How about when your exploring you can find astroids....but here is the difference when you mine them they run out ( so they are temp and get abandon when they deplete). ie. Minerals 2mill might take say 1 week to deplete or artifacts.......and just for the research perhaps obelisks which contain....all these astroids have their own gathers that need to be researched or mission based. Thoughts

only if them and their structures are cheap....I don't want to colonize a billion credit asteroid, spend 4 billion building stuff, then have it run out haha

of course the ratio should be good and also you can capture them.....so you risk loosing them unless you build defenses but your gain is less.....it would make a hole new set of badges for taking roids which would be easier because players would be less likely to defend.

I mean if there's a limit to how much you can get from them then just max out the production structures and get ALL the resources as quickly as possible

Dan could workout the limit. I suppose you find a massive (space 63)astroid with say 2 million minerals you build mining droids/structure (size 5) with 1000k per hour then as a research chain to upgrade the droids/structure so size 7 but with 5000k per hour. so the bigger/better the droids/structure the quicker it finishes. And once it finished thats it, its a rock in space

or a size 300 asteriod belt, where you cant build structures greater than 7

i like the idea of asteroids with timers, or a limited amount of material to be mined..what about arti/research, just not available on an asteroid?

Artifacts - excavation sites/derilict ship which is slowly going into lockdown.
Research - anomalies which don't hang around.

Also find plans, blueprints to form something on these astroids. Like I said astroids have limited number of resources then become rocks in space....You could booby trap the astroroid once its depleted so the next ship to scan or use it would get snared with a resource capture but with a legion becon so legion members don't get trapped

been suggested before i made the first one of theese suggestions that i can think of anyway +1