Revamped Mining recommendation

[Pleione]

Few appreciate the current hot-spot based mining approach.  Rather than complain, I thoughts I'd take a stab at describing a potential new approach which would be fairer and potentially even fun.  Key in this approach is that planets won't get mined out, and new players will have a decent chance at finding good stuff.  So here we go:

 

1)  Remove Territory Scanning units (or limit their use to old planets as the new system is phased in).

 

2)  When a player claims a tile, the Territory Unit generates a random distribution of ore in that Territory.  Note this means you need to claim a tile in order to mine it, much like old timers had to "stake a claim" before they could hold and mine a spot (ok, not a perfect analogy, but close enough).

 

3)  Players use their Scanners to triangulate on a particular ore just like the used to, and still do on asteroids.  A new talent would allow for deeper scanning to reveal higher tier ores (say T3+) based on what the planet contains.  This would be consistent with Proficiency talents that exist today ("Mining Proficiency" anyone?).

 

4)  Once a local "hot spot" (local as in a few tens of meters square) is identified, a new Integrated Mining unit is placed.  These units consist of a single mining unit combined with a "mining core".  New talents could allow for more mining cores, or they could just be counted against a players Core Unit count, or both.  Personally I favor the later.

 

5)  The new unit could work somewhat similarly current miners and require calibration for the ore located (which makes lore sense).  However, the ore is limited in quantity, and drained down.  So perhaps 5000 l of ore are detected, and a mining unit can pull 100 an hour - so it would drain the pocket in 50+ hours.  If one wanted to code it fancy, it could decrease in efficiency as the percent of ore is withdrawn (e.g.  when 2500 l are left per this example, it would only pull 50 an hour out).  That would extend the time technically forever, although for server efficiency sake, perhaps mining always stops when less than 1% of ore remains (e.g.  At max you can pull 4951l from a 5000 l spot).  Hopefully the mini-game goes away and one simply clicks a "calibrate" button to start the process - or when mining starts it takes N hours to complete its initial calibration (personally like that, where N is something like 2-24).

 

6)  Similar to adjoining structures held by others, miners must be some distance apart from each other - dev's choose anything from a few meters (multiple, but limited, miners per spot), to tens of meters (one miner per spot).  Players are free to have as many units running in their tile as they want to place, limited only by the number of hot spots they find.  Presumably the devs will limit the number of spots when the Territory Unit initializes.

 

7)  If a territory is removed, its random ores go with it.  Thus once a territory is mined out there is little point in holding it.  If a new player comes along and claims it, their Territory Unit will generate a new ore map for the territory.  This implies a territory owner could remove and replace their Territory Unit every week to regen if they wished.

 

8)  Recommended:  Territory taxes be reset to something like we had in Beta, with increasing cost as count-per-planet increases.   

 

Notes:

 

A)  This does not require new planets, but rather an extension to the exiting Territory Unit logic (one presumes this is an object with associated data that controls what happens in a territory already).

 

B )  This strengthens the use of the old and now asteroid only mining and dredger skills - making them useful for everyone, not just Roid hunters.

 

C)  There is no impact to an org that wants to own 100 tiles in an area - they are welcome to do so (presuming they pay the taxes), but they have no advantage over any other tile on the planet. Future "Territory Warfare" would still be valid, it just wouldn't be driven by an Org owning all the gold tiles on a moon, or worse, all the gold tiles in the defined universe, and being big enough that nobody can take them away.  Such monopolistic behavior is not good for the economy.

 

D)  Calibration charges would still be valid - perhaps needing one per T level to allow the new units to functions (also makes sense lore wise, since higher T level ores would be deeper and need more charges to detect).

 

E)  The game loop is now critically enhanced.  Every time a territory is drained dry, the TU is simply recycled, and the scanning and miner placement process starts again.   I suspect this would be a vast improvement over the current calibration minigame.

 

F)  Corporate advantage of being able to find all-or-most of the hot spots on a new planet within a day disappears - giving the smaller orgs and solo players a chance to progress in the game at a pleasing rate as well.  Those same Corporations can still claim a hundred tiles if they wish in order to form a community, but those tiles will not be inherently better than any others.

 

G)  Just my guess, but I suspect once news of this hit the street, it would draw a lot of old players back in.  Although hardly necessary, acknowledge of a player-based-rework-idea being implemented wouldn't hurt NQ's reputation either...

 

H)  Note that the new Territory Units would be doing all the hard work - no need for planetary wide database updates - just miners reporting into the servers when clients view them along with temporary (weeks, not years) of data being stored in the Territory Unit.  e.g.  This should be relatively server lite impact wise.

