The Universe of Fun - Terran Federation. Year is 2089.
I've disabled spoilers and left the computer running with auto turns and auto increments for a lot of time. I think I've overdid it, around 30 years have passed without research and expansions and mining and such.
I'm now lagging extremely behind other empires and with my own expansions. Mineral situation is getting dire, At least colonies were nicely terraformed, even if not fully as they were few and slow. Still better than nothing, I guess.
Research advanced a bit but I didn't expected such a time increment and I've not queued that much in advance.
Most grav survey ship were stranded with no supply and ridiculous maintenance clock. Those were the only jumping enabled ships, but I saved them with the jumpgate building vessel and a lot of patience.
I'm now recalling all ships and fleets for due upgrades. To speed up expansions and colonization, I'll be refitting all of them with jump drives. I'm standardizing on three ship sizes, to avoid having to design dozen of jump drives.
The chosen sizes are (about) 4 ktons, 50ktons and 170ktons. I'm now finishing the research on the Magneto Plasma drive, 0.5 fuel efficiency has already been attained.
I've also the feeling that the mining operation using automated mines are too hard to manage, given the current scenario: lot of small deposits all scattered around the sectors, scattered over asteroids and moons. I've not yet found a single planet worth of placing an advanced outpost.
I've to consider creating a specialized fleet for asteroid mining. A small cargo, to carry a mass driver or two around, some mining ship, to get continuously produced and merged on the spot and probably a fuel harvester to be placed on the sector giants, allowing me to provide support for long range intra sector mining - but not right now, I've a lot to mine just here on the Sol system.
I'm also considering a small period of deflation and military contraction, abandoning consolidated mining outposts and colonies except the two on the two Ross system, to act as base for civilian operations. Having a colony per sector, civilian mines sending minerals to them and a mining fleet roaming according current trend sounds like a plan to keep complexity low at the price of a bit of management.
Still less trouble than keeping to ship mines around the system with the fuel hungry cargo. Those keep forgetting their orders, and so do I
This is the current situation:
On Sol, I've a 18M colony on Mars; it has no strategic value as minerals are next to none there but it just happened. I wonder who put all that infrastructure on Mars and who produced it, as I think it wasn't me.
On Ross 154 and Ross 128 I've a 2M and .7M colonies respectively. Worthless planet, but with low colonization costs. I hope civilian will fill out the blanks in mining there. I wanted those just to have some early warning system around Sol, and that's that. It should be better with a pdc sporting some long range sensor, I guess.
If I want to put my plan in place I'll need to get over the current Curundium crash. Right now this comet is the only source of the stuff in the wole discovered universe:
There are larger deposits, but all of them are at .1 availability.
Mineral situation back on Earth is very dire:
Stockpiles have quite a bit of the stuff but future expansion seems will hit a ceiling pretty soon. Expansion is soon to follow after the current reorganization. I need just one planet to get along with production and resources, but it has to be a good planet, I've committed a lot in production and got almost nothing in return in terms of production capacity or resource gathering.