I do feel a certain sentiment towards this, but at some point you simply should have enough trade outposts to compensate

frankly: I dont know if its good or bad.

I think this is more a product of the game speed increase, not the infinite resources. I need fewer refineries, but it still remains a cash strapped start where I'm loaded and can't spend it fast enough towards the end, both on credits and mined resources.

I do prefer the drying mines approach though, scarce resources and whatnot. I find myself with nothing to do with quite a few logistics points in even a medium map. As you scrap your research facilities on completing the research you're after, it goes from a tight squeeze to what do I bother to build now.

I see what you mean, but it also makes games more competitive as players strive to increase overall resource rate.

Plus thats why you have the black market and trade.

I think the current system is more about "economic maintainance" rather than a rush to build refinery's before it all runs dry. Which on large maps you can accumulate a ridiculous amount of wealth from this. Your only limitations are your fleet supply. Hence the cap ship spammage. Good point is it makes for some epic battles

The old system had its merits, but on small maps it would be next to impossible to keep a metal/crystal supply up, and maintain a decent fleet, or recover from a big loss. Even with refinery's.

The only difference between the old, and the new system is you still had infinite resources with the old system IF you had refinery's built. You just didnt generate near the metal/crystal you can with the new system. With the new system the refinery's just help generate resources faster. Which does help on smaller maps.

How is not needing a broadcast / media center a problem? Edit: Heck, you never needed one before, either!

Maybe resources could slowly run out.

I have a good Idea I think...

Lets say a basic asteroid produces at a rate of 10... have this eventually run down to say 5, but it stops there and is inifinte...

This way you have an infinite resource collection, but your economy does peak, decline, and then stabilize, it would make the refinery more useful, and reduce the spamming a bit, but without dropping the infinite potential.

but a smaller empire has no chance of using its resources more efficiently during the important timing, to gain advantage over the larger empire.

The larger empire if mismanaged may not be able to muster the surviving refinery economy before time runs out. Perhaps a small empire does, and suddenly the pendulum swings in favor of the small empire. Thats hard to do, but you can see my point; the ticking clock of resource count down can help a downed player facing a larger one, if he is sufficiently skilled.

Currently there is allot less in hard choices because those infinite resource rates will always be there.

Your right infinite resources isnt the a lone factor, but it is the largest, as without it is not nearly so easy to replace those fleets. Without it the large empire will still have a harder time building up that fleet cap, because a successful player can destroy ships enough that when the resources dry up, the larger player will not be able to build his fleet to full capacity. And he ended up sticking some important money in that fleet supply.

Hard choices. As opposed to now, where it doesn't matter nearly as much since you will always get more money.

you could also have the basic resource quantity of asteroids be a good chunk higher, that way it will be easier to survive to refinery stage.

My solution to this would be to remove all unit caps. Actually allow the player to spend all that extra res and have gargantuan battles between fleets with 100+ cap ships .

I'm with Annatar here. If the issue with the original system is that refineries are insufficient to replace extractor income as the asteroids deplete, then beef up the refineries. There are lots of ways to do this:

1) more refinery ships per refinery
2) increase refinery ship speed/acceleration
3) increase the frequency with which refinery ships can revisit an asteroid (i.e. reduce the time that an asteroid becomes "off limits" after a refinery ship visit)
4) increase amount of resources held by individual refinery ships
5) decrease logistic cap consumption of refineries
6) make mining upgrades more powerful, and make them apply to the amount of resources refinery ships give you
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Some of you here may remember beta 1's economy model. Similar to what we have now except the roids all had finite minerals. Refinery's, and Trading stations were a must have, and we didnt have all the planetary infrastructure that we do now. The biggest difference was there was no fleet supply at all, and no cap ship crews. No hard unit caps at all. However there was an "upkeep" system. Each ship cost "x" amount of credits to maintain per second. This was similar to how newly colonized planets cost upkeep until you develop them. Your fleet was only limited by how much upkeep you could afford. IMO the good point was that it was a pretty realistic system (modern naval ships cost tons of money in maintenance). If you strike on trade posts, or refinery's it could be crippling. The bad point was self explanatory. No need for frigates in the late game, because you could build as many cap ships as you can afford to maintain.

I would like to see a hybrid of that upkeep system brought back. Lose the fleet supply, but keep the cap ship crew research to avoid spammage, and to keep the frigates useful in late game.

I am undecided about if roids should stay infinite, or make them finite again. The infinite roids help, but it didnt change the late game economy much from the pre beta 4 models.