Asteroid Mining is tedious on Manual, expensive on Automatic

[OrnluWolfjarl]

Asteroid field mining needs rework.

On Automatic/Advisor Suggestion it can get really expensive:

1) The AI will frequently build stations right next to each other (sometimes so close, that their models are actually inside each other), which goes against the game otherwise preventing you from double-mining a resource location.

2) The AI will go for any % of resources, as long as there's something there, creating even more clutter

3) More mines per field means more freighters to supply them with fuel, more freighters to bring back resources, more maintenance and upgrade costs in general.

4) Tying up constructors to build redundant asteroid mines delays expansion to secure other critical resources.

5) On suggest, the advisor will keep spamming the player with messages to build mines on asteroids. The same problems as above arise, only now the player is more keen to turn off the advisor and get rid of the headache of either just accepting, just rejecting, or checking out the location to make sure the AI isn't going to make a mess.

On Manual:

1) The New Mining Locations tab is full of asteroids, with irrelevant and unrecognizable names such as RR123 or YX506. The player has no idea where these asteroids are, or if they belong to the same field. To find out, they'll have to double-click the asteroid, zoom in extremely close, zoom out to check the planet/system, repeat for the next entry.

2) The same tedious check as above has to be repeated to ensure we are not building mines that intersect. Only now it's more tedious, because asteroids are not sorted through any of the available methods, in their own groups. Instead asteroids from different fields are mixed together.

3) There is no feedback to know how many asteroids will actually be in the range of the new mining station to be build

4) The effective area covered by a mining station is too small, requiring multiple stations in the same asteroid field.

5) Same problems as on Automatic can arise, due to player error.

Proposed solutions:

1) No more mining area. Only 1 mining station required for every asteroid field. In case of planetary asteroids, the planet's mining station also collects resources from the orbiting asteroids.

2) On ANY sorting method of the New Mining Locations tab, asteroids of the same field should all be grouped together.

3) Give names to asteroid fields as follows: "System name - Asteroid Field A, B, C, D, E, G, F etc". This name should be in brackets next to each asteroid's specific name. (While we are at it, please name moons in a similar convention, instead of non-specific similar-sounding names, like Ipeyboras and Eeporoku, give them in brackets the name of the planet followed by a letter designation. e.g. Our Earth's moon would be Sol 3-A). This naming and sorting convention would be a big QoL help.

4) When a mine is ordered over an asteroid, then the game should eliminate from the New Mining List all asteroids that will be in the range of the new mining station.

5) The mining area of a station should be displayed when deciding to build a mining station, when we hover over the button to build. This is already displayed if ordered to build a mine with the right-click context menu, but the location where the mine ends up going is not going to be the same as where the click happened.

6) An even better solution than 5) would be to to immediately display a greyed out model of a mining station with its effective mining area displayed around it, when a mine is queued at a certain location.

[Omena]

This can indeed cause some frustration. However, the situation is not quite as bad as it might seem.

First of all, you can change the mining ranges. Go to the ComponentDefinitions.xml file in the "Data"-folder. All large mining engines have an "ExtractionRangeAsteroid"-setting. If you set it to 10000, a single mining station will be enough to mine entire asteroid fields. You have to do this each time the file gets updated though.

You also don't really need to care about abundances that much. The limiting factor is often transport capacity, not mining rate. You can see this by looking at the stock level in your mining bases. Having additional mines can, in fact, increase the rate you get resources even though they overlap or have low abundances.

The cost of mining bases is paid by your private sector. They often have more than enough money, so you don't really need to care about these expenses. The private sector can't build new mines if it's broke, so it tends to stay pretty healthy economically.

You also want the private sector to spend money on upgrades and ship commissions. These are your main source of extra income. Having more mines can mean more usable credits for you.

Construction ships have priorities in what they build. These additional mines should not delay them that much.

And, yeah, pretty much set base construction to automated after the early game. You can manually queue up construction orders if you want to prioritise something and the automation work pretty well (apart from having these extra mining bases).

Asteroid mining locations being grouped together would be good. There is always a central asteroid that could group them. Dunno how hard that is to implement in practice.

[Emperor0Akim]

Asteroid field mining needs rework.

On Automatic/Advisor Suggestion it can get really expensive:

4) Tying up constructors to build redundant asteroid mines delays expansion to secure other critical resources.

On Manual:

3) There is no feedback to know how many asteroids will actually be in the range of the new mining station to be build



Proposed solutions:


2) On ANY sorting method of the New Mining Locations tab, asteroids of the same field should all be grouped together.

