And while I may disagree with the stance on resource regeneration, I am willing to withhold my judgement until A. There is more information on planet exploration and the game's length or B. I get my hands on a planet exploration demo.
I'm all for having a design discussion on this if you disagree. The reason as to the why for this is as follows.
If a player can visit the same planet over and over again it creates a negative reinforcement loop for the individual.
First, the player will have access to a static known resource location that they can continually mine. They want the fastest reward with the least amount of work. This is just an aspect of human nature that exists and could spawn it's own psychology gameplay discussion. (I actually give a talk at a schools about how this effects game design and gameplay) but I digress. While this sounds great from the player's end of things it's pretty harmful to the game and the game's core game loop.
As an example, let's say the player finds a planet that has a good enough amount of resources for them to work with. Whenever they need resources they are just going to keep going back to this planet to get them. This hurts the motivation game loop for exploration. The compulsion game loop is visit system > search planet > find nothing of worth (negative reward - because they can get all they need from their mining planet), rinse and repeat till the player finds something. They are performing the action that they are supposed to be doing but they are getting a negative reinforcement for it because they haven't found anything. Now their exploration feels like searching for a needle in a haystack for where the game may have hidden a story location. The core of their searching ultimately leads to more negative rewards than positive rewards, with that much negative reinforcement the player starts to think they are doing something wrong.
That type exploration without purpose for the vast majority of people isn't very fun. But if the player has a goal, they are looking for more resources because they know they need them to accomplish X, they are exploring with purpose. Now for an example with resources being finite at a location. The player has the same need as above, they need resources. However they now know they can't visit the same place more than once because they learned that when they visited a planet that they have already mined once that it's empty. Now the need and desire to explore new areas is strong, the player needs resources and has a reason to go someplace they haven't been before. The player's compulsion loop changes to visit system > search planet > get resources (positive reward). Now regardless of the amount of resources the player gets, the player got a positive reward because the access to resources is finite. The player needed the resources because they know they aren't everywhere. Each time the player explores they are given a positive reward for their efforts not a negative one. Their goal is to get resources, but during the course of meeting that goal they might discover something cool along the way.
The way that I was trying to spin resource regeneration was that it would take place over a very, very long period of time. My intention with such a change would be the ease of late-game mining if you were able to re-visit and re-harvest previously visited planets, as otherwise my fear is that you would start to experience a dilemma such as that seen in SC II where nearing the end of the game it becomes difficult to find a planet with any valuable resources remaining, and so it becomes a very expensive and tedious trip back and forth trying to find a planet worthy of exploration and that hasn't been mined already.
Exploration would still be a major incentive in the same way, as planet resources would not be spawning once every month or so, the rate of replenishment I was more considering was once every average game (or about ~4 years in game time). The end result of this would make it impossible to camp a sector, or even a section of the galaxy and farm it for resources, and it would give a greater push for exploration. What it would do is that after most, if not all, of the map is explored, and the player is simply mining for resource and not exploration sake (although I do think it would be interesting to have some late-game discoveries triggered by a due date, so the player still has an incentive to explore late in the game), then I believe resource regeneration during this time would mitigate the long and exhausting grind for new and expensive technology (which, in SC II resulted in me sometimes just grinding enemy ships until I could buy new kit, which wasn't exactly very fun).
I agree 100% that resource regeneration should not be a normal occurrence, since that would essentially kill all benefit of exploring, but I also think that the late-game player should not be punished by a lack of resources in the late game (especially when it is needed there the most). If, say, such long-term resource regeneration was implemented in tandem with a dynamic world, one that is impacted and changed by your actions (including, and especially areas that you previously visited) I think it would be refreshing and entertaining to re-visit these areas in the late-game instead of having to fly over to some corner of the universe to find a specific resource. Not to mention that if these worlds, or at least, terrain/biome, interactivity and possible alien populace would change within these visited planets over the course of your actions I think it would be quite enjoyable to visit these places once more, and to observe how they have changed over the course of the game, not only drastically increasing the perceived size of the game (all the while it remains the exact same dimensions physically) but it would also be an engaging way to collect end-game resources.
I wasn't able to put my thoughts into all I wanted to say, but that is the gist of it. If I remember something more I will be sure to share it if I believe it to be of any worthy contribution to this discussion.
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