Make the Moon Great Again

[DarthVicious]

(Inspired by comments in another thread)

In my current campaign Luna had several pretty decent sites. One site with water, two with organics, and several with good fissiles (5+).

I was tempted to setup at least two Luna bases, but eventually did one. I got just enough metal, rares and fissiles to make establishing five Mars bases relatively cheap. Pretty much only had to pay boost for the water.

My Mars bases also had good fissiles (10 to 20), and usually Fissiles is the only reason for maintaining a Luna base. So once my Mars bases were established I dropped my Luna base.

While you can build hospitals and resorts on Luna you might as well build them in Earth Orbit. So unless you are cramped for Fissiles, there is no reason to do a Luna base, which is slightly disappointing.

Would be nice to see a required role for Luna throughout the game, be it a logistics hub, a manufacfuring centre for Earth, an astronomical observatory or a mission control centre. As it stands, it can be ignored most games.

[neilwilkes]

I agree utterly here - IIRC I think I even mentioned this in another thread too, so am 100% with you on this.
The yields on The Moon now make it a really poor ROI for bases & modules so much so it's not worthwhile bothering.
In my current game (on the validation thread) I see the following:

Lunar Yields.jpg (73.59 KiB) Viewed 6513 times

What's the point?

[DarthVicious]

I am tossing around the idea of increasing the cost of boost for anything that has to come off Earth.

This would make it more of a requirement to have an Earth orbital station or a lunar base (with dock or supply depot) before trying to launch for Mars, so that the boost cost is reduced.

The other idea i have tosses around is whether certain techs (or bonuses to researching those techs) should be linked to location.

So research to superconductors might get a bonus from labs in orbit or on the moon. Research into magnetics and/or fusion gets a bonus closer to the sun (Mercury labs). Antimatter research requires Jupiter orbital labs, or whatever.

[DarthVicious]

Read it and weep. This is Luna in my current game. Fissiles everywhere, two really good metal sites, and even some rare metals, water and organics.

Then I get to Mars and check those Fissiles. Who needs Luna?

Luna_Rich_Fissiles.png (463.04 KiB) Viewed 6456 times

[neilwilkes]

I am in awe of those yields - never seen anything even close to that.

I do like the ideas mentioned about Boost costs though - that makes a lot of sense to me, even though I am finding it is a really fine line between having enough boost to get Mining started and spending all boost keeping orbitals up.......the last 2 run-throughs have both been abandoned due to negative boost (despite the boost-enhancing techs and similar) making it impossible for me to obtain sufficient boost to open a single mine.