Birth of the Empires

Instead, my grand dream is the Balancer mod.
1. (which eliminates sabotage for the first 700 turns,
2. adds trade and resources routes,
3. increases deritium mining,
4. maybe adds morale boosts in later turns
5. Ultimately adds more levels of research
6. And some surprises...)

Then use multiplayer to configure six fully balanced empires.

Then wage intragalactic war.

Then empires all have different motivations and the player chooses based on whim and who they identify as in that game.

Then it's more like a science fiction show as all empires think, "Those folks are dangerous and not like us. Let's get along with them and ally to eliminate a third party. And keep doing that until it's between us and them."

It's the difference between a hardscrabble skirmish with daggers
vs
A full bore, nailbiter using vast fleets of diverse ships and the best infantry to do ground invasions.

Why?

Because the AI and the player aren't strong enough to truly wage war until turn #600+. And it won't properly build an empire but will fight pointless battles accomplishing nothing. But if someone designs six empires with mighty ships and lethal solders, it's a different story...entirely. Now any empire could conquer the galaxy. It's six superpowers waging fullscale war.

I think most people want to play that kind of game as they don't have 2000 hours to resolve a campaign. Maybe they want to do it in 3 days so 24 to 72 hours...and drink a beer and eat pizza and have fun.

About turn #170 or so, you will be struggling to grow and have adequate resources and configuring it makes you crazy doing all the routes. So what you start doing is selling surplus in sectors and selling it down and then looking in the systems overview and resources and buying the now cheaper deflated in value resources wherever the numbers of resources are too low to support creating infrastructure. Sell high, and buy low, as in progressive turns, it's meticulous and boring to create and break and create and break ad nauseum resource routing.

This is why I want to address resource routing in the Balancer mod as I think this is unrealistic.

My way is far more profitable and takes less time and causes less headaches.

Do both and instead of either or if you want but when dealing with more than fifty inhabited sectors, it is too much minutia. It's one of the least well designed aspects of the game.

Here's my theory.

I think any empire that can create and terraform colonies could manage resource routing to all of their colonies or they wouldn't even bother colonizing.

What would be difficult would be having enough of a surplus of mining to distribute to minor alien races just to improve diplomatic relations as the empires are growing and so there would be little surplus.

So mostly, the issue is trying to achieve a surplus so the empires can maintain expansion through the BotE supply chain. And trade income that is not profitable is probably why the minor aliens and major aliens NEVER establish trade with you. It's illogical to create trade as it confers too little a benefit and the AI wants to win, so why bother?

At first you are struggling too much to even considered making freighter runs with transport ships hauling ore/crystals. Later, you have too much mcromanagement and can make more profit with my method, to bother with making freighter runs as every transport ship could make you more money making outposts and starbases and scrapping them instead.

See?

What BotE most needs for Trade to even exist is a finished product sort of trade. Rare goods made on certain planets would be desired far away and so that is how spice runs in medieval times became so valuable.

Or doing colonial times, sugar availability meant rum could be made and slaves harvested the sugar thus trade existed in slaves, sugar, and rum.

Ore and crystals are not rare but ubiquitous so why trade them? It's a conundrum in BotE.