Remote Mining Economics

I just discovered the payback on remote mining! It is wonderful! Build battle cruiser yard ships. Each yard ship goes over a planet of the wrong atmosphere and builds a starbase with master computer III and one remote miner III RM3. It takes 4 turns and when built immediately do a retrofit to same with 3 RM3 plus one repair bay. Retrofit again to same with 7 RM3. Retrofit again to same with 13 RM3 and now 13 to repair. Next turn you have 8 working and the repair bay added. Retrofit to same with 22 RM3. Retrofit to same with 23 RM3 and one minelayer III which has space for 6 small mines. There are 16 to repair and the Last retrofit is done. Next turn the yard ship shifts to another planet and starts over. So it takes 4+3 = 7 turns per planet mined. Next turn your income is 800x23xtotal percentage of planet/ moons which is 184 per percent. Base maintenance is 5181 125 701. So breakeven is 29% total. Factor of five profit per turn versus maintenance is 169% requiring moons, but who is that greedy? The base costs at least 42k minerals, but I did not bother to check how much more multiple refits make it. The planet is depleted one percent per turn. Calculate L = total percent minus 29. Then total percentage earned until you drained it down to breakeven is L*(L+1)/2.
Examples % = 39 gains 55 * 184 = 10k definitely not worth it
% = 59 gains 465* 184 = 85k about a factor of two minus initial is 1x.
% = 79 gains 1275 * 184 = 234k a factor of 5-1 but it takes 50 turns
% = 99 gains 2485 * 184 = 457k a factor of 10-1 takes 70 turns
Draining a 99 down to 59 is 40 turns at (40*41/2+30*40 = 2020) * 184 = 371k Which is a factor of 9-1 payback in 40 turns.
At 99% if you have the proper atmosphere on a large planet you can get yard + 19 * 1000 * 1.2 Jubiliant * .99 = 22572 per turn. At that rate it takes 14 turns to get the same minerals payback as the base gives in 40 turns. But it also takes 5 turns to build the yard and 19 more to reach full production. So call it 5+24 turns to get an equal payback. So if it will be 10 or more turns until you can plant a colony with the proper atmosphere, do the starbase. Now why would that be a factor ? Well it turns out that production from planets is part of your score. But production from remote mining is NOT!!!!!! To have an enormous minerals surplus while avoiding MEE you just need to learn minerals 3, battle cruisers, and bases 3. If you have the time you should also do yards 3, computers 3, repair 3, and mines 3, but the economics without them is almost the same.

Let's just say that this has completely changed my plans as presented in "TDM-Modpack politics in really big game". All I need the sphereworlds for is to deny them to the enemy, grow population, and build intelligence centers and storage facilities.....

[This message has been edited by LCC (edited 13 June 2001).]

[Suicide Junkie]

Big problem... When the miner's planet runs dry, you're outta luck. You ecomomy goes straight down the tubes.

It is not hard to find a scoring profit. Look for type 3 single star solar systems. Planet IV always has two moons. The base costs 25 score points x1000 +5181 maintenance says look for total greater than 164. To have it Last 25 turns at a scoring and maintenance profit look for 164+75 = 239. Of the 13 such systems in my homespace on map6 there were six really good ones - Ute@246, Vote@303, Equal@343, Eural@278, Sop@306, and Ebb@283. Combined 1759 * 184 per turn minus 6 * 5181 is a minerals profit starting at 292570. In 25 turns it drops to 1309 * 184 - 6 * 5181 = 209770. Since the scoring for bases is 25 * 6 = 150 then I am still making a scoring profit on the set of 59k and would not need to scrap for another few turns. My profit over base maintenance for the least of them would continue for 246 - 3N = 29 makes N = 72 turns by which time the game will be OVER because it is already turn 47 and the soonest I can do this is about 55.
As I said before it only makes sense if you need your score to remain below MEE while getting a boost in minerals, and do not do it if you expect to get the proper atmosphere race any time soon. In my case both are true.

[jc173]

LCC are you some kind of statistics major or do a lot of work with analytical math? You do more number crunching on this game by yourself than the rest of us combined <G>

Well I guess I HAVE gone a little overboard the past few days designing starbases. This is the first game where I have had both the tech and the economic capability to finance them. So these designs are my first attempt. A search on starbase did not reveal much in the way of designs. I thought less experienced players might find them useful, especially if they are playing a ten good planet high tech start.

[jc173]

I didn't mean for that to come out negative, just seems like you're someone who's used to doing a lot of number crunching.

[Saxon]

A hopeful question, but one I am fairly sure the answer is no.

If you have a facility (the Nature Shrine in the Religious Tech tree) that improves all statistics of the planets in the system, does that counter the loss of 1% per turn due to mining? Or does it only improve the stats for planets which you have colonized? This could be a way around the loss of planets due to over mining.

[Suicide Junkie]

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Or does it only improve the stats for planets which you have colonized?

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Only colonized.

If you stuck a colony on there and built 10 Value improvement plants, you could get any planet up to 255% value in only about 80 turns.

[Taqwus]

Do RM ships work cloaked? Hrm.

One evil remote-mining thought that came to mind was that of a maintenance-free, crystalline race (yes, this might take many racial points...) sending out hordes of cheap remote-mining ships across the quadrant. The objective would be to reduce the resources available to non-crystalline players, while crystalline players could use their solar generators. If combined with generous use of planet-value-depleting intel operations, it might have an effect...

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

quote:

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Originally posted by Taqwus:
Do RM ships work cloaked? Hrm.

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**YES** they work cloaked! So add a cloak and scanner jammer, take off the repair bay as a very Last retrofit, and you can get 24 miners on board. Thanks for bringing that up!
If you can afford to keep the repair bay on, do so - it could come in handy.....