The Economy: Organics and Radioactives |
It's difficult to tell the maintenance cost for population in general -- I'm told that organic resources are essential, but it requires some digging to track down how many are needed.
That said, it strikes me as somewhat odd that facilities can be maintained only with minerals -- ideally, maintenance would be in organics and radioactives (food and fuel), while initial construction was in minerals.
I haven't checked into whether maintenance costs are moddable, or whether they are simply a proportion of the construction cost. Ideally the former, in which case it is worth considering the economic model behind them.
In general, it seems to make sense to try to differentiate the function of the three materials (else why have three, instead of just one ($$s). Making minerals essential to building and new construction, organics essential to maintenance(on the ground), and radioactives essential to combat (or ship maintenance?) would make the economy interestingly complicated. Of course collapsing all of the resources into "credits" might also make sense -- a rather different game....
I like it the way it is, myself.
Its a little more complex than just generic "credits", but not overly so.
Organic and Radioactive have a good use for Organic and Crystalline tech too. Since their technologies use more of those resources and less of Minerals, they gain an advantage for taking those traits.
A ship that costs 5000 Minerals, 0 Organics, 500 Radioactives, takes twice as long to build as one that is 2500, Minerals, 2500 organics, 500 Radioactives.
A planet that is 120% minerals is a good choice for a mining colony, whereas 120% organics is probably going to be "wasted" as a research facility. Not so much if you take the organic trait and have ships that require more of it. Now the balance of economy tips toward the race that "buys" organic.
jm .02
Population does require
Population does require organics to support. Not a lot, but its there.
See settings.txt; population maintenance.
I usually have my mods set up such that facilities cost organics to build. Energy weapons all cost lots of radioactives to build and maintain, while projectile weapons are cheap, but use up ordnance.
Crew and lifesupport are big organics users too.
In GritEcon for Se4, and GGmod for SE5, I have set facility maintenance to be independent of build cost.
The mineral mines use up organics and radioactives for the workers and power...
The Hydrocarbon Power Plant burns up organics to produce power (rads)...
The Soylent Green facility reduces population by 20M per month and produces 20k organics per month... 
The ability to balance costs is quite nice, although it is still hard to avoid the temptation of overdoing the energy costs, when that Dreadnought with 30% of its tonnage devoted to two massive Lasers'o'Doom is calling.
I like the idea of ships
I like the idea of ships costing lot of minerals to build and high rads to upkeep cause of fuel but the problem is maintance cost are hard coded into the game. They are based on the building cost of the ship 
. So higher mins cost to build means higher mins in maintance. You can change maintance modifiers but it seems to apply to ALL the resources not just one. So as far as i know can't say reduce mineral maintaince by 50% while increasing rads maintance by 200%.
Ship cost distribution changes as game proceeds
If SE5 is anything like SE4, you're gonna find that the ships cost alot more radioactives later on when you use more advanced weapons. Null-space beams for example cost alot of radioactives. If you're not careful and don't adjust your mining accordingly, this can catch you by surprise when you retrofit a large fleet that suddenly skyrockets in rad maintenance... and you can't afford it anymore.
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The goggles... they do nothing!
It is quite easy to make
It is quite easy to make maintenance independent of build cost...
Simply set the regular maintenance costs to 0%
Then add a negative resource generation ability to your components and/or hull.
Minerals too essential indeed
I agree with you. Minerals are way to important related to the other resources. As I said in one other thread, I would make Organic essential to mantain the empire population, and radioactives more important for Ships and Building maintenances, reducing Mineral costs for maintenance.
Therefore, Minerals should be used essentially to support construction of Ships and Buildings, Minerals essential to support them, and Organics to support the population and population growth (the higher the population grows, the more food it needs, when the planet cap is reached there is just the normal food consumption)...