Well!!!! Let it not be said that I am a guy that does not enjoy a challenge! Here are my latest findings.
I thought that structures have maintenance cost but apparently they dont. So the initial formula will work for every kind or production, be it Mineral, intelligence or Research! (
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Now! You guys gave me an idea about Remote mining. In the past I used to build Remote mining ships only for asteroid belts with Resource_PCT > 100%. Since I read your post, I thought to examine if my assuption was logical. This is what I found. I normaly build mining bases rather than ships, but what I will say applies to either.
In order to determine whether is beneficial to build on an asteroid or not, one can look to the individual resource (ie minerals) or the total. After examining this fact, I came to the conclusion that taking the total of an asteroid is pointless and not really useful. For example I might be mining on an asteroid with 135% Mineral, 50% Organic and 10% Radio. I know my ship needs radio to maintain, but I dont care spending it since I am after the 135% mineral bonus. In view of that, it would be safe to assume we would need a formula to calculate what would be the ideal % of an asteroid before we place a REMOTE MINER COMPONENT to harvest the particular resource. Lets assume we have an asteroid belt with stats:
135% Mineral, 40% bio, 60% Radio.
I would like to know IF its worth sending a ship with a Mineral mining component on to harvest minerals and what would be the min % bonus I would require (did i undestand your request successfully?). So here it goes:
if C = the bonus in percent
MC = maintenance cost of the ship AS FAR AS the resource harvested is concerned
and A = the amount of material produced by the component AS FAR AS the resource harvested is concerned
and N = number of such components on the ship
we have:
C>MC/(N*A)
This means that in order to gain advantage of an asteroid the % bonus for the material has to be greater than its MaintenanceCost divided by the product of components with their output. One can verify the formula roughly like so: if we increase the number of components N then the product of N * A becomes larger, but MC/N*A becomes smaller, hence a smaller percentage is enough to give us profit from the mining.
Real game example:
I have a ship that containts 2 mineral miners, 1 organic and 1 radio. The maintenance of the ship is 487mineral, 59 organic, 71 radio. Whats the ideal asteroid for my ship?
Answer:
Using the above formula I have:
C(mineral)>MC(mineral)/N*A
since i have 2 components N=2 and they give me 700 each in minerals. So i have:
C> 487/1400 or C>0.34 or C>34%. In otherwords, I will have profit from the asteroid as far as minerals go, for as low bonus as 35%. To verify this we have 1400 * .35 = 490 which is greater than 487. Of course, building the ship would require time and materials so something as low as that its not really viable, but gives you an idea on how low it can be before you actually make profit on it. It came as a surprise to me since I never build on anything less than 100% bonus