Mining automation query

[Malamis (OP)]

Greetings In the name of Dorn and The Immortal Emperor of Mankind,

Found this game yesterday, played it enough to have a shocking headache today

Anyway, first game non-combatant as possible as I wanted to work out the industrial balances and have two queries as to how to best automate the process:

1. Asteroid miners, what if anything determines the "go to nearest mineral source" standing order? I have geo-surveyed most if not all of the first ring surrounding Holy Terra but no matter where the miners start from, they scurry to roid 120 and stay there, despite the fact it has no minerals.

2. pickup auto mine - drop automine orders ; putting the drop automine standing order first and pick up second, my (installation capacity) freighters refuse to drop them of on Luna or Mars , what am I not seeing?

3. I had 3 geo survey Imps, I now have 0. where could I find out when where and why they exploded?

4. is there any way to further automate roid mining ? dropping the mass driver(s) is all well and good, but in a system with several hundred worthwhile roids and a beefy mining fleet, the clicking and chance of oversight is worrisome.

[sloanjh]

1. Asteroid miners, what if anything determines the "go to nearest mineral source" standing order? I have geo-surveyed most if not all of the first ring surrounding Holy Terra but no matter where the miners start from, they scurry to roid 120 and stay there, despite the fact it has no minerals.

Dunno - I've never built one.  I think most people use automated mines.  It takes long enough to mine out an asteroid (unless there's hardly any minerals there) that you might want to just give them the explicit command to go where you want them.

2. pickup auto mine - drop automine orders ; putting the drop automine standing order first and pick up second, my (installation capacity) freighters refuse to drop them of on Luna or Mars , what am I not seeing?

Do you have colonies on Luna or Mars?  If you don't see them on the left panel of the F2 screen (where you should see Holy Terra), then go to the F9 screen, select the one you want a colony on, and hit the "Add Colony" button.

3. I had 3 geo survey Imps, I now have 0. where could I find out when where and why they exploded?

Have you been watching the event log screen (ctrl-F3)?  That should have given you a message.  Note that you can set the color of events by clicking on the event then hitting the "BG Color" button at the bottom.  BTW, if your geo survey ships are military designs (which they probably are due to the engines), then you need to make sure they have engineering spaces - there's a line on the design screen that tells you how likely they are to break down the first year (it goes up with time), how many spares they have, the worst case for how many spares will be consumed by a breakdown, and a rough estimate of how long they're likely to go before running out of spares.  For a geosurvey ship, I would probalby shoot for ~5 years on the last number, although sometimes you need to skimp in order to not make the ship too big.

4. is there any way to further automate roid mining ? dropping the mass driver(s) is all well and good, but in a system with several hundred worthwhile roids and a beefy mining fleet, the clicking and chance of oversight is worrisome.

There are typically only a few bodies in a system that are worth mining (high accessibility and decent quantities of something).  So it shouldn't be that bad.

Have Fun!

John

[Brian Neumann]

For geo survey ships you can actually make them civilian.  They are not going to be slow as a single engine gives a lot of power and is probably close to half the total ship.  This gets around the problems of mainenance for them as well.  It does not help with Grav survey ships which have to be military.

Brian

[Venec]

For geo survey ships you can actually make them civilian.  They are not going to be slow as a single engine gives a lot of power and is probably close to half the total ship.  This gets around the problems of mainenance for them as well.  It does not help with Grav survey ships which have to be military.

Brian

Will civilians build them and scan bodies?

[Father Tim]

Yes they will.  Currently, they will survey the closest system body that is not surveyed and does not have a survey ship assigned to it.  (In other words, they ignore bodies that are on another survey ship's (civilian or government) order list to be surveyed.)  If there are none in the current system, they'll go up to four transits to find one.

On Steve's long-term list of things to add to Aurora when he gets a round to it is the ability to issue civilian survey 'contracts', much like the movement contracts you can already issue.  Until then, you can't really control where the civilians go other than to designate certain areas 'off limits'  or to assign certain surveys to your own ships (thus causing the civilians to ignore those bodies).

[Venec]

That's awesome, thanks