A little colony/mining help please

[Elmo (OP)]

In my current game Mars has too low a gravity for me to put a colony there.  From what I've read you can't do anything about that.  But it has the following minerals:

Mars
Duranium 23,120,000  Acc: 0.5
Boronide 7,214,596  Acc: 0.6
Corundium 722,500  Acc: 0.1

I still feel completely ignorant about the game in spite of Steve's best efforts in the tutorials, but that looks pretty good for Duranium and Boronide.  My question is, can I mine that stuff without being able to set up a colony there and if so, how?  Automated mines?  If that will work do I just build them, put them in a ship, send them there, and dump them into space along with a mass driver?  Or am I out of luck and need to keep looking for habitable planets?       Thanks.

[James Patten]

You must create a "Colony" on Mars in order to mine it, in the F9 System view window click on Mars and there's a "Create Colony" button on the bottom of the window.  However it won't be a habitable colony, just a mining colony.  You'll see it in your F2 economics window upon refresh and it will be available as a destination in your F12 fleet window immediately.

Just start putting Automated Mines and mass drivers there.  You'll have to build them on Earth, ship them in a ship with at least 5 cargo holds, and unload them on Mars.  Set the mass driver target to Earth (as long as there's another mass driver on Earth) and the game will automatically mine and send to you the minerals.  The more automated mines you put, the more minerals they will mine.  Eventually you'll have to put more mass drivers on Mars to throw more minerals than 1 alone can handle, but that will take some doing.

The accessibility is OK, not great, but the amounts are really nice.  It will take you a long time to mine out the duranium in Mars.

[Elmo (OP)]

Thanks very much.  That is what I needed to know.

[Elmo (OP)]

Bah.  How do I load my automated mine on my freighter?!  I looked at every menu I could find and see no way to load cargo.     It's probably right in front of me but I don't see how.

[Steve Walmsley]

Bah.  How do I load my automated mine on my freighter?!  I looked at every menu I could find and see no way to load cargo.     It's probably right in front of me but I don't see how.

Open the F12 task group window and select the fleet with the freighters. Click on Earth in the System Locations Available list. A list of orders should popup in the second listbox. Click on Load Automated Mine. Now click on Mars and select Unload Automated Mine. If you need to move a lot of them click the Cycle moves checkbox and the orders will keep repeating (or instead use the Repeat button for a specified number of cycles)

Steve

[Elmo (OP)]

OK, it was not knowing to click on Earth in the Task Group window that threw me.  Thanks again for the support.  I'm sure you haven't heard the last from me though...

[Elmo (OP)]

OK my Mining Colony on Mars is operational!  Would it do any good to assign a Governor to the colony with a mining bonus?  Seems like she would be a bit lonely there since it's all automated but if it would increase the yield we'll remind her it's only two years and it's for a good cause.  

Edit - Also, do you follow the same procedure to set up an asteroid mining colony?  Thanks.

[Hawkeye]

OK my Mining Colony on Mars is operational!  Would it do any good to assign a Governor to the colony with a mining bonus?  Seems like she would be a bit lonely there since it's all automated but if it would increase the yield we'll remind her it's only two years and it's for a good cause.  

Edit - Also, do you follow the same procedure to set up an asteroid mining colony?  Thanks.

Yes on both counts.

You actually don´t even need to create a colony first. Just order your frighter(s) to drop the mines on the body and aurora will automaticaly create a colony there. This works with all installations, afaik, but not for Xeno- or Geo-teams.

[Elmo (OP)]

Thanks Hawkeye.  I forgot to set up the colony on an asteroid before dropping the mine and noticed the game made the colony for me.

[sloanjh]

The accessibility is OK, not great, but the amounts are really nice.  It will take you a long time to mine out the duranium in Mars.

This is an important point to keep in mind from a cost/benefit point of view.  Automated mines cost twice as much as regular mines.  An accessiblity of 0.5 means that you'll only get minerals out 1/2 as fast as if the mine were situated on a planet with accessibility of 1.0.  So if it's Duranium that you're worried about, your return on investment for mines on Mars is going to be 25% that of putting manned mines on a habitable world with duranium accessibility of 1.0.

That being said, it's awfully hard to find colony-cost 0.0 worlds with lots of 1.0 duranium, plus you have to pay the costs of colonizing the world (transporting workers to man the mines, paying for infrastructure if it's cost 2.0 rather than 0.0, etc).

In my games, Earth usually gets mined out after 10-20 years, by which point I need to find a habitable world with good duranium to which I can move my manned mines.  The alternative of converting them to automated mines doesn't work very well, since you don't have any net increase in mining capacity while you're doing the conversion.  So all of the new mines I build are usually automated - any manned ones I need I simply transfer off Earth, putting off the day that it's mined out.  The location of the automated mines I build is usually controlled by where ever I can find the best accessibility (and at least a 5 year supply) of which ever secondary mineral (e.g. Neutronium or Mercassium) I'm running out of, along with a decent (0.5 or greater) accessibility of Duranium.

Just trying to give you an idea of the calculations that go through people's heads when deciding where to put their mining colonies....

John

[Elmo (OP)]

... I need to find a habitable world with good duranium to which I can move my manned mines.  ...

John

Never would have thought to move the manned mines off Earth.  Thanks.

[Erik L]

I usually convert my manned to automated to free up the population for things like research

[sloanjh]

I usually convert my manned to automated to free up the population for things like research

Interesting....I don't think I've ever run out of workers on Earth itself.  On colonies, yes, but not on Earth.  It might be because I'm partial to conventional starts - plenty of time for population to grow before I've built up my industry....

Unless you're talking about using automated mines on habitable colonies so the pop can work on industry or research - that I think I've done.

BTW, with the new research rules, I haven't had any motivation to move research labs off Earth to the colonies - I can work on multiple projects while keeping them at home.

John

[Elmo (OP)]

The last couple of posts got me thinking so I'm going OT in my own thread for a minute.  A lot of 4X games encourage specialization with colonies.  One is best suited for research, another for ship building, another for mining, etc.  Are there any incentives for that in Aurora or is is best for each colony to be more self sufficient?

[Brian Neumann]

Th last couple of posts got me thinking so I'm going OT in my own thread for a minute.  A lot of 4X games encourage specialization with colonies.  One is best suited for research, another for ship building, another for mining, etc.  Are there any incentives for that in Aurora or is is best for each colony to be more self sufficient?

It used to be that there was a strong incentive to specialize colonies for reasearch purposes.  That was so you could get multiple different leaders with different scientific specializations working on projects.  With the change in seting up reasearch projects that has gone away.  Currently I would say there is some benifit to specialization for smaller colonies (under 100k) as they won't have the people to do much of anything.  By the time you get into the 1billion range, probably not really.  I still do like to split my research off from my main industrial planet though.  Mostly this is because by the time it is an issue, my homeworld is out of minerals so moving the population to a world with lots of minerals and having the factories/shipyards move as well simplifies the logistics.  Moving that much population (about half) is not easy, but it does work out well.  

Brian