[Noble713]

I also turned off the "deplete asteroid" flag in my MOD. Combine this with a 100-pt. increase (I think, I may have left it alone) in the resources mined, and robo-miners are actually useful.

If you put 3 Robo-Miners on a space station at an asteroid over 100%, you get 2000 minerals of pure profit every turn. This gets better with higher level miners and richer asteroids (up to about 3500 minerals profit).

In my Last game I had built about 20 mining stations and they were vital to running my large fleet (a 200-ship fleet with 800kT cruisers and a 3500kt heavy battleship is expensive). It's important to defend your stations though, as I lost an entire system of them to cloaked ships and the loss forced me to halt all new construction.