Author Topic: Sorium as a strategic weakness  (Read 3336 times)

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Offline nakorkren (OP)

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Sorium as a strategic weakness
« on: October 24, 2021, 10:33:49 PM »
After some frustrating time trying to get my fuel harvesters to process fuel from a moon, I realized that fuel harvester's only work on gas giants. That got me into thinking about why that might be so, from a physics standpoint, and it makes sense if you think about sorium as a gas. If you take that standpoint, then you have to wonder why the efficiency of extraction is equally as high on planets as on gas giants.

That train of thought led me to an idea that, physics aside, might spice up combat and add more strategy. What if the extraction efficiency for sorium was half as much on planets, moons, and asteroids as on gas giants? That would incentivize players and the NPC races to establish fuel harvesting operations at key gas giants. These operations would be vulnerable to surprise attacks and raids. The AI could be programmed pretty easily to attempt to take advantage of the players reliance on these facilities, which would be more difficult to protect than a typical planet or moon with ground-based troops and potentially a fleet based in orbit. I could even see some scripted behavior for simple feints towards either a harvesting fleet/station or a planet, then hitting the opposite target.
 
Forcing the player, and the NPCs, to defend forward bases for fuel harvesting should result in more thrilling cat and mouse combat than usual, and force the player to split their forces up more or risk losing significant infrastructure.

Thoughts?
« Last Edit: October 24, 2021, 10:48:40 PM by nakorkren »
 

Offline Bremen

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #1 on: October 24, 2021, 11:51:14 PM »
That train of thought led me to an idea that, physics aside, might spice up combat and add more strategy. What if the extraction efficiency for sorium was half as much on planets, moons, and asteroids as on gas giants? That would incentivize players and the NPC races to establish fuel harvesting operations at key gas giants. These operations would be vulnerable to surprise attacks and raids.

The extraction rate for sorium harvesters already is quite a bit better; a sorium harvester module (30 BP) is quite cheap compared to an mine/automine (120/240 BP) or an orbital miner (120 BP) and fuel refinery (120 BP). The harvester module is also half the size as an orbital miner and includes the refining portion.

I usually switch over to fuel harvesters as soon as I can for efficiency reasons.
« Last Edit: October 24, 2021, 11:53:38 PM by Bremen »
 

Offline Rich.h

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #2 on: October 25, 2021, 05:33:58 AM »
As stated the process is already much faster on gas planets than ground based operations. Sure the extraction aspect might be equal, however on a gas world you suck up ready to use fuel. When ground mining you end up with a sorium mineral that must be refined to be of any use for fuel, however what it does give you is that sorium mineral that can be used in construction of parts/facilities, whereas the gas harvesters do not produce this. Along with being a two step process on ground based operations, you also have the population cost to run all those facilities compared to the small crew numbers needed for harvesters.

If you focus on gas harvesters you will very quickly end up with more fuel than you can use and still have population spare for other mining or construction projects.
 

Offline nuclearslurpee

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #3 on: October 25, 2021, 08:34:47 AM »
That train of thought led me to an idea that, physics aside, might spice up combat and add more strategy. What if the extraction efficiency for sorium was half as much on planets, moons, and asteroids as on gas giants? That would incentivize players and the NPC races to establish fuel harvesting operations at key gas giants. These operations would be vulnerable to surprise attacks and raids. The AI could be programmed pretty easily to attempt to take advantage of the players reliance on these facilities, which would be more difficult to protect than a typical planet or moon with ground-based troops and potentially a fleet based in orbit. I could even see some scripted behavior for simple feints towards either a harvesting fleet/station or a planet, then hitting the opposite target.
 
Forcing the player, and the NPCs, to defend forward bases for fuel harvesting should result in more thrilling cat and mouse combat than usual, and force the player to split their forces up more or risk losing significant infrastructure.

Thoughts?

As others have pointed out the economic factors that already motivate gas giant sorium mining, I will also note that in terms of strategic combat, Aurora usually does not work this way. Points of contact are limited by the jump point network, such that unless you play with Random Stars and some significant changes to the system/JP generation logic you will usually only have 1-2 points of contact with any given NPR. There is no point in defending fuel harvesters with split-up forces when you can simply defend one or two jump points - and if the jump point falls, a small guard detachment will not be of any use to defend the fuel harvesters anyways, against a full-size NPR battle fleet.

The new spoiler race coming in v2.0 will go much further towards motivating the use of guard detachments than this proposal, simply because it will bypass the usual jump point network entirely.
 

