I thought I would solicit opinions, advice, tips and tricks on the asteroid mines. So far they haven't been a major part of my game because:
1. You have to build more space miners and I am generally busier building constructors and war ships.
2. They take so long to turn an asteroid into a mine (is there a way to speed this up? Is it always five rounds?)
3. Bunches of them defect to me throughout the game anyway. Yet, I never remember to go back and optimize where the asteroids should be beaming their benefit.
4. I can't tell what stage of advancement the mine is at by looking at it. This kind of stinks. Wouldn't it be better if the four tiny pieces which represent an asteroid filled in one at a time as they upgraded instead of completely filling in on the first upgrade?
Here is what I have learned by myself. If you are going to build a miner, wait to do it until you have enough minaturization to do it on a tiny hull so the miner is cheapest. Also, don't completely wipe an enemy out until his asteroid mines have flipped to you, otherwise all the mines go "poof" and disapear and I haven't the inclination to rebuild them.
So what am I missing?
Worse. It's ten for the first upgrade and 20 for the next two-each. And no, in answer to your other question, there's no way to make them faster, short of modding.
The only use I've found for them is to support the Thalan tree's initial shortcomings in the colony rush, but others have spent some effort to make them useful in their games.
Good questions. I think a great deal depends on the distance and quantity of the asteroids, as well as the math, which isn't available in the Galactopedia (you have to check in game to see how many sheilds they are producing). As asteroids get further away, their value diminishes greatly. But if you have a bunch near your planet, then when you have some breathing space, kick out a miner or two.
At the colony rush stage, I will usually have my miner build 2-3 mines before I upgrade it to a colony ship. Other than that I am with you, one rarely has time to spit out spaceminers and when you do, you are usually already winning. If there are no galactic resources left to mine, and I am not ready to go to war, then I will usually produce a couple space miners. That being said, think about the math (and please correct where I am wrong):
A manufacturing center produces 10 shields and takes, later in the game, oh, 10 turns to build. A level II mine spits out, err, 10 shields and also takes 10. But, the number of space mines are limited only by the number of asteroids, which, depending on your settings, can be very numerous. I may only be able to build 5 manufacturing centers on the planet but could be surrounded by a dozen asteroids. In this case, I may get more production from the asteriods than the manufacturing centers. So from the math, as you can see, they can be very competitive with production planetary improvements. This is assuming that the mines are close by. If they are two squares away you usually get 4/5 shields for Level I, which is very helpful. Why is this worse/different than a Xeno Factory, which produces only 6 mp? You could make the reverse argument, why bother with xeno factories when I could just build space mines. They take 5 turns to get 4/5 MPs? Great deal.
There is another aspect to the math: space mining is expensive to research and other civs will not trade it to you under any circumstances. I think it is actually a bug. I remember trying to trade my home planet for space mining and the AI civ told me that "Space Mining is too important to our strategic goals to trade at this time." So, I'll usually only have time to research the other levels when I'm producing so much research that I can knock it out in 1-2 turns. This usually means I'm winning anyway. The argument could be made, though, that instead of researching manufacturing centers, you could research SM and then trade for MC's when the AI researches it (they will trade MC's, for a lot).
Therefore, one thing to try is to research space mining and offset this by trading for the production improvements, and have space miners continuously a-building. Once again, provided that the asteroids are close by.
Here are my questions:
1) Do the MP's from space mines contribute to your base production or are they added to your production after bonuses are applied? If the latter is the case, then much of the reasoning here is weakened.
2) Do space mines have maintenance like PI's?
3) I have noticed in the campaigns, against the Dread Lords, that they tend to ignore your ships if they are hiding in asteroid fields. I have observed this time and again, although it is not 100% of the time. There is simply a drastic reduction in the number of times the Dread Lords go after your ships if they are hidden. Is this an illusion or is it part of the AI?
Manufacturing center costs 150 production to build...how are you only capable of putting out 15 production if you've researched to manufacturing centers? Even with a 33/33/33 split, it should be 5 turns, maximum. 3 is honestly more likely, given a more "normal" slider split.
A level II mine requires 10 turns for 10 industry + 5 turns prior to that to get it to a level 1 mine = 15 turns.
A generic system has anywhere from 2 to 4 asteroids, while quite a few have none. Given that most of these will be in the 4/5 or 9/10 range and some may be in the 3/5 or 7/10 range, you're looking at 7 to 16 production (call it 12), which is barely more than a manufacturing center. Even with four asteroids at 9/10, that's 15 turns x 4 miners or a total of 60 miner-turns (you should really build more miners if you want to do it this way) for 36 more industry. Compare this to 4 manufacturing centers for a total of 600 production cost, and we could have them all done in 20 turns by my math above.
If I remember correctly they contribute to base production and get bonuses applied to them.
They don't have maintenance-that's really about the only good thing about them.
