Overharvest
From SOTS
Unlike games that have metal or other things to be harvested and then depleted, SotS abstracts the resource level of a planet in terms of renewable Resources. All things being equal, and with a high tech eye to recycling and replanting, a planets resource base remains the same and feeds the infrastructure at a steady pace.
Overharvest is a term which refers to the practice of permanently depleting a systems sustainable Resources.
This can be used for short term advantage in order to complete ships in a hurry or to obtain maximum benefit from a doomed colony while also denying Resources to the enemy about to capture it.
Overharvesting can be used to long term advantage by moving Resource from one system to another by the use of mining ships. Useful when the cost of terraforming the system being harvested in this fashion would be too expensive to colonize by yourself in order to access the Resources in the usual fashion. Only about 25% of the mined Resource is added to your colony's Resource base when unloading Mining ships at said colony. The rest is used as an Overharvest bonus for that colony for that turn, as if you had set the slider on that colony appropriately.
A system can be overharvested to varying degrees by using a colony slider, a mining section or a refinery section.
Overharvesting permanently decreases the Resource rating of the system being mined or the colony with the slider set to Overharvest. Overharvesting will remove asteroid fields from a planet.
There is a news event warning you every 5 turns of overharvest (and when you doubleclick a news event the map centers on where it happens). On the colony summary list (and on the main sidebar when you have a planet selected) when you overharvest the resource total turns red and in brackets you see how many points are going to be destroyed when the turn cycles.
Real World Examples of overharvesting would be pumping an oil field full of water or having children work rather than go to school. Both practices increase productivity in the short term but lead to lowered efficiency in the long term.
