Originally Posted by Malorn
If the soft-cap is "realistically" 40, then make the hard cap a little under that and call it a day. It's effectively the same and a lot easier to balance.
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I don't think you understand what a soft cap is.
Let's say both the example hard cap and example soft cap are exactly the same cap. Both will be 100 for this example.
With the hard cap, I earn 10 resources every hour. If I don't spend any for 10 hours, I will max out. After that point, no matter how much I play or how well my empire does, I will never gain any reward of any kind.
With the soft cap, I earn 10 resources every hour. Once I hit 50, I earn 5 resources every hour. Once I hit 75, I earn 2 resources every hour. Etc etc. Instead of maxing out after 10 hours, I would only be at 75, or three quarters of the maximum amount I could hold. There is still plenty of potential to still have some reward for doing well or for my empire doing well, just at a slower rate of return than if I only had a few resources.
This is why your example makes no sense. A balanced soft cap will always be higher than a balanced hard cap, because it's harder to reach the cap. It's the whole point of having a soft cap, so that you can still get something, but at a balanced rate proportional to how much you have stockpiled.
It's not hard to balance a soft cap. You just pick what amount you want the average player to have and you start diminishing their resources earned once they pass that number or slightly before it, and then you figure out what the maximum number of resources an individual player could have without it becoming unbalanced and place the end of the soft cap there, where diminished returns trickle to nothing.
Resources are meant to reward. What exactly is the harm in rewarding both big spenders and misers in their own way? It's very easy to balance and you would never run into a situation where you felt cheated out of resources because you couldn't get to an inventory station to grab some grenades or a vehicle because you were stuck in the middle of a long drawn out fight in the middle of nowhere.