A question for the more experienced Aurora players out there:
What criteria do you use to decide if a system body is worth exploiting for its mineral content? I'm assuming total tonnage and availability rating will factor in somewhere but what would you consider the lower end worthe exploiting?
Sorry that's now 2 questions
This is very complex, and very situational, at least for me. First off, there is demand to consider. If I need a resource, badly, this will play a large part in determining what resource deposits I'll exploit. While the primary resources that tend to run out the most, at least for me, are first duranium and second sorium, all of the others can be a problem at various points in the game. When you are out of, or nearly out of something like neutronium, then that moon with a 0.9 availability deposit of neutronium and nothing else might become a prime site for exploitation.
Past the emergency situations, to fuel general growth, I tend to look at bodies with multiple deposits with availability levels over 0.5 and amounts over 100,000. The higher the availability levels go, and the more types of resources available, the lower the amounts can be, but I generally don't bother with exploiting deposits under 1,000 units, no matter the availability. Location matters, as a deposit that is closer to your homeworld or whatever manufacturing center you are going to use is worth more than a higher availability deposit further away.
There is no one formula to follow, although I have played around with developing one based on the calculations that obviously go on in my subconcious when I'm trying to decide whether or not to exploit a deposit. I suspect it would be very difficult to quantify. I've thought about rating resource finds by adding up the availability levels, to show the overall production of mines emplaced there, but that doesn't tell the whole story. After all, who cares if you just found a moon with nine different resources with 1.0 availability levels and present in the millions, if you have a lot of those already and you really need two other resources that you are short on?
One rule of thumb that I try to follow is to bulk up the mining centers closer to home until they have a resource exhaustion date of 20-30 years. Why start mining a site farther away if the closer site still needs to be exploited, unless the farther one is better somehow?
Kurt