Vast Expanse

Aww thank you so much for playing and leaving such a detailed response! During development I wanted to include something to indicate population growth beyond the next population's cost but I didn't have the time to figure out how to fit it in sadly. And yeah when I was first was testing the game, like you I didn't consider buildings too much since it requires both the building and an extra population, but combined with research it can definitely lead to crazy high resource gain especially with the research bottleneck that happens. It's been a while since I've played so I can't remember what my high score was but I think it was maybe somewhere around the high 300s? So that is a very great score! And yeah also your right, it's just the quantity/rank of the building/tech times like some multiple, the higher level ones don't count for more.

My main inspirations for the game were Stellaris, Evolve Idle, and Pre-Civilization Bronze Age. I love the economic management side of Stellaris and wanted to try making a game that revolved around that aspect, although since the scope was much smaller than Stellaris of course there is definitely a lot I still wanted to make. In my original plan for this game I think I had a bunch of one time upgrades planned, like one that gave a little bit of energy from extractors and a little bit of resource production from buildings, and a lot of the internal workings of the game were built to support that and then like... I just didn't add them haha.

Again thank you so much for leaving this comment it means a lot :)