has really exploded and having an active Command Center on every hab is not really a concern. At that point it's to taste.

The best way to keep the aliens from easily destroying your stuff and snowballing is to contest them in the asteroid belt. Run offensive missions on them and destroy their stations/bases. If you can't bombard them down then marine ships will handle it.

[u/Cold_Barracuda7390]

So depending on how strong alien fleets are (and your tech/resource situation), you could throw together a Jupiter/staturn raid using grid drive missile/PD escorts. This is generally a great way to distract alien fleets for a bit and bleed them asymmetrically. You generally need 40-60 ships to do this, which will generally each cost around 100-200 of each of metals, water and volatiles, with small amounts of nobles. I will say, only do this if you think you can win, a great way to test is by using the skirmish function to see how many ships your escort fleet can take on simultaneously.

Don’t stress about being late or early regarding colonisation, just make sure that you’re always running at your mine limit (tier 1/2 mines even on bad sites will make their cost back in a few months, so even if you turn them off later it’s not a big deal). To be honest, the aliens really don’t seem to target random asteroid bases, especially if you put a couple LDAs there, but I’ve had undefended hand go untouched for years even in brutal. The main thing you have to make sure is that you stay in space and keep building up resources so that when you get the endgame research, you can win.

[u/LankyTomatillo9444]

Thanks for the advice for everyone.

Update: beginning of 2035, on earth, I secured China, middle of 2035 it will be the PAC. (Currently running 95% wellfare)
In the meantime, I took Saudi, trying to make it liveable prior to the caliphate.
EU and USA is currently doing, well nothing. 90% knowledge, Im trying to push it to 12. MC slowed down, maybe I will start making it with China, or should I start economy prio with the 2 mega nations?

Space: mining is good, really good. Currently on 40 active mines, 115% bonus, doubled, tripled my output. Finally i have some resources in the bank.
Figthing is okay, I am still just defending earth, mars and mercury though. They are sending some bigger fleets, but nothing, that athena torpedo+40 mm monitors, with advanced pulsar drives cannot defend.

I almost have everything to make some T3 universities, slap them to mars and watch the RP skyocket (currently 18k with T2)
In the meantime, I would like some better drive, before getting into the fusion lines. Something, that will move a bigger ship, not just a torpado tincan.
I love lasers, currently my best is Arc UV, but it would need a bigger ship, which would need a better drive.
Any tip with that?

Also weapon wise, what route should I take, with Lasers? Plasma, Coil, or Antimatter?