Haxus, I think preventing mines from overlapping other mines is a major problem with the current rock limits. The solution is not necessarily allowing them to overlap, but increasing resource yield in other ways.
The resource requirements for new-style buildings and ships can just be massive and, in my experience, the rock numbers are simply not high enough to support building them in anything like a reasonable time. The number of processes allowed per rock needs to be greatly increased if this overlap rule is going to be enforced. Otherwise, the gap between established players and new players is going to become unbridgeable - with old players having hoards of materials that would take newbies a fraction of their life-expectancy to compete with.
For example, right now, even with overlaps allowed, it would take me longer to gather the resources needed for a mid-range ship than it would to actually run the process that makes it - several months in some cases. An awful lot of my subscription money is just sitting there waiting for numbers to tick up...
There is also a disparity with how much city volume you can dedicate to processing (smelting, making complex parts etc.) compared to how little you can dedicate to mining the tiny veins of raw material. This change will lead to an increase in server-intensive harvester missions and busywork, with mines and wells becoming a very, very second-rate option for their own stated purpose.
With old-style ships, it never took much more than a few days to gather everything you needed, even for the largest, if that. I think new-style ships should remain proportional to that, if the underlying scale of gameplay and player experience is to remain in the same ballpark.
For that to happen, process limits per rock need to be increased not only 4 or 5 times but 100 times at least. They need to be able to compete with the harvester ships that can hoover up resource counts which actually suit the number of jobs a smelter or machine shop can have.
Regarding non-resource buildings, it is good to let them overlap because mesh is no longer allowed to overhang the site. If they couldn't overlap, you might place a building where the roof gutters slightly overhang the base of the walls, then be unable to place a road, sidewalk or other building close up to the first.
The resource requirements for new-style buildings and ships can just be massive and, in my experience, the rock numbers are simply not high enough to support building them in anything like a reasonable time. The number of processes allowed per rock needs to be greatly increased if this overlap rule is going to be enforced. Otherwise, the gap between established players and new players is going to become unbridgeable - with old players having hoards of materials that would take newbies a fraction of their life-expectancy to compete with.
For example, right now, even with overlaps allowed, it would take me longer to gather the resources needed for a mid-range ship than it would to actually run the process that makes it - several months in some cases. An awful lot of my subscription money is just sitting there waiting for numbers to tick up...
There is also a disparity with how much city volume you can dedicate to processing (smelting, making complex parts etc.) compared to how little you can dedicate to mining the tiny veins of raw material. This change will lead to an increase in server-intensive harvester missions and busywork, with mines and wells becoming a very, very second-rate option for their own stated purpose.
With old-style ships, it never took much more than a few days to gather everything you needed, even for the largest, if that. I think new-style ships should remain proportional to that, if the underlying scale of gameplay and player experience is to remain in the same ballpark.
For that to happen, process limits per rock need to be increased not only 4 or 5 times but 100 times at least. They need to be able to compete with the harvester ships that can hoover up resource counts which actually suit the number of jobs a smelter or machine shop can have.
Regarding non-resource buildings, it is good to let them overlap because mesh is no longer allowed to overhang the site. If they couldn't overlap, you might place a building where the roof gutters slightly overhang the base of the walls, then be unable to place a road, sidewalk or other building close up to the first.