3) Give names to asteroid fields as follows: "System name - Asteroid Field A, B, C, D, E, G, F etc". This name should be in brackets next to each asteroid's specific name. (While we are at it, please name moons in a similar convention, instead of non-specific similar-sounding names, like Ipeyboras and Eeporoku, give them in brackets the name of the planet followed by a letter designation. e.g. Our Earth's moon would be Sol 3-A). This naming and sorting convention would be a big QoL help.

4) When a mine is ordered over an asteroid, then the game should eliminate from the New Mining List all asteroids that will be in the range of the new mining station.

Automatic 4 ) Solution Suggestion : Automation mode of Construction Ship is an Check-Box selection, so you can stack jobtypes you want the ship to do, instead of exclusive selection.

Manual 3 ) There is feedback in a way, the mining locations view adds up the percentages in range into a single value instead of multiple percentages.

Solutions All ) YES, YES Many Times Yes.
and as I like to repeat : An option to Sort by System !

[OrnluWolfjarl]

Automatic 4 ) Solution Suggestion : Automation mode of Construction Ship is an Check-Box selection, so you can stack jobtypes you want the ship to do, instead of exclusive selection.

What do you mean? Like Auto-Salvage, Auto-Build, etc? Sure, but the problem is moving on to build other mining stations on other resources. If you put building mines on automatic, then the AI will just move down the list of mining locations, meaning you'll probably get to have at least a few duplicates on asteroid fields.

Manual 3 ) There is feedback in a way, the mining locations view adds up the percentages in range into a single value instead of multiple percentages.

Sure, but the way asteroids are sorted it's meaningless and still extremely tedious. You have to scroll up and down, past other asteroids, remembering 2-4 different numbers. If the information was displayed on the actual asteroid card, maybe I could live with it. I mostly avoid building asteroid mines from the list because I'm tired of doing this.

This can indeed cause some frustration. However, the situation is not quite as bad as it might seem.

First of all, you can change the mining ranges. Go to the ComponentDefinitions.xml file in the "Data"-folder. All large mining engines have an "ExtractionRangeAsteroid"-setting. If you set it to 10000, a single mining station will be enough to mine entire asteroid fields. You have to do this each time the file gets updated though.

You also don't really need to care about abundances that much. The limiting factor is often transport capacity, not mining rate. You can see this by looking at the stock level in your mining bases. Having additional mines can, in fact, increase the rate you get resources even though they overlap or have low abundances.

The cost of mining bases is paid by your private sector. They often have more than enough money, so you don't really need to care about these expenses. The private sector can't build new mines if it's broke, so it tends to stay pretty healthy economically.

You also want the private sector to spend money on upgrades and ship commissions. These are your main source of extra income. Having more mines can mean more usable credits for you.

Construction ships have priorities in what they build. These additional mines should not delay them that much.

And, yeah, pretty much set base construction to automated after the early game. You can manually queue up construction orders if you want to prioritise something and the automation work pretty well (apart from having these extra mining bases).

Asteroid mining locations being grouped together would be good. There is always a central asteroid that could group them. Dunno how hard that is to implement in practice.

I don't want to mod the game right now, because of instability issues.

Fair points, but the problem is mostly mid and early game, where resources are few and constructors even rarer. I've seen this happen: I needed Silicon for my shipbuilding, but my wonderful automated constructors instead of building a mine at the neighboring Silicon planet, they went to the other side of the system to build 3 Steel mines on 3 adjacent asteroids.

It also doesn't solve the bigger problem of the UI not being very user-friendly. Sure, it's nice to look at, but a lot of things require incredible amounts of scrolling, clicking, going back and forth, etc.

[zgrssd]

Asteroid field mining needs rework.

On Automatic/Advisor Suggestion it can get really expensive:

1) The AI will frequently build stations right next to each other (sometimes so close, that their models are actually inside each other), which goes against the game otherwise preventing you from double-mining a resource location.

2) The AI will go for any % of resources, as long as there's something there, creating even more clutter

3) More mines per field means more freighters to supply them with fuel, more freighters to bring back resources, more maintenance and upgrade costs in general.

4) Tying up constructors to build redundant asteroid mines delays expansion to secure other critical resources.

5) On suggest, the advisor will keep spamming the player with messages to build mines on asteroids. The same problems as above arise, only now the player is more keen to turn off the advisor and get rid of the headache of either just accepting, just rejecting, or checking out the location to make sure the AI isn't going to make a mess.

On Manual:

1) The New Mining Locations tab is full of asteroids, with irrelevant and unrecognizable names such as RR123 or YX506. The player has no idea where these asteroids are, or if they belong to the same field. To find out, they'll have to double-click the asteroid, zoom in extremely close, zoom out to check the planet/system, repeat for the next entry.