Offline Bremen

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #4 on: October 26, 2021, 12:29:59 AM »
If you wanted to make sorium a strategic weakness I think the best way to do it might actually be by limiting storage rather than production. Personally I pretty much just build a ton of harvesters and have a tanker constantly grabbing their fuel and dropping it on the nearest colony with its infinite fuel capacity, which means that yeah, losing my fuel harvesters is annoying, but only in the sense that "gah, now I have to rebuild these things sometime in the next three decades."

If, say, each spaceport could hold 10 million liters of sorium and then tankers would fail to unload any excess, and fuel harvesters/refineries stopped depleting sorium when full (harvesters may do this already, I'm not sure), that would make having forward bases for fuel harvesting a bit more important, and losing production considerably more dire. On the other hand it would also increase micromanagement, so it's probably worth considering if that tradeoff would actually be worth it.
 
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Offline alex_brunius

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #5 on: October 26, 2021, 01:58:32 AM »
If you wanted to make sorium a strategic weakness I think the best way to do it might actually be by limiting storage rather than production. Personally I pretty much just build a ton of harvesters and have a tanker constantly grabbing their fuel and dropping it on the nearest colony with its infinite fuel capacity, which means that yeah, losing my fuel harvesters is annoying, but only in the sense that "gah, now I have to rebuild these things sometime in the next three decades."

An interesting middle ground might be to give AI ( and players ) a way to detect and blow up your planetary fuel dumps from orbit... Although all it would acomplish is probably moving the fuel dump back to your capital / closest well protected base instead.

If, say, each spaceport could hold 10 million liters of sorium and then tankers would fail to unload any excess, and fuel harvesters/refineries stopped depleting sorium when full (harvesters may do this already, I'm not sure), that would make having forward bases for fuel harvesting a bit more important, and losing production considerably more dire. On the other hand it would also increase micromanagement, so it's probably worth considering if that tradeoff would actually be worth it.

It's definitely an interesting design decision.

Arguments against making storage limited:
- It would add more micromanagement
- Could be frustrating when all storage is filled up and you either get errors or deplete sorium for no reason ( assuming fuel production is not automatically stopped ).

Arguments for making storage limited:
- It doesn't make much sense (IMO) that fuel storage costs you minerals and production to build in ships and space stations, but is free on planets.
- It would add an interesting gameplay decision when it comes to how much you invest in storage vs production.
- It would make both harvesters and tankers alot more valuable assets as the fuel is not just of tactical importance but having someplace to store it is also of strategic value.
- It would make dispersed harvesting, planetary refining and storage more valuable to protect from loss of all fuel production with limited storage.

I think I'm slightly leaning for limiting fuel storage actually since it would add logistical/strategic depth and seems like alot more "high level" / less micro than much of the other logistical & fuel depth added in C# ( transfer time for fuel or on way refueling mechanics for example ).

A "hacky" quick way to implement it might be to have any fuel storage on a body above say 10 million lose X% per year to "evaporation" which would act as a soft limiter ( the cost of storage is paid in the resource being stored basically ).

« Last Edit: October 26, 2021, 02:04:25 AM by alex_brunius »
 

Offline Black

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #6 on: October 26, 2021, 02:31:47 AM »
Problem is that if you want to limit planetary fuel storage, you are opening can of worms. If the fuel storage is limited, should mineral storage and maintenance storage also be limited? And what about missiles. Do you also need planetary magazines to store your missile production?
 
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Offline alex_brunius

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #7 on: October 26, 2021, 03:48:10 AM »
Problem is that if you want to limit planetary fuel storage, you are opening can of worms. If the fuel storage is limited, should mineral storage and maintenance storage also be limited? And what about missiles. Do you also need planetary magazines to store your missile production?

Where one sees a can of worm another sees opportunities :)

I think the issue most players have with these unlimited storages is the ability to dump billions of liters of fuel, millions of tons of minerals, hundreds of thousands of missiles and maintanance supply on any small rock.

So if one were to consider improving the situation then perhaps a good approach would be to start with only allowing bodies above X millions pop unlimited storage space.
 
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Offline Scandinavian

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #8 on: October 26, 2021, 04:08:25 AM »
Fuel/maintenance/munitions/minerals storage could be a function of the buildings that produce or consume the stored product (mines, factories, maintenance facilities, etc.), the buildings that let you transship them (spaceports, transfer hubs), and amount of infra on the planet (with populated planets automatically converting trade goods infra to planetside infra if they run near their storage capacity). You should probably be allowed to remove non-infrastructure storage generating buildings, even if they would put you over storage capacity (just to avoid micro hell), but you should be required to either discard or lift out excess stores before you can remove infrastructure.

