Allowing overlap is not necessarily the proper solution; it's just that, till now, it provided a workaround for a genuine problem.
As everyone is pointing out, the problem is that yields are so low.
Yes, high-end ships should require work to achieve. The big problem is that, right now, no amount of work can get them built in anything less than several months. The number of rocks per world is low enough that even with every single one being mined right now, you wouldn't be able to gather the resources for a big-ish (just big-ish, not titanic) ship in less than several weeks.
In the old days? Not a problem - that's an incentive to expand. Colonize more worlds, harvest more rocks. Except that now, there is also a hard limit on the number of planets you can own without decay, and it's not high enough to get a good extraction rate. There is a hard, absolute limit to how quickly you can extract raw materials, which no amount of work or dedication can exceed - and it's too low for the level the game is pitched at. It's not that it's hard to build big ships, it's that there is literally no way to get it done faster than a certain rate no matter how skilled or devoted you are, and that rate is frighteningly slow compared to the cost of a month's subscription.
So please, help us correct this as an urgent matter of balance. As I've said before, the best solutions are probably decreasing ship and building requirements by a factor of at least 100 for max-sized ships (perhaps even 150-200), with a curve so that small and mid ships have less of a cost reduction - or increasing the number of processes per rock by about 100. I tend to advocate the latter, because the ship build-times themselves (on the order of a month) are fine; it's just the gathering stage that's not well balanced.
Either of those fixes would keep your concrete link between rock generation and resource extraction intact, while alleviating the punishing scarcity of supply for established players with design goals bigger than about one third the design limit.
(I refer to the problem as urgent; to be fair it's more urgent for after the reset, as the timescales we're talking about mean we probably won't even get anything built before then.
But afterwards, it will be important, as experienced players who understand how to leapfrog their production up through space-harvesters of increasing capacity will soon be able to outproduce newbies and stockpile resources to such a ridiculous degree that the newbies will never catch up.
On the other hand, when any newbie can extract a competitive amount of resources by choosing a good building and putting the effort into getting it completed, the playing field remains much more level.)
As everyone is pointing out, the problem is that yields are so low.
Yes, high-end ships should require work to achieve. The big problem is that, right now, no amount of work can get them built in anything less than several months. The number of rocks per world is low enough that even with every single one being mined right now, you wouldn't be able to gather the resources for a big-ish (just big-ish, not titanic) ship in less than several weeks.
In the old days? Not a problem - that's an incentive to expand. Colonize more worlds, harvest more rocks. Except that now, there is also a hard limit on the number of planets you can own without decay, and it's not high enough to get a good extraction rate. There is a hard, absolute limit to how quickly you can extract raw materials, which no amount of work or dedication can exceed - and it's too low for the level the game is pitched at. It's not that it's hard to build big ships, it's that there is literally no way to get it done faster than a certain rate no matter how skilled or devoted you are, and that rate is frighteningly slow compared to the cost of a month's subscription.
So please, help us correct this as an urgent matter of balance. As I've said before, the best solutions are probably decreasing ship and building requirements by a factor of at least 100 for max-sized ships (perhaps even 150-200), with a curve so that small and mid ships have less of a cost reduction - or increasing the number of processes per rock by about 100. I tend to advocate the latter, because the ship build-times themselves (on the order of a month) are fine; it's just the gathering stage that's not well balanced.
Either of those fixes would keep your concrete link between rock generation and resource extraction intact, while alleviating the punishing scarcity of supply for established players with design goals bigger than about one third the design limit.
(I refer to the problem as urgent; to be fair it's more urgent for after the reset, as the timescales we're talking about mean we probably won't even get anything built before then.
But afterwards, it will be important, as experienced players who understand how to leapfrog their production up through space-harvesters of increasing capacity will soon be able to outproduce newbies and stockpile resources to such a ridiculous degree that the newbies will never catch up.
On the other hand, when any newbie can extract a competitive amount of resources by choosing a good building and putting the effort into getting it completed, the playing field remains much more level.)