Tldr: Give each Power a valuable mineral, and only that mineral gets boosted to high prices in their territory. Then undo the demand changes.
The recent changes to demand in relation to Minerals has made it actively pointless for most of the population to bother mining many of the previously used minerals. You're better off mining Osmium or Platinum than Painite, which is pretty dang silly.
The previous system was also silly, of course. All anyone ever mined was Painite, Painite, Painite. What the heck did they do with all the painite? Who knows!
This led to a scenario where you could stockpile tens of thousands of painite and offload it when the next high price was inevitably found.
I'd like to propose an alternative.
Give each powerplay faction a specific mineral. Maybe Yuri Grom is Painite, maybe Aisling is Alexandrite, whatever.
The combination of States that causes the high price will now boost ONLY that mineral when it happens inside their space! All the other prices remain the same!
This means that you can never count on one mineral being the valuable one this week. IN fact, you'll only have about a 1/11 chance of a given mineral being the top price at a given time, meaning it's much more difficult to prepare ahead of time, and players are more incentivized to instead go mining as things happen naturally.
This creates a diversity of mining that was absent before, AND drives Powerplay to some extent, as more systems in a given faction means more chances for that certain thing to become valuable!
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Once you've done this, revert the silly change to demand, so more than 10/100000 players can sell to a given station.
Also, consider adding some of the less-used core minerals to Subsurface Deposits, too(or instead). That way players have a reason to use Subsurface Launchers sometimes, which would be pretty cool.
The recent changes to demand in relation to Minerals has made it actively pointless for most of the population to bother mining many of the previously used minerals. You're better off mining Osmium or Platinum than Painite, which is pretty dang silly.
The previous system was also silly, of course. All anyone ever mined was Painite, Painite, Painite. What the heck did they do with all the painite? Who knows!
This led to a scenario where you could stockpile tens of thousands of painite and offload it when the next high price was inevitably found.
I'd like to propose an alternative.
Give each powerplay faction a specific mineral. Maybe Yuri Grom is Painite, maybe Aisling is Alexandrite, whatever.
The combination of States that causes the high price will now boost ONLY that mineral when it happens inside their space! All the other prices remain the same!
This means that you can never count on one mineral being the valuable one this week. IN fact, you'll only have about a 1/11 chance of a given mineral being the top price at a given time, meaning it's much more difficult to prepare ahead of time, and players are more incentivized to instead go mining as things happen naturally.
This creates a diversity of mining that was absent before, AND drives Powerplay to some extent, as more systems in a given faction means more chances for that certain thing to become valuable!
---
Once you've done this, revert the silly change to demand, so more than 10/100000 players can sell to a given station.
Also, consider adding some of the less-used core minerals to Subsurface Deposits, too(or instead). That way players have a reason to use Subsurface Launchers sometimes, which would be pretty cool.
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