I mentioned this earlier, but didn't get a response, so I'll post it again:
This quote only holds true if you assume that there is no trade between factions. And there is already a sufficient feature-set ingame for trade... It's not very good UI wise and rarely used, but I've done multiple manual supply runs, exchanges, and delivery flights even with the resources being all mixed up everywhere. No reason to assume that people in different areas wouldn't trade for things, and would only ever opt to blow each other up in an attempt to take the stuff for themselves.
No that's 100% what would happen right now, and the natural inclination that most people have. It doesn't help that credits are basically worthless these days short of spawning stations and ergo acquired less frequently, so it's always bartering - and if you don't have what somebody needs, you're SoL.
This goes back to what I've said before about balancing - we'll turn it into an analogy about roads. People seem to think, optimistically, that the best way to make drivers travel on the roads they want is to put toll boths on different roads. Because of how inventive people get to dodge those toll booths, the most effective
pragmatic solution is to incentivize driving down the roads you want. It's far harder for a driver to rationalize driving on roads where they don't get a reward compared to driving on a road with a toll booth.
Bringing these two points together, it's exactly as Red said - you have these "quirks", for lack of a better term, in systems or groups of systems in a galaxy. As opposed to not having something, it's having more of X in one area - people will fight for that incentive.
For example, say the variable in question is shield resources, because that's easy. Instead of removing shield resources from a system/group of systems, what if you just added a 200% mining multiplier to shield resources in a system/group of systems? Not only is that a shit ton easier to handle dynamically (without a doubt that could be a server config option for admins), it also allows people who don't control that system to still have a chance as they can get shields from any other old place.
Of course, I'm not saying penalties are without merit. It'd be fantastic if you could have the inverse for systems and clusters too, so, for example, this system/area with a 200% bonus to shield resource mining multiplier also has a 50% multiplier penalty to mining of thruster resources. You can even start applying these penalties and bonuses to non-mining things, like scan range, specific weapon range, whatever. I think
schema alluded to this in the dev blog where he said that block config files can have multiple values for the same block.
This sort of thing increases the nuance in actual territory tenfold, easily, and lays the framework for large scale conflict.
