How much do galactic resources help?

Absolutely they do. The benefit of resource mining starbases far out weighs the benefit of a single or even a group of planets. You can see the values of these bonuses in the Stats & Graphs section of the civilization manager. The bonuses listed there are the cumulative total of resource mining, racial abilities and techs and wonders.

For example, in my current game my economics bonus is 486%. This means that about 1/6th of my 1.4M bc per week income is my "normal" income and the other 5/6ths is "bonus" income. Of this bonus income, 312% is due to the 8 economic resource starbases that I'm mining. So my economic resource SB's account for about 700K bc per week in income.

You can see the same kind of effect in your research, morale, influence (although the benefit of influence is harder to determine) and military rating (as well as the attack/defense values of your ships).

As I mentioned, early on in the game I'll give up whole groups of planets just to make sure I snag a mining resource (except perhaps influence).

I'm too fond of role-playing my games to be as fiercely pragmatic as Mumblefratz, but I do worry about a given game if I don't have at least a "fair" share of the available mines (my notion of "fair" gets more demanding in rough proportion to my military rating).

To get an incremental view, just pay attention to the dialogs as you add modules to your mining bases. 312% is a very dramatic number, but in many games a humble 5%, especially at the right econ growth or learning curve moment, can mean a great deal.

Extremely, once fully upgraded with mining modules. Thats why there are so many defense modules to build on them.

I've always thought the resources are kind of broken. I've had the worst military in the fleet before, and with one military resource, those same ships became the most powerful in the game. I think that the system should be changed, but this would probably be a serious change.

Hi!

I agree. Just having one mil resource while others have none can make you a winner, as your ships will attack and defend 39% beter FOR FREE. If GC would be a multiplayer game I'd be the first one to vote galactic resources out, because they unbalance the game so much. But it's a single-player game, so I can play how I want: restart, reload, cheat, or go down in flames. I never heard an AI complaining about that.

BR, Iztok

Absolutely... you need at least 2 military resources fully mined to go to head against the suicidal AI at the end game, and preferrably more. An AI mined military resource should be your very first target when war breaks out.

I like to 'stalk' military resources mined by others early in the game -- someone else gets one, I'll park a fleet of constructors within range and goad the other majors and minors into war with the owner and just wait for the base to be destroyed.

Ha ha I do that all the time.

LOL yeah... I call it "poaching" the resource

I was trying to poach about 3 recently, along with 3 other resources, to catapult me from weakest to strong in the mid-game. They all belonged to a civ that was "in the corner" behind my civ territory, and in any other circumstances it should have been cake to flip the 2 planets, and have my horde of constructors pounce on all the resources.

Unfortunately just before I committed converting my fleet of constructors to Influence SBs in the target system, the United Planets decided that SBs could only have 4 modules. I decided to try it anyway, just build more SBs with the extra constructors.

Oh, did I mention that the civ in the corner was the YOR! And I had forgotten about their little racial ideocyncracy about loyalty! As it was, I actually GOT one of the planets before they declared war...and ate me.

drrider