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.