I have never seen a fight over material resources, ever. It is not worth loosing a ship when you can simply expand into another system or galaxy. Especially on the more resource scarce servers. (Or when you spent several weeks mining in order to spawn it)
Most of the fighting we do seems to be over systems that have strategic locations. (close to spawn, adjacent to enemy faction territory etc)
And i would personally rather see a larger focus towards exploration and combat instead of resource harvesting.
I would also rather see a technology based economy than a ore based one, most of the point of moving into space is the access to literally infinite resources. (Like it currently is in starmade, the problem being it simply takes too much time gathering resources to make anything pvp-worthy that most players just give up and move to a server with credit-based blueprints instead, or they build doom-cubes instead of the nice ships they designed in creative mode)
A system where skilled players could develop technology and sell it for resources would be perfect. (ship layouts, automation scripts, weapon systems etc)
My solution would be, remove all current asteroids and replace them with two different types.
Have one common asteroid that gives you a generic ore which can be utilized to craft any type of block. The other asteroid is the one people will be fighting over. Mining this second type will give faction points and credits, and it will only spawn in very special systems. (for example a star-nebula area)
This allows people to make the ships they want to build, and also creates a need to control certain systems to gather points for their faction.
And as a bonus it also frees up block-IDs that are currently used to represent the diversity of asteroids and ores.
And as the final bonus, it gives value to exploration, as the valuable asteroid is extremely rare. (now the only really valuable asteroid is larimar, which you can find simply by utilizing the galaxy map in order to find large-orbitals)
To make this second asteroid valuable, faction points also need a increased value, for example use faction points to hire a pirate fleet which can attack a enemy system.
Could also have "artifacts" that provide this same reward.
Imagine ships in orbit over a planet, and on the planet surface a ancient temple is located.
Now imagine bounty hunters fighting inside the temple to get the artifact for their faction.
Adds a whole new level to out-of-ship combat.
Also adds more useful ship categories, now people usually have mining ships and battleships,
but with this system people would also create scout-ships, and infantry-support ships.
Tl;dr: Starmade is a amazing sandbox game, please don't turn it into just another EVE clone.
(I also feel this idea would open up the game to a broader public, instead of just us who spend far too much time playing :p)
Edit:
Had some time to think, and this suggestion may lead to gigantism.
A solution to this, make very large shipyards appear on the galaxy map, this way you would be alerted if the enemy faction begins production of a titan.
Also a time delay on shipyards would give you time to attack the shipyard before the titan is complete. For example the yard takes 1000 blocks every hour from your factory/storage, but you can enhance the production rate by adding factory enhancers up to a certain hardcap.
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