Newbie Mining Questions
 

Hey, can any of you old pro's help me? Unable to easily move my colony mining above 20,000 or so per turn, and frozen out by new less than four neighboring empires who have gone to war and insist on staying there, even though two are 'brotherly', I tried to find a way to increase my mineral production.

Problem is that the maintenance on the miners I built is usually higher than the ore that they process!

I have Mineral refining level 2, but level 3 costs far too many research points to swing righ now.

Am I missing something here?

Re: Newbie Mining Questions
 

If you have time, research Planet Utilization.
(3 years build time + heavy research, about 5 times productivity)

LEVEL 1-3
- Conditions improvement plants will help increase your population, adding production bonuses.
LEVEL 2-6
- Value improvement plants will directly increase your output by increasing the value upto 3% per year.
LEVEL 6-9
- Atmosphere converters will quintuple your facility space on non-breathable worlds (they take 2 years to complete their effect, though).

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Also, research stellar manip level 3 for monoliths.
(5 turns per facility, about 75% more production)

First replace your organic & radioactives production with monoliths, then slowly replace the mineral miners.
- Before you start replacing mineral miners, get a resource converter. (Chemistry LEV 2 + Resource Manip)

To see if a planet is worthy of conVersion to monoliths, compare:
A) 900 * highest resource %
(extractor lev 3)
B) 630 * (SUM of all 3 resouce %'s)
(monolith 3 times 90% efficient resource converter)
Almost all planets will be worth converting, especially if you are using value improvement plants as well.

When you've completed all of the monolith conVersions, you will probably be using the resource converter every turn, but your total output will be much higher.

Combine both of these, and you will have a utopian civilization within a decade, producing 5x the resources through option 1, and roughly 75% more resources via option 2.


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For your specific case, 100k research for monoliths 1.
MM 1: 800 resources
Mono 1: 500 x 3 resources.

If you then replace all the organic and rad extractors with monoliths, you should end up with a net gain in org& rad, as well as the additional mineral output.

Especially on your homeworld(s), since they have equal values in all three, putting monoliths on them will double your output, and your organic/radioactives planets can be diverted to minerals.
DONT FORGET: "At war", yet "brotherly" aliens will trade your unwanted rads & orgs for minerals (at a 1:1 ratio, plus a small bribe)
That is as good or better than a resource converter facility!

[ 02 January 2002: Message edited by: suicide_junkie ]</p>

Re: Newbie Mining Questions
 

I have never built the remote miners for two reasons.
a. The maintainance cost of a mining ship exceeds the return.
b. I want resources when it's time to colonize that planet.
(note: planets can be created from asteroids).

Some players have placed the remote miners on a large SAT and avoid paying the maintenance.

My quickest fix for more minerals is to upgrade to level 2 miner facilities. Level 2 takes one turn to build, and level 3 takes two turns usually. I don't bother researching mining above level 3 because there are better enhancements.

The next best fix is in the computer research. Good infrastucture enhancements and a ships computer too.


UPGRADES HAPPEN!!!

Re: Newbie Mining Questions
 

I've found the best strategy for remote miners is to put them on a space station/base station/starbase hull. Assuming you have at least cruiser hulls, you can put a spaceyard component on a cruiser with (IIRC) 5 engines; move that to an asteroid sector, and build a mining base. The base works better than a ship because of the 50% maintenance bonus for bases. Not to mention that you can cram a LOT of mining components on the larger bases...