How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

Sorry for the bizillion questions - I couldn't find the answers in the manual.

I was wondering what I need to do to use robot miners on asteriods? If I do this, will the system need a Space Port so the minerals can be used my the empire?

I was also wondering what effects storms have on gameplay? They kind of seem to just sit there. Right now I don't see a reason why I would go through one.

TIA

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

No, you don't need a space port for remote miners.

Storms interfer with sensors, and targeting, amd in SEIII they disabled sheilds, however I'm not sure if that still happens in SEIV.

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I AM Canadian.

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

Hi there,

I was wondering about ship-design with robo-miners (etc.) I tried to build a small size
class ship with one robo-miner and ended up
with the ship costing more maintainance than
the mined minerals.
Next thing I tried working with satelites.
Works quite fine.
Any suggestions for shipdesigns yet ?

Greetings
Ferendra

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

I discovered early on that a miner ship costs more in maintenance than it can mine, so I gave up on them until someone here (Saben?) discovered that you can mount the mining components in large satellites, so you build the satellites, load 'em in a satellite transport, and deploy them in the asteroid field. Apparently they work quickly enough that you can use them to fill your treasury and then retrieve them when full. He said it worked quite well.

In my current game, I intend to do this, but have only teched up to medium satellites (it's expensive research) so far, and they are too small.

Storms hide ships so in theory, you could park a spy ship or even a whole fleet in a storm in an enemy's system, and your enemy could be completely unaware of it's presence.

Since you don't get to see enemy ship movements on their turns, an enemy ship in
your system can just "disappear". Unless you have a view on all the surrounding systems or know the warp points are out of range, you can't be sure if it warped out or is still lurking in a storm. I don't know if the AI can be fooled if you tried this trick.

I also think there's high-end tech that lets you create/destroy storms.

Anyways, that's the only reasons I can think of to go into one.

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

I've got the same problem as Ferendra. I can't come up with a remote miner ship design that will cover its own maintenance costs. I suppose you could use large satellites, but that takes a lot of research to get them, which means you can't remote mine until much later in the game. That doesn't make sense. Maybe this is a job for the drones (whenever they get added)?

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

Well a escort class ship, having a bridge, crew quaters, life support, two engines and 1 robo miner has little maintinence. The only problem I see is that since you only get 600 units of production when the precentage is at 100%, it doesn't take you too long to mine out a asteroid or planet and then make in cost ineffective.

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

I've found what appears to be a bug in the code related to remote mining. There is a parameter in the settings.txt file for whether asteriods are depleted by remote mining. I set this to "False". However, they still deplete (1% per turn).

In the in-game setup, I do NOT have "finite resources" turned on, and colony planets do not deplete.

I am aware that changes to the game files do not affect saved games (apparently all the data from the files at the time the game was set up is stored in the save game file). To test changes to the text files, I relaunch the program after editing the file, then start a new game at high tech and play a couple of turns to test.

Other changes to settings.txt seem to work (max systems, for example). It is just this one concerning remote mining that doesn't (so far).

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

Yes, this has been a known bug for some time. They finally found what was wrong and fixed it. This will be in the patch coming soon to a site hear you. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

The first thing I will do when I get the full Version is to kill (cut in half or so) the build cost of remote mining components so it actuall makes sense to remote mine. It will make the ships cheap to build but they will also be costeffective to operate so I can live with that.

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

On storms...

Can you create a storm right on top of an enemy planet, or a warp point?

(Might be tempting, if mildly eccentric -- a cloaked CA skulking about, manipulating space weather...)

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

Jubala, don't kill the mining. Use Large satellietes. Its EXTREMELY cost effective. Build a few hundred sattelites, fill up your reserves, and load them back up onto the carrier. Haven't tried fighters yet, though.

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

The problem with sats is that you can only use large sats, and to tech up to them costs quite a large amount of research points (I'm guessing at least 500K), and then you have to spend the resources and time to build the sats and the sat layer. So they aren't useful for mining until quite a bit into a low-tech game.

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

Sats are 50,000 per level; you get the first level for free. Researching the next two will take a total of 250,000 RPs.

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

Hmmm. I had thought I needed to research construction tech before getting satellites, but I just checked and I was mistaken - you do start with Sat 1. But it doesn't cost 50K per level for me. Level 2 is 100K, but Level 3 costs 225K for me, not 150K.

Is it really 150K for Sat level 3 for you? I'm seeing the 225K the (default) medium tech cost setting.

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

Research cost will vary with how much you set it to be at the start of the game.

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

Lintman: Thank you for blowing away good theory with bad empirical evidence. ;-)

I'd read through the data files, and somewhere they claimed that the cost N listed in the tech data files was the cost per level, with each level costing N*Level RPs. Because of a minor technical detail (I'd stopped sleeping because of SEIV, so my wife & I agreed to uninstall it for a time), I'm currently running on lots of notes I took before the uninstall.

I'm actually a bit annoyed; I've done a fair amount of calculation based on the tech formula above. Should have known I needed to double-check with the game itself.... 8/

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

LOL! My wife would love to get me to uninstall this game, too! I'm resisting the idea so far, though!

Re: How to Mine Asteroids?/Effects of Storms?
 

I'm actually hopefuly that eventually she'll play it - she's a gamer, and was a True MOO Addict for a while. So far, though, her attitude is that I can figure out how the thing works, then teach her what should have been in the docos. 8/

All of which is going quite slowly until we have a vacation and I can afford the lack of sleep. 8)