Remote mining

[Fyron]

"It allows you to save facility slots for other uses (spaceyards, research/ intel point production)."

I'm not sure what this means. You can't use remote mining on a colony, so how does it save facility slots?

[Alneyan]

That would mean "resources gained from remote-mining don't have to be produced on colonies, hence allowing to build more non-resources facilities on the colonies without sacrificing resource production"... okay, my phrasing is about as clear as mud stuck in a red nebulae.

[Fyron]

Wouldn't you have more resource production if you did both though?

[PvK]

I thought remote mining worked from satellites, as long as you could fit a remote mining component on a satellite, no?

[Fyron]

Which part says you can't?

[Parasite]

My requested modifications and/or items for discussion...

Why Mine...
I would add "It allows you to make use of unusable asteroids and planets. Especially when playing with no Stellar Manipulation or with restricted colonization."

Mechanics....
"but only ships and bases can do this. " good, but I would put "but only ships and bases have room for multiple mining components"

This is incorrect. "If there is more than one mining ship/base/sat stack in a sector then only the first one placed will mine." It is the LAST one built at least for bases. Very possibly it is last shipID number. I would not even include the "sat stack" here. It is very hard to get multiple stacks and it doesn't matter which sat of each type produces. You may mean a stack and base/ship combo. Sorry, I have no experience here.

I would say something like... "as the percentage of the mined resource drops, the mine will produce less and less resources. It will finally stop producing when the percentage gets to zero. If maintance is being paid on the miner, well before the zero point the mine will start to become a loosing proposition." and not just say it is zero at zero as appears in a few places.

Other thoughts....
In the remote mining fest of HomeworldWars, a strategy of a spaceyard ship building a shipyard base then moving on. The shipyard base building, and if needed, retrofitting the mining base seemed to work well. It was free to build other things after the construction was complete and while waiting to retrofit the miner to a new resource.

Mining Sats can be used to reduce the production percentages of planets destined to become enemy enclaves.

[Fyron]

Parasite said:
It is the LAST one built at least for bases. Very possibly it is last shipID number.

Really? In my experience, it always seemed like it was the first built item that did the mining. Definitely never seen a situation where I could build a base in a sector where another empire was already mining and take over. This bears testing.

[Alneyan]

Imperator Fyron said:
Wouldn't you have more resource production if you did both though?

The efficient Empire produces as many resources as needed (and to have full storage), and not one unit more. I know I just love to flirt with bankruptcy around turn 10-15, at the apex of the early expansion wave... erh, I digress.

I guess the point could be phrased more generally.

[Parasite]

In HWWars I build a mining basestation then when the tech appeared built mining starbases over them. I am 90% sure that the new base would produce and the old one would then be locked out. This even needed to be optimized in the case of a SB replacing a battlestation to have the SB mothballed until the retrofiting could bring it up to par with the old instillation.

[Glyn]

In one PBW game, I had a system with one habitable planet and a ring of asteroids. I had stealthy remote miner battle-stations on almost every asteroid when I lost control of the system to another empire. Because the invader was not using any stealth sensors, it was nearly 20 to 30 turns before he found my mining operations! By then most of the remote miners were doing poorly due to reduced resource value.

Best defense for a remote miner base is stealth armor or cloaking.