Not quite true. You can totally mitigate it using both of those things together, so I consider those policies worthwhile regardless. But at maxed Tech it’s literally impossible to get rid of it if the game progresses for too long, since it’s a Year thing.
Yup, this is true. I think that ‘year’ thing needs to be capped.
It actually sorta makes sense for Rare Earth Crisis though. Those materials really are scarce and eventually we’d, for practical purposes, run out altogether. (Really, some of it is likely permanently staying in the ground as mining more would just end up no longer being cost effective. Though it’s highly doubtful that this would be a linear effect as it currently is)
As I elaborated in another thread, I do wish Year would be significantly reformed, but adding a cap on it just seems like hacking a hack to me.
Maybe having both a robust space program and Mars program could help mitigate this too? Very high levels of funding leading to asteroid mining, exoplanetary mining, and the like but would take a length amount of time to kick in.
This would definitely be a way out eventually, but it’d take ages
Like, even if we focused a lot on this, it’d take at least decades to have a hope of starting to pay off.
A private space program should also help though.
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I guess it would be fun for both of those to have some impact… but also unrealistic. Maybe this should be heavily tied to foreign relations, as rare earths are extremely unevenly distributed AFAIK, so decent trade relationships would be a good way to mitigate it. It might also be worth adding an input from the global economy, as that would drive demand for them… Might be worth adding both these as factors.
Indeed, China has the most of it, which is convenient for them seeing as how they also are gonna need a large portion of it for all their hardware factories. The US sits quite pretty as well though. Maybe that could be another regional factor, so the US version of Rare Earth Crisis happens later and/or increases more slowly and/or is less pronounced than that of the UK. It looks like only six countries in the world have access to rare earths at all based on this map
https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/deposits.html
Still, even so, it is an issue which will eventually be unavoidable. At which point, at a guess, if space mining ever actually becomes real, it will then. Because the cost considerations are gonna start to shift.
That being said, if it ever actually comes to that, assuming we can’t simply find ways around Rare Earth needs with new materials, the crisis would also be far more pronounced than what the current version does.