Geo team or Geo Teams ?

[Nibelung44 (OP)]

Is it possible to have several geo teams working on a single planet to uncover the vast, unknown riches of the soil?

[Brian Neumann]

Yes, but each team has a chance of finishing the survey for the planet for all of the teams. If you have a good survey team, it will find more stuff normally than half a dozen mediocre teams, it just will take longer.

Each team has a chance of finishing the survey based on its team survey score.  The higher the score the lower the chance it will be finished.  If you have multiple teams working the same site then each team will be checked on each 5 day cycle.  In addition the experience gets spread out so each team does not improve as much as a single team working the site.

Brian

[Iamwinterborn]

Yes, but each team has a chance of finishing the survey for the planet for all of the teams. If you have a good survey team, it will find more stuff normally than half a dozen mediocre teams, it just will take longer.

Each team has a chance of finishing the survey based on its team survey score.  The higher the score the lower the chance it will be finished.  If you have multiple teams working the same site then each team will be checked on each 5 day cycle.  In addition the experience gets spread out so each team does not improve as much as a single team working the site.

Brian

While this is an 8 month old post, I just had to comment on it because THIS IS IMPORTANT INFO.


I have simply been assuming this whole time that the survey score merely determined how long it takes - ie, higher means shorter is better..  Never did I assume it actually is THAT important.  This was a simple sentence in the wiki that just did not stand out enough in importance.

WOW.  This changes everything.   

I had a period where I had too many officers, so I decided to make them do some good by putting teams on all the planets in my colonies systems.  I had 3 teams with scores of 120, 140, and 190.  I put a bunch of NOBODIES on my future colony planets.  If I had known better I would have shipped them out to the asteroids to do their work while I saved the colonial planets for my ubergeologists.

[Father Tim]

Slightly incorrect.  The chance of the survey being 'finished' is fixed, and based on the mass of the system body (due to a quirk in mineral generation routine).  Unlike a regular geological survey via ship sensors - where you must accumulate X points and then you learn what already exists on the body - a Geo Team investigation isn't checking what's already there, it's actually creating each new discovery.

So a really good team might have a 3% chance of discovering something good and a 1% chance of triggering the "nothing left to find" event, whereas a mediocre team would have a 0.05% chance of a good discovery and the same 1% chance of "nothing left to find."  Put both on the same system body and you've doubled the chance of "nothing left to find" with nowhere near double the chance of finding something good.

[Zed 6]

They might find something in the next cycle or more likely years from now. Also I check each team every now and then to ensure I didn't miss a message saying one of them had died off on me.

[randal7]

Also, your max chance of finding new minerals is at a team score of 120. You may wish to split your teams up when you have enough idle personnel to make two teams of 120+. However, my observation is that higher scores work noticably faster, even though the chance of success stays the same after 120. (To my knowledge Steve has never verified this.) I usually split teams when they hit 200 unless I really need a new team for a choice system.

[sloanjh]

Also, your max chance of finding new minerals is at a team score of 120. You may wish to split your teams up when you have enough idle personnel to make two teams of 120+. However, my observation is that higher scores work noticably faster, even though the chance of success stays the same after 120. (To my knowledge Steve has never verified this.) I usually split teams when they hit 200 unless I really need a new team for a choice system.

I think the correct statement (from Steve) is "The odds of avoiding a 'minerals depleted' result cease going down after a team score of 120."

In other words, teams with score lower than 120 have a higher chance of screwing up the planet than teams with a score higher than 120.  Above 120, the chance of screwing up the planet is independent of team score (but the rate of finding things still goes up).

NOTE - I don't remember the magic number "120" on my own - I remember it was somewhere around there, so I'm assuming that's what it is based on your post.

John

[dooots]

Here is the thread where geology teams got added.
http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php/topic,1172.0.html

The cap for the "minerals depleted" event was changed later, I thought the thread had the new cap but I don't see it in there.  120 sounds right but I can never remember.