2) The same tedious check as above has to be repeated to ensure we are not building mines that intersect. Only now it's more tedious, because asteroids are not sorted through any of the available methods, in their own groups. Instead asteroids from different fields are mixed together.

3) There is no feedback to know how many asteroids will actually be in the range of the new mining station to be build

4) The effective area covered by a mining station is too small, requiring multiple stations in the same asteroid field.

5) Same problems as on Automatic can arise, due to player error.

Proposed solutions:

1) No more mining area. Only 1 mining station required for every asteroid field. In case of planetary asteroids, the planet's mining station also collects resources from the orbiting asteroids.

2) On ANY sorting method of the New Mining Locations tab, asteroids of the same field should all be grouped together.

3) Give names to asteroid fields as follows: "System name - Asteroid Field A, B, C, D, E, G, F etc". This name should be in brackets next to each asteroid's specific name. (While we are at it, please name moons in a similar convention, instead of non-specific similar-sounding names, like Ipeyboras and Eeporoku, give them in brackets the name of the planet followed by a letter designation. e.g. Our Earth's moon would be Sol 3-A). This naming and sorting convention would be a big QoL help.

4) When a mine is ordered over an asteroid, then the game should eliminate from the New Mining List all asteroids that will be in the range of the new mining station.

5) The mining area of a station should be displayed when deciding to build a mining station, when we hover over the button to build. This is already displayed if ordered to build a mine with the right-click context menu, but the location where the mine ends up going is not going to be the same as where the click happened.

6) An even better solution than 5) would be to to immediately display a greyed out model of a mining station with its effective mining area displayed around it, when a mine is queued at a certain location.

0. Make sure you verified the gamefiles. They tended to break a lot. And the core issue of double building or overlapping building is the opposite of my experience.

Automatic

1. I have seen that 0 times.
The second a Mining station is planned, all other Asteroids nearby become unavailible. I could not force them to build a mine there.

2. That actually is a problem. One I already reported. Especially bad if there are way better resoruces in the same field

3. If you need more mines in that field, you need more resources from that field.
I admit the game should actually account for planned bases when determining shortages. But even that is a minor issue.

4+5 Not encountered, as hte base issue is lacking for me.

On Manual

1. Again, as you can not order a double build when trying to, the issue does not exist.

2. On Priority the asteroids are sorted by distance first, demanded resources second. Again, the issue does not appear in my games.

3. "Hitting the most asteroids" is irrelevant. "Getting the most yield is all that matters". And since the yields include all bodies in range, there is no issue.

4. That is the advantage of Mining Station range and mining bonuses.

5. Again, issue is not supported by my experience

[Emperor0Akim]

Automatic 4 ) Solution Suggestion : Automation mode of Construction Ship is an Check-Box selection, so you can stack jobtypes you want the ship to do, instead of exclusive selection.

What do you mean? Like Auto-Salvage, Auto-Build, etc? Sure, but the problem is moving on to build other mining stations on other resources. If you put building mines on automatic, then the AI will just move down the list of mining locations, meaning you'll probably get to have at least a few duplicates on asteroid fields.

What I meant is, that you should be able to select multiple automation modes for the construction ship,
build resort and research and repair
instead of do either a single automation or all automation.

Also I give you, that I would like access to the global build queue and reorder in which order stuff gets build.

[Emperor0Akim]

Automatic

1. I have seen that 0 times.
The second a Mining station is planned, all other Asteroids nearby become unavailible. I could not force them to build a mine there.

2. That actually is a problem. One I already reported. Especially bad if there are way better resoruces in the same field

3. If you need more mines in that field, you need more resources from that field.
I admit the game should actually account for planned bases when determining shortages. But even that is a minor issue.

4+5 Not encountered, as hte base issue is lacking for me.

On Manual

1. Again, as you can not order a double build when trying to, the issue does not exist.

2. On Priority the asteroids are sorted by distance first, demanded resources second. Again, the issue does not appear in my games.

3. "Hitting the most asteroids" is irrelevant. "Getting the most yield is all that matters". And since the yields include all bodies in range, there is no issue.

4. That is the advantage of Mining Station range and mining bonuses.

5. Again, issue is not supported by my experience

Automatic
4+5 are a result of 2, so you have seen it

On Manual
5 should be, because it is true for all base building, I should be able to tell my minions exactly where I want a base to be.

[OrnluWolfjarl]

What I meant is, that you should be able to select multiple automation modes for the construction ship,
build resort and research and repair
instead of do either a single automation or all automation.

Also I give you, that I would like access to the global build queue and reorder in which order stuff gets build.

Oh I get you know. Yeah that would be great to have!