No idea on the DL/asteroids phenomenon. It's probably simply the fact that the AI tends to ignore asteroid fields in general, as any ship that sits on them is reduced to 1pc/wk until it moves off of them, and that tends to slow them down in getting to where they're going.
I don't use the all-factory strategy? So-so planet I have 3 MC's producing 10 MP each = 30 MP, Capital producing 14 MP, total 44 MP. 150/44 = 3.4 (or 4) turns, and that's the case if I fund social 100%. That's for a new MC, with no advance factories needing to be upgraded, etc. 33/33/33 and we have 3.4x3 = 10.2 = 11 turns for new MC.
I'm not sure how you build MC's every 3 turns on average without funding social 100%. I don't get that very often. I might get that on a planet with the manufacuring capital and quite a few factories. We must be playing different games or one of us needs some sleep. Probably me.
[e digicons][/e]
Thanks for the answers. Space mines have no maintenance and they contribute to pre-bonus production. Check. Both good things. I stated clearly in the post that one's decision to utilize space mining depends on abundance and distance. No disagreement there. One also must consider that asteroid production doesn't take up a tile on the planet as an MC does, freeing that tile for other uses, so there is additional benefit there. Finally, you are calculating the cost of the space mine forgetting that in practice, most level II mines are upgrades from basic, which gets 4/5 MPs the whole time that the upgrade is occuring (right?). So it is normally not the case that I am getting nothing from my investment in miners until the 15 turns are up. From what you are saying, it seems you are actually agreeing that space mining can be cost-competitive with MC's over the long haul.
There are improvements in the game that almost universally pointless (fusion power plants, e.g.). I don't think space mining is one of them.
You're also neglecting production bonuses. All trees should have 30% social by the time they get to manufacturing centers, so your planet in question has 44 * 0.33 = ~14 * 1.3 = ~18 or 14 * 1.4 = ~19 if it's your homeworld (assuming you're custom or Terran or who's the other folks with a moon?). Which brings us to 150/19 for 8 turns. (150/18 is going to be 9.)
Perhaps I was too quick to judge, as the difference between 8 or 9 or 10 turns might be considered irrelevant.
Initial colony (14), central mine (10, Torian tech tree), 4 xeno factories (4x6=24) = 48, 50% social funding = 24 *1.3 bonuses = 31 = 5 turns.
Assuming I already have a manufacturing center presence on the planet and am simply adding more: 14+10+40 = 64 * 50% funding = 32 * 1.3 = 41 = 4 turns. If I ran 61% social funding I'd get it in 3 turns, as 39 * 1.3 = 50.
And this is without even taking a social bonus in customization points-I know people used to love that; has it fallen out of style?
I suppose if you're running a labs-focused or even labs-leaning game the mines are more worthwhile, however it would have to be labs-leaning rather than labs-focused as you'd only get production out of them when military/social were funded. So maybe a 75/25 spread of labs/factories?
I love asteroids, so I play with the 'dense asteroid' settings on. Asteroids everywhere. The difference in productivity is so huge that I get used to planets having the extra production boost. Planets that receive no asteroid mining bonus, even though they have 4 Industrial Sectors and a Quantum Power Planet, seem to be absolutely lame in production. In fact if you have a Galactic Project to complete, by running all asteroid mines production to that 1 planet, you can usually cut the social prodcution time in half.
I don't see why people hate asteroids so much, and why they don't use them... I usually have 1 planet keep pumping out the cheap ole Space Miners and just let them do their thing. Once a turn or so you need to tell it where to mine next when one is done, but it's not even a micro-manage issue. And over time, you don't notice the increase in production since it so slowly becomes avaiable, but if you destroy all your asteroid mines, you would notice an enormous difference. warships would probably take double the time to be built on an average planet.
On big maps, I usually pick a planet or two and have them crank out tiny hulls with mining modules on them. At 75 MP, it is often a miner a turn per planet. Who cares about range or speed. If the damn thing is going to take 10-20 turns to upgrade an asteroid, why sweat the few extra turns it takes getting there?
I don't bother managing them, either. When you have several dozen of them running around, having a few going somewhere stupid doesn't really matter - those asteroids would get done eventually anyway. And when you run out of asteroids to upgrade... well, that rarely comes up [e digicons][/e] but when it does, they get turned into either starbase array fodder or constructors for influence bases.
I'm liking the direction of this post. Willy & GD, I think you are on to something with the "set one planet to spam tiny miners". What I think would make this work particularly well, which Willy obliquely mentions, is the fact you can set the miner to "auto" and just let them do their thing. I had forgotten about this and trying to manage miners and trying to determine how far an asteroid is up the development cycle was alienating me. I'd love to have all the production points of those asteroids without all the BC cost, I just didn't want to micromange the process. Voila, turn on the auto feature, you dummy!
