Space Exploitation
"Space mining done right." -Riddle78
You ever wanted to mine that system with 3 asteroid belts? Or maybe skim Gas Giants for more material for your fusion reactors? Or how about processing lava from a Molten world?
Well, we’ve got all that, plus a bit extra. It’s not free to place these mining operations, but they don’t require pops or jobs. They do require a colonized planet with at least 10 pops in the system, however. This leads to constructing habitats in specific systems so you can build Minor Colonies on all the planetary bodies in the system.
Planets can be colonized by decisions on them, or by Automation. Each planet colonized using these decisions has a specific Exploitation Value based on its size. Default is 1 Exploitation value per size, which translates to 1 construction project per size.
Due to safety concerns of the few people living on these colonies(And game limitations), power generation must be on-site. Due to the same limitations, Alloys can only be manufactured from local minerals.
Each project produces a resource, and all non Power Planet projects require energy. When a construction project is completed, it adds deposits to the planet, with a base amount for the project, a random chance of extra, and more based on the planet it is built on. For instance, Mineral Mines get an extra 2 minerals on asteroids. Due to how vanilla handles mining/research stations, you cannot mix resources that would be collected by the other one. Mining stations do not collect Research Station resources, Research Stations do not collect Mining Station Resources.
There are several decisions to simply fill the planet with one kind of construction project, meant to reduce clicking. Click once, planet fills as much as it can, and lets you know about it.
For every colony, a Deposit is placed on a designated Colony in the system. This deposit provides 1 trade value, and 1 Colony Admin job, and consumes 2 food, 1 consumer goods, and 1 admin cap.
For every construction project completed on one of these colonies, a designated system planet gets +1 Trade Value. This is partly so that Megacorps don’t lose out heavily from this different form of colonization, but also to represent a bit of inter-system trade.
One benefit of this, especially for the AI, is it is far harder to collapse an economy by using this, due to how it works.
The AI has event automation for this, that you can use as well by using the provided edict. The Automation develops a certain number of colonies based on how many planets you have, and how far into the game it is.
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