While I generally agree on being careful with exotics usage.
This comes down to how does the logistic/recruiting side of thing look like in combination with how well/fast can we scale our industry.
There are loads of trade-offs here. One extra Starcrystal Farm makes enough Starcrystals for a hundred Starblaster Rifles a turn, and would cost 5 AP. Consider a couple of example scenarios:
Scenario 1: If one Foundry can produce a 100 Starblaster Rifles a turn (1000 EP worth) then it would be 7 AP to build every 100/Turn worth of automated capability.
Scenario 2: If one Foundry can produce 20 Starblaster Rifles a turn (200 EP worth), then it would be 15 AP to build a 100/Turn automated capability.
Then compare these two scenarios for Sunblaster rifles
Scenario 1: If one Foundry can build 167 Sunblaster Rifles a Turn (1000 AP worth), then it would be 1.7 AP to build 100/Turn worth of automated capability
Scenario 2: If one Foundry can produce 33 Starblaster Rifles a turn (200 EP worth), then it would be 6 AP to build a 100/Turn automated capability.
In Scenario 1, each Starblaster Rifle costs 4.4 times as much as a Sunblaster
In Scenario 2, each Starblaster Rifle costs 2.5 times as much as a Sunblaster
Clearly, I think, we 're much more likely to pick the Starblasters as a standard weapon in Scenario 2, as it's more likely that they're 2.5 times or more as valuable than they are likely to be 4.4 or more times as valuable (although even at that exchange rate, it could still be worth it, depending on relative combat performance). As the per turn Foundry outputs shrinks, the Starblaster becomes relatively more attractive.
These numbers are purely for illustrative purposes. For the avoidance of doubt they are not assertions of what will happen.
The biggest limit there is that it takes significantly more time and effort to ramp up production of Special Resources than it does equipment in general. They need very high end, very specialized equipment and equally rare and specialized skillsets that take years to train in---it's like the difference between training people to work in a car garage, and training a nuclear reactor operator. Or the difference between a truck driver and an Astronaut.
Your recruiting pool is small to even start, in high demand for at least four other critical fields, and the infrastructure for training them has limited throughput. Whereas even High Technology, for the most part, is fairly easy to ramp up.
Is that fully reflected in the hit to the next turn's production of that exotic resource, or are you saying might we hit a hard or soft cap where we can't build any more of an exotic production facility, as that really changes things?
If there is a cap, hard or soft, then I wonder if we could expand our recruiting pool to other worlds.