Another thing I have found is that the AI will trade his space miner to you as well, so if you want some in the early game you can get them through the diplomacy screen. For my two cents I'll probably let the AI keep them and just buff my influence ability so as soon as the AI miner completes a mine it flips to me anyway.[e digicons]:grin:[/e]
I always use asteroid mines to give a boost to my initial colony as the start of play. I tend not to bother to upgrade them though as planetary bonuses tend to overtake what i can get from the mines.
This principle applies to any of the modules (constructors, transports, spore, survey, etc) as miniturization improves. A good tactic in general. Remember that you get civ-wide speed bonuses for ion, impulse, warp and some race specific techs, in addition to starting speed bonus if you have selected it. You can have a constructor move at 4-5 with no engines on a tiny hull.
FYI, Two of the tournament boards ("Arcea's Last Stand" and "Rock and a Hard Place") are really good places to test your space mining theories, in addition to being really fun.
[e digicons]:thumbsup:[/e]
That depends entirely on the geometry of the system and how far you upgrade them. You can get up to 30 MP out of each mine. Four asteroids going to one planet can usually get 100+ MP with no mainenance and almost no build cost.
I read that as from a time perspective, personally.
Heh...I'm doing the exact opposite. I set ~2 manufacturing planets to put out battleships. The remainder are spamming tiny ships.
Thats 9 Industrial Sectors worth, and that's just the base MP. Now granted, asteroid mines are way too easy to destroy, but I have yet to ever see an enemy destroy one. They usually fly right past towards a planet or starbase. Usually you don't even need to protect them.
Because the last thing I would want to do is rebuild a mining asteroid for the next 75 turns because of a Korath Super Duper Corvette popped up right next to it with nothing better to do. (This did happen, but the Corvette just sat right next to my mines while I was at war. In fact it sat there for almost a year).
I was referring only to the "tiny ships" part, not whether you use one planet or many. Looking back at what I quoted, and starting the reply with "this", I can see how my meaning was unclear.
One thing I miss from Civ is that settlers could team up to complete a project. You could have two settlers clean pollution in 1/2 the time. I would lilke to see space miners team up on an asteroid.
See, if they could do that, I'd use them outside of the first 6 months.
But until then...fat chance.
They do go after them more often as difficulty increases, but not nearly as often as they should.
I used to enjoy blowing the AI's asteroid mines to smithereens....until I realized it was better to have them switch allegiance to my glorious empire instead. I haven't yet seen the AI attack an asteroid mine and I've been playing on suicidal for a few weeks, so it's probably a rare event in general.
Try the Arcea's Revenge tournament map. They do go after them.
The problem with letting the space miners be automated, is that it seems they often will not keep improving the same asteroid field until it is fully built up... instead they often leave them at the basic level and will fly halfway across the galaxy to some remote asteroid in the very corner of an immense map. I tend to keep a close eye on my space miners to make sure they don't do dumb things like this.
Since the AI probably uses this same method as the human 'automate' option, that is the reason you will rarely ever see an AI opponent ever have an advanced asteroid mine.
True, with the exception of minor civs. Can't flip those, either have to destroy them or kill the civ.
I'm pretty sure this is due to the controlling algorithm considering build time but not travel time. It was brought up more than once while they were working on 2.0, but nothing got done. It would be nice for that to get fixed.
In my experience that is the lesser of the problems the AI has with mining. The more glaring problem is that they simply don't build enough miners - they love to research the tech (and won't sell it, either), but they simply don't have the ships to use it. Add that to how often they target miners, and it's no wonder they never get anywhere.
They love to research SM I. In my games they rarely research SM II and never III. To be honest, I rarely have the luxury of researching SM II and III unless the game is already in the bag. On games where I have pursued SM more diligently I try to time the research to correspond exactly to when the miners are finishing available asteroids. I might take a break from whatever I'm researching to give the miners the tools they need.
You're totally right though, they don't build enough miners. If they're going to go through all the trouble of researching the tech, they need to prosecute that advantage.
At higher levels in close games (Obscene is my current max), you need all the free production you can get. I just gradually build space miners throughout the game. I micro-manage them. When they run out of things to upgrade, I research the next level. If you already have the game in the bag by then, then its time to play at a higher level. If you automate them early, they often build mines out of your influence. No point in helping the AI like that.
They really do make a huge difference. The AI loves to target miners, I have not seen it target the mines. If you place a ship or fleet on auto-attack, you will target miners, but not mines.
Really, in a close game (defined at the AI having a huge lead), it's all about maximizing production, research, and income. Production involves a mix of factories, fusion plants and the like, social techs, economic starbases and mines. (as well as the appropriate environment tech) The fun part of the game (personally), is micromanaging all of this. It is easy enough to test this by reassigning mines and adjusting sliders. (also, some planets may have innate production bonuses) I think I will test it out this weekend.
Asteroids are a waste of time.
Second that.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
