quote:
Originally posted by Triumvir Emphy:
Sat's are economical because 1) you don't pay maintenance and 2) you get to pick them up and move them once you have stripped the target.
Well, at first I thought this was a great idea, so I went and tested it. What I found, was that I only got resources from ONE of the satellites in a group.
I colonized a huge planet, filled it with cargo space, and built 1000 farming satellites. It had a moon that I colonized and value improved to 250%. I abandoned the moon, then launched the 1000 satallites as a group. Instead of 800 per component * 1000 satellites * 2.5 planet modifier = 2,000,000 organics that turn, I only got 2,000. Bummer.
So, since the planet still drops by 1% because you mined it, satellites are one of the least effective methods of remote mining. One exception is if you play with a huge maintenance penalty, so that you rarely recover your maintenance costs on mining ships, but in that case you shouldn't be remote mining anyway.
-Drake