 

I)  Asteroid mining would remain as it is today - allowing for the acquisition of relatively large amounts of rarer ores quickly - at the risk associated with the current activity.

 

J)  Multiple tiers of new miners, like we have today, would drive industry and the economy - especially if miners wore out over long periods of time (say 20 uses, using the existing damage mechanism - each calibration does 1 damage against a new units 20ish "repair" count).

 

K)  The existing bookmark system would allow players to scan their entire territory and map out future mining locations should they only own a few mining units.

 

Constructive comments only please.

 

 

[Aseennav]

Limiting several things in game will allow for a thriving population without any one player or organization to monopolize the game.

 

Limit Cores by Player / Org <-- Already in play

Limit Territories by Player / Org <- needed to keep viability of new players being able to claim territories

Limit Mining Units by Player / Org <- This would allow for increased yields by Mining Unit / Territory

As stated in the OP, the TU creates a random Resource map. These could rotate on a biweekly basis.

So if my TU gave me a resource set of 4 T1's Constantly it would vary the T2 and up per rotation and in each rotation the higher tiers of ores can vary their yield.

As a matter of course I may mine Malachite for 2 weeks on a given time but Chromite the next 2 weeks and it keeps on rotating.

This allows for the prevention of stockpiles of ores and can help the market since those who have and don't need may sell and those who need and don't have will buy,

Eliminating the Territory tax would be allowable under a mining unit cap because instead of paying taxes for a territory to mine you pay maintenance on each MU.

When the maintenance runs out the MU stops working.

Maintenace can be charged on a per hour basis, lets say Small MU 8q/h, Large 32q/h.

If a player places a Large unit, it pays 5376 Q per week, and the more units you place the more tax you pay as an example.

 

If you think about it this is an overall better approach.

 

Territory Warfare and Piracy don't fit in with the "We left earth and we all pulled together to survive" lore that is presented as part of the game.

 

v/r,

 

Edited December 20, 2022 by Aseennav

[Novean-61657]

No thank you to either ideas.

[Pleione]

8 hours ago, Cergorach said:

No thank you to either ideas.

 

Blanket rejection is not particularly informative, nor does it follow the request of "Constructive comments only please".

[Kezzle]

16 hours ago, Aseennav said:

Territory Warfare and Piracy don't fit in with the "We left earth and we all pulled together to survive" lore that is presented as part of the game.

 

The lore that is presented as part of the game is a laughable "sophomoric" exercise in not-very-creative writing. It has little or nothing to do with how the game was always going to pan out. Using it as an argument for pretty much anything is a waste of effort. Likewise, trying to justify anything based on the tech available in the game. TW and Piracy are and pretty much always have been, key pillars of the game. Safe zones were "added", not inherent from the beginning.

[Novean-61657]

3 hours ago, Pleione said:

Blanket rejection is not particularly informative, nor does it follow the request of "Constructive comments only please".

I understand that your attempt to 'fix' things comes from a good place, but you're ideas are not unique or are you the first amateur games designer on these forums attempting to 'fix' DU. Your idea hasn't been the best or the worst. The common thread with all the suggestions here and elsewhere is that NQ doesn't use them.

 

Now, I just don't like the mechanics you and 'the other guy' suggested. They don't seem fun, even less so then the current system. Now I can post a bunch of BS around the fact I don't like it, I might even dig deep and explain why I don't like it (beyond it doesn't seem fun). But it has zero value, your opinion and my opinion have less then zero impact on the issue. With other games you sometimes get someone from the devs go like, "Ohhh!!! I like that!", even if that would happen here, we would never see it. But it doesn't happen. And what NQ employees say and what eventually happens are often two completely different things. But one thing stays the same, none of the suggestions here are ever used, no matter the quality.

 

At least you didn't claim to have a simple solution that would take no time at all to implement... 😉

[Novidian]

Why not just have the ore pool randomly change every 24h until the territory is claimed, and then it is “locked in” until the territory is abandoned or tokenized? That way, you can just keep scanning your preferred tiles until you “roll” the ore you desire.

 

This would prevent massive tile claim swarms, because it’d be more preferential to wait until you roll favorable adjacent tiles, instead of pouncing on 30km around whatever you hit first. Everyone can get what they want, where they want, if they’re patient.

 

Then, maybe you can make it to where TS have charges like MU. Limit active scanners to 3, so players/orgs can’t plop down 30 scanners single handed and run them as fast as they can drop them.

 

I would make HQ tiles tax free for individuals, limit 3-5. After that, taxes would scale up. Smaller operations have less overhead, larger ones would have to pay their fair share.