1. Metal is so important and so scarce that most games are going to focus on increasing metal production before anything else.
   
   
2. On non-easy difficulties (and depending on the planet type), metal nodes cannot be relied upon to exist or be explored/prospected in a reasonable time.
   
   
3. If you're lucky to be on a planet with ruins, nationalizing your starting recycling asset and spamming recyclers everywhere you can is the most important thing to do in the beginning. Not only do the recyclers get precious metal, but they also get fuel and rare metals.
   
   
4. Researching and building soil demetalization is the most important project in the early to mid game. Everything is focused on making that happen as quickly as possible (i.e. building power, trading for money/resources, etc)
   
   
5. Industry assets are very metal intensive and not worth upgrading past Level 1 until you have a couple levels of demetalization plants... and once you have a couple levels of demetalization plants, you never have to worry about metal or rare metals ever again.

quote:

ORIGINAL: KingHalford

Play on a wider variety of planets and you'll see that all your points don't carry over I'm afraid. There's some truth to point 3 perhaps, I usually try to get that recycling nationalised but if you're on a metal rich planet (a young planet generally) then the metal mines are more effective ways to get metal.

quote:

ORIGINAL: VoodooDog

iam also very new to the game but i feel that ressources are not scarce enough.
for me it quite dosnt feel like a post apocalyptic world because i always have everything in abundance.
i would love to get an option to decrease the amount of ressources on a planet.

quote:

ORIGINAL: jking142

Metal is absolutely critical from the start of the game: there is literally nothing that can be made without it.

I won my second game on beginner, which notably offers you a metal mine next to your capitol.

None of my "normal" starts had a single metal mine anywhere nearby (fully prospected); without a rich zone for scavenging, this start is basically impossible. I managed to control two full zones in my first normal difficulty game, only to find out my neighbor was a major with 4 zones, 5 exploited metal deposits, and a level IV city before turn 40. This RNG wildly skews the difficulty setting: the planet was not metal poor, just me.

I admit that I did not find that fun, and decided to restart, using the detailed planet generation process rather than the quickstart. I was surprised to find that a planet with 21 billion population pre-war left not a single scavenging tile anywhere near my capitol. (I had seen the screenshot on this forum of a planet with fields of ruins, and figured that that would eliminate the early impact of metal deposits.) Maybe they were concentrated on the other side of the world, but it highlighted the variability and criticality of initial starting conditions in the game.

I recognize that this is a design challenge for a procedurally generated game, and I propose some consideration be paid to addressing the viability of the player start, since this is currently the true practical measure of game difficulty. One possibility might be to allow a new starting hex rather than regenerating the entire planet from scratch.

Incidentally, I have swallowed my pride and gone back to playing beginner, simply to ensure having that first metal mine.