A fringe benefit would be that it would become feasible to make default and conditional orders like "move to nearest planet with less/more than % stockpile and transfer cargo," allowing you to automate the more tedious aspects of intra-empire logistics.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #9 on: October 26, 2021, 04:10:18 AM »
The new spoiler race coming in v2.0 will go much further towards motivating the use of guard detachments than this proposal, simply because it will bypass the usual jump point network entirely.

I have completely changed the way I distribute forces because of this threat. The forces involved may be small, but they can wreak havoc in an unprotected system. Therefore I am guarding fuel harvesters, terraformers, smaller colonies, etc.. In my current campaign, I have mobile forces and maintenance facilities setup in fifteen different systems.
 
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Offline Bluebreaker

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #10 on: October 26, 2021, 04:22:51 AM »
The new spoiler race coming in v2.0 will go much further towards motivating the use of guard detachments than this proposal, simply because it will bypass the usual jump point network entirely.

I have completely changed the way I distribute forces because of this threat. The forces involved may be small, but they can wreak havoc in an unprotected system. Therefore I am guarding fuel harvesters, terraformers, smaller colonies, etc.. In my current campaign, I have mobile forces and maintenance facilities setup in fifteen different systems.
Doesn't feel a bit overwhelming having to manage so many dispersed units? Or you design those ships to require minimal babysitting?
 

Offline Garfunkel

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #11 on: October 26, 2021, 05:54:44 AM »
Limiting storage makes no sense. Even a small asteroid can hold basically infinite amount of fuel or MSP or missiles. This comes up every time someone suggests putting engines on an asteroid to move them and we do the math and people get surprised how massive and big even small asteroids are. Aurora doesn't model the tiny rocks, after all.

This isn't really a problem because of the new spoilers coming in the next version.
 
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Offline Scandinavian

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #12 on: October 26, 2021, 06:28:33 AM »
There's also functionally unlimited surface area on Earth, but this does not mean that fuel can simply be dumped in any conveniently located ravine, nor munitions stacked in any old fenced-in field. At least not if you want it back in a functional state. Even mineral ores will degrade or wash away if you leave them exposed, though you can get away with a lot less care for many of those (especially if you don't have to deal with atmosphere or pilfering population). The point isn't that you run out of space to put the stuff; it is that we might want to model the facilities required to store and handle it in an orderly manner that makes it not degrade or go missing.
 
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Offline nuclearslurpee

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #13 on: October 26, 2021, 08:24:31 AM »
I think it is important to keep in mind that in Aurora, the cost of things is usually in terms of TNEs, which we can generally assume are not the entire actual building requirement for an entity. The cost of things in good old concrete, steel, etc. is not included and at the scale of the game we can assume these are generally a negligible economic cost compared to the rare TNEs. A manual mine for instance costs 120 corundium (240 shipping tons) yet takes 25,000 tons to ship as cargo, over 99% of that facility is presumably made out of traditional materials. Similar for ground units, a typical early-game medium tank requires just under 5 vendarite to construct but requires 62 tons of transport capacity, and you are not convincing me that a medium tank is 5 tons of tank and 57 tons of supplies.

In the same way I think we can abstract fuel, mineral, etc. storage as being cheaply-built warehouses, tanks, etc. and not the hardened high-tech TNE-enabled construction we use for spaceship or military hardware. As Garfunkel points out, physical storage area is decidedly not an issue, even a small 100 km diameter has some 30,000 km^2 of surface area to work with, if you assume fairly short 10m height storage facilities and that 1 ton = 14 m^3 as Steve has used unofficially elsewhere this comes out to some 22 trillion tons of storage on that small rock, which is far more than the starting facilities on Earth even in a 12b pop start.

I also want to reiterate that besides adding more logistics micro (and not the good kind IMO as there is not really much decision making involved in "this planet is full, we need to dump everything on the nearest moon"), this really would not add as much strategic depth as people are imagining because Aurora is (until v2.0 and the new spoiler race) dominated by jump point network topography and JP defense, and come v2.0 there will be more than enough strategic depth in rear-areas defense for those who want it without resorting to adding new micro-heavy mechanics.
 
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Offline Steve Walmsley

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Re: Sorium as a strategic weakness
« Reply #14 on: October 26, 2021, 08:56:00 AM »
I have completely changed the way I distribute forces because of this threat. The forces involved may be small, but they can wreak havoc in an unprotected system. Therefore I am guarding fuel harvesters, terraformers, smaller colonies, etc.. In my current campaign, I have mobile forces and maintenance facilities setup in fifteen different systems.
Doesn't feel a bit overwhelming having to manage so many dispersed units? Or you design those ships to require minimal babysitting?

All I do is setup the maintenance facilities, leave some fuel and MSP and send the ships. Apart from an occasional check on the MSP level, no further management is required.
 
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