Alternative to passive mining

[Gideon77]

PROBLEM:

Passive mining basically removes the need to actively play the game. Empire building games are about spending time and effort to accomplish a goal, not about letting the game automatically give you whatever you want.

 

SOLUTION:

DU already has the ability to "harvest". Instead of having passive mining units that play the game for you, why not have the game place a 5 or 6 large ore rocks on each territory. These large rocks will never change shape, or go away. They act like "mines". When you "harvest" one of these large rocks, then they produce 4 smaller rocks. When harvested. each of these smaller rocks produce the tiny rocks, and harvesting the tiny rocks produce the ore. The size of the tiny rocks can be adjusted to determine the maximum amount of ore a person can gather per hour. Anyone that has ever played other space building games knows that what I am suggesting is similar to the way two other games (I won't name them here) do it, and it works quite well for them. So it is already a tried and proven way of dealing with ore mining. This way the more active the player is, the more ore they get. The ore never runs out. And the game never has to tell other players about any changes in the landscape due to mining. For instance on Alioth every territory could have 1 of each T1 ore, and 1 random T2. And the game could use this to get rid of all the tiny 20L ore rocks scattered everywhere currently.

[space_man]

You still need to be active once a week or so to recalibrate. If your doing any serious amount of resource gathering that is plenty of time spent on auto mining. Most players are not going to setup mining for every type of ore as that would require going to several planets and moons, not to mention the bonus that you get for having neighbor tiles would be lost.

 

There's already asteroid mining but that is still pretty meh.

 

I agree that the current system causes issues with making it too easy to get ore compared to other means, however I think a better solution(s) would be:

 

* Reseeding tiles every 3 months

* Adding bigger and smaller asteroids, redo the spawn mechanics to be more random

* Adding mining drones or mining drills for ships... Ideally just rip off everything that starbase does

* Removing the DSAT broadcast mechanics, add a new scanning tool (subjectively that would be more fun and easier)

* Remove t1 ore bots, or consider making them less available, so there's more hauling involved

 

[Gideon77]

I agree about reseeding tiles, but that didn't fly earlier, so I was trying something else.

[Verliezer]

I think I fancy the old mining principles but with one difference. In stead of manual mining you have the OPTION to place a mining unit. After a while the node get depleted and you have to look for a different one.

 

I like once in a while scanning and it would be great to have the option to either mine manual or with a mining unit. This will keep being a miner as a profession and gives new joiners a fair change on decent nodes as well.

 

At least the boring mandatory stupid calibrating will be gone then. Although calibrating is very quick these days, it still is a kinda stupid action you need to think about of doing.

Edited April 9, 2022 by Verliezer

[Hecticus]

On 4/5/2022 at 3:28 PM, Gideon77 said:

PROBLEM:

Passive mining basically removes the need to actively play the game. Empire building games are about spending time and effort to accomplish a goal, not about letting the game automatically give you whatever you want.

 

SOLUTION:

DU already has the ability to "harvest". Instead of having passive mining units that play the game for you, why not have the game place a 5 or 6 large ore rocks on each territory. These large rocks will never change shape, or go away. They act like "mines". When you "harvest" one of these large rocks, then they produce 4 smaller rocks. When harvested. each of these smaller rocks produce the tiny rocks, and harvesting the tiny rocks produce the ore. The size of the tiny rocks can be adjusted to determine the maximum amount of ore a person can gather per hour. Anyone that has ever played other space building games knows that what I am suggesting is similar to the way two other games (I won't name them here) do it, and it works quite well for them. So it is already a tried and proven way of dealing with ore mining. This way the more active the player is, the more ore they get. The ore never runs out. And the game never has to tell other players about any changes in the landscape due to mining. For instance on Alioth every territory could have 1 of each T1 ore, and 1 random T2. And the game could use this to get rid of all the tiny 20L ore rocks scattered everywhere currently.

So wait -you want to replace the mining mini game with just clicking rocks ? How is that an improvement? 
 

If all that “actively playing the game” consisted of was that, then I suppose MUs have ruined it..but there is a lot more to do. I don’t miss earthworming at all, I did a few weeks of it before Demeter and honestly don’t miss it one bit.

Fast forward to present and I’m spending that time building stuff, crashing stuff, and tending MUs which are actually not passive at all.
The ore amount is still tied to the amount of work you put in; if you want to pull enough ore or the type of ore you need for a given industry, or high quanta, you have to go out and prospect until you find it, then you have to set up mining sites, then you have to maintain them. If you want to run your own warp cell factory, be prepared to spend several hours weekly calibrating, collecting, and transporting ore, not to mention the time spent prospecting for it and slogging back and forth to the market to make enough quanta to buy the mining units.  
If you want to kick up your heals and do almost nothing, you can still rake in the T1 ores, but limited industry and slogging to market for t1 prices isn’t automatically getting whatever you want. It’s flailing. 

[SweatyGopher]

Mining units are lazy design.  Instead of making the mining gameplay loop more interesting and fun to encourage people to play daily they say [filtered] it and implement auto mining.  
 

they are so incredibly broken.  I haven’t been playing because I am awaiting the wipe news and within about a month using my alts and main accounts I have 500k of T1 ore and a bunch of other tiers.  
 

That’s just insane.  Why would I mine asteroids?  In one 8 hour session mining basic or advanced roids you might make 50-100k ore but that’s labor intensive!  I literally log in and reset my miners once a week.  I don’t have to play because that’s way more ore than I ever used anyway.  
 

 

Edited April 12, 2022 by SweatyGopher