What to do when asteroids are exhausted?

[Dobian]

Several of my asteroid fields are now exhausted of minerals. I want to move in new satellites to mine rads and organics. Do I have to remove the mineral satellites, or can they just sit there while I move in new mining satellites (i.e., any violation of the one satellite per asteroid field rule)?

[Suicide Junkie]

You could have had the organic and rad sats stacked in there from the beginnning.
Only one mineral sat, one organic sat and one rad sat will actually work, but you can have 3 working on different resources at the same time.

You can't do the same sort of stacking with ships or bases, though. Instead, you can just move or retrofit.

[ December 12, 2002, 21:21: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]

[geoschmo]

They can sit. When you launch the new sats they are grouped with the old sats. The game considers this one "ship" so you get the produciton from each miner comp. There is a hardcoded restriction when dealing with sats that prevents more than one of each type in a sector to work. Where on a ship or base you can have several mineral robo miners for example and get a greateer rate of mineral production, a sat group only gets the produciton from one of each type regardless of how many are in the group.

Geoschmo

[ December 12, 2002, 21:21: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Puke]

you should probably never mine things out, with bases. there is a point of diminising returns where the low resource percentage will not pay for the base's maintenance. becareful that a base is not costing more to build than you can get out of the rocks.

personally, i prefer to play with resource reduction through mining turned OFF. if strip mining a planet with facilities will not reduce its levels, why will mining from orbit do worse?

[Arkcon]

Sucked them all down did you ? ...

Well, I said it before, and I'll say it again.

There's plenty of planets out there. You need them. Other empires have got them. A moral dilemma?

Nah...they probably built a bunch of mineral miners on a 85 % world, and are taking up space with a single research facility, you can do better than that.

Come on over to the Dark Side

[Dobian]

I didn't know stacking was okay if the sats mine different things. Oy! I've needlessly hamstrung myself. I'll fix that when I play tonight. Now I'll finally be able to grow my fleet past its current size.

[Arkcon]

When you add sats, make sure you research and use the level 3 robominers. You get the same rate of depletion, so why shouldn't you get the best yield. A base is really the way to go however.

Have you seen this: Link to Encyclopedia Malfadorica entry

[tesco samoa]

u could always convert them to planets... put value improvements on them... blow them up and repeat...

[Wardad]

Originally posted by Dobian:
Several of my asteroid fields are now exhausted of minerals...

Depletion of minerals by remote mining is figured in the simplest way possible. It depelets at one rate per turn no matter how much minerals your pulling from it. A SAT maybe cheaper, but your wasting a lot of potential resources from that field.
So the more experienced players prefer a large base with many of one type of miner. When the field is depleted of Minerals then the base can be refitted for RADs or Organics.
Remember the Base gets a maintenance reduction and a ship doesn't. A ship may cost more in maintenance than it can mine.
One more thing.... With the right tech a planet can be created from an asteroid field. The planet will have the fields resource Ratings. So think twice before remote mining.

[LostCommander]

Is it possible to set the game to not reduce the value of the remotely mined space object?