[Omena]

Fair points, but the problem is mostly mid and early game, where resources are few and constructors even rarer. I've seen this happen: I needed Silicon for my shipbuilding, but my wonderful automated constructors instead of building a mine at the neighboring Silicon planet, they went to the other side of the system to build 3 Steel mines on 3 adjacent asteroids.

It also doesn't solve the bigger problem of the UI not being very user-friendly. Sure, it's nice to look at, but a lot of things require incredible amounts of scrolling, clicking, going back and forth, etc.

You can find all the crucial resources on your home system. After you have saturated it with mines, you won't run into critical resources shortages that much. That being said, it is probably a good idea to manually order you mine construction before that (2-3 constructions ships are more than enough). Just queue up one steel/mebnar/aculon/cuprica and caslon first and then the rest of the construction resources.

These overlapping mines are not intended btw. If you encounter construction ships going for them, it might be worthwhile to provide the devs with a savegame. Sometimes these things are hard to squash.

[rxnnxs]

Asteroid field mining needs rework.
..
Proposed solutions:

1) No more mining area. Only 1 mining station required for every asteroid field. In case of planetary asteroids, the planet's mining station also collects resources from the orbiting asteroids.
..

You have very good points and list this very good. I would love to see all of this.
But I like the mining ranges. Maybe we could set them for ourself.
I like watching those little shuttles travelling. But the amount of the ships should be reduceded to one at a time per mined object..
And the range should be kept.
Maybe the small asteroids/cluster could count as one asteroid field. Problem solved?!

[Miravlix]

Asteroid field mining needs rework.

On Automatic/Advisor Suggestion it can get really expensive:

No it can't get expensive, since it cost you NOTHING.

It takes quite a bit of effort to make to many mining stations for the private economy to get in trouble, the few bad stations the automatic setting builds is not enough to create an issue. The main cost of a station is "200" credits, even building 100 to many mining stations and you would still be fine.

You need an extremely low private income and an extremely large explored and mined universe. To few colonized worlds while having 10000+ mining stations?

In DWU we could as Sacturan tax our planets so heavily that you starved the private economy, I've not even gotten close to starving it so far in DW2, the private economy always end up with billions in cash and an insane cash flow.

[SamuraiProgrmmr]

If I am not confused, upgrading mining stations moves cash from the private economy to the state economy. This would be at least one reason why 'more is better' - at least in the early middle game.

JMO

[Ranbir]

I'd like it if mining stations are only for planets and for asteroids it's all relying on mining ships.

[maggiecow]

I'd like it if mining stations are only for planets and for asteroids it's all relying on mining ships.

Makes sense to me.

[zgrssd]

I'd like it if mining stations are only for planets and for asteroids it's all relying on mining ships.

I'd like it if mining stations are only for planets and for asteroids it's all relying on mining ships.

Makes sense to me.

It would make more sense to place a mining Ship hub into or near the asteroid field, so STL miningships can do all the work and the transport is handeled by FTL freighters.

Oh wait. That is what the game calls a mining station.

[maggiecow]

I'd like it if mining stations are only for planets and for asteroids it's all relying on mining ships.

I'd like it if mining stations are only for planets and for asteroids it's all relying on mining ships.

Makes sense to me.

It would make more sense to place a mining Ship hub into or near the asteroid field, so STL miningships can do all the work and the transport is handeled by FTL freighters.

Oh wait. That is what the game calls a mining station.

I think you may have missed the original post where he wanted an ALTERNATIVE to the existing system because... I mean, it's right in the thread title.

[zgrssd]

I'd like it if mining stations are only for planets and for asteroids it's all relying on mining ships.

Makes sense to me.

It would make more sense to place a mining Ship hub into or near the asteroid field, so STL miningships can do all the work and the transport is handeled by FTL freighters.

Oh wait. That is what the game calls a mining station.

I think you may have missed the original post where he wanted an ALTERNATIVE to the existing system because... I mean, it's right in the thread title.

???

The title of this thread is "Asteroid Mining is tedious on Manual, expensive on Automatic"
And it was not made by you.
So I am not sure what you ar referring too?

[OrnluWolfjarl]

It would make more sense to place a mining Ship hub into or near the asteroid field, so STL miningships can do all the work and the transport is handeled by FTL freighters.

Oh wait. That is what the game calls a mining station.

I think you may have missed the original post where he wanted an ALTERNATIVE to the existing system because... I mean, it's right in the thread title.

???

The title of this thread is "Asteroid Mining is tedious on Manual, expensive on Automatic"
And it was not made by you.
So I am not sure what you ar referring too?

He's correct. You can take the time to read, instead of being sarcastic...