Thoughts on mining abilities for ground units ?

[Louella (OP)]

What are people's thoughts on adding a small mining ability for ground units ?

I had a thought the other day, about a "Pioneer" unit for ground forces, along the lines of how engineer units have some construction ability to build installations.

You see a planet that could one day be a useful colony. You put a pioneer unit onto it, and they start mining a few minerals, to allow engineers to build the first few installations, so that colonists can be brought in at a later point. A simpler, but considerably slower, method of setting up the first buildings of a new colony, that then allows civilian colony ships to start bringing in population.

As it is, to start a new colony, you'd need to bring in colonists, infrastructure, a mine or automine, plus a factory, or an engineer unit, to be able to start producing things.

Normal mines need population, and the workers pay taxes, so they provide wealth as well as minerals.
Automines just produce minerals with no upkeep, as do orbital mines.
The hypothetical pioneer thing I'm thinking of, would consume wealth from unit upkeep, and provide minerals.

More options to do things, you don't have to use all options available.

I just thought it could be an interesting story thing, to have such pioneer units to build the initial colonial infrastructure. What does anyone else think ?

[nuclearslurpee]

This is an interesting idea...

Currently, we have the CON component which can act as a factory, providing the capacity of 0.05 factories per component (with the caveat that they only work as factories once all entrenchment is done). A standard design with the Vehicle base class and minimum armor (2x racial armor tech) mounting two CON components costs 12.72 BP to build and 1.59 wealth annually to maintain. Ten of these are the equivalent of one construction factory, costing 127.2 BP to build and 15.9 wealth per annum to maintain. Incidentally, such a force also requires only 3,180 tons of transport capacity compared to 25,000 tons for a factory.

If we introduce a "MIN" component along the same lines, it would be significantly cheaper and smaller to transport than an automine. We can't have that, so probably the best solution would be to halve the mining capacity to 0.025 per component. Then the equivalent to an automine would require 254.4 BP to build and 31.8 wealth per annum to maintain, which is at least fair. Note that the wealth cost comes out to 318 per annum for a formation equivalent to 10 automines, which is less than you would pay for a CMC - this part is pretty fair.

The remaining issue then becomes the mineral cost. Ground units, other than STOs, cost only vendarite to build which is usually a far more available resource than corundium. This means we may create a situation where "MIN" units are better to build than automines, even if the build costs are similar, because corundium is in much higher demand as a resource. Changing the build cost to use corundium is not a good option, since that adds a unique exception to the ground unit system which we generally should avoid doing. However, given that the wealth cost is greater than the cost to collect minerals from a CMC, maybe this is not a big problem.

The other problem of a sort with this idea is overlap. Essentially, we're adding a second automated mine that works exactly the same except that it is built and paid for differently. There is therefore a lot of mechanical redundancy, so even if this idea is good from a flavor perspective it doesn't add anything new mechanically (side from a minimax decision about resource usage). This is quite different compared to CON components, which add a unique capability (there is no automated factory in the game) and has other uses besides adding construction capacity.

So overall: I think it is both interesting and mechanically feasible, but also I think it is unlikely to be added to the game since it won't advance gameplay very much in practice.

[Snoman314]

Agree with nuclearslurpee. Cool idea, but I think I'll stick to just dropping Automated mines in that situation, for reduced micromanagement if nothing else.

You can always roleplay it as 'pioneer equipment' or something.

[Louella (OP)]

Agree with nuclearslurpee. Cool idea, but I think I'll stick to just dropping Automated mines in that situation, for reduced micromanagement if nothing else.
You can always roleplay it as 'pioneer equipment' or something.

If we introduce a "MIN" component along the same lines, it would be significantly cheaper and smaller to transport than an automine.

Thing is though, to achieve a roughly similar effect of (deploy this unit to kickstart colony's industry), requires even less transport capacity.

A unit of engineers, plus enough corundium for them to build at least 1 automine, is still much less transport volume, than bringing an already existing automine.

But yeah, there's not really much additional mechanical gameplay from this idea. Mainly just flavour.

[kyonkundenwa]

I'd be happy to see automines replaced entirely by ground unit mining, as I dislike automines on principle: they are an exception to otherwise reasonably consistent planetary production mechanics.

[drejr]

I would prefer that Pioneers be some form of assault engineer that lowers enemy fortification bonus.

[Mark Yanning]

Nice idea! I think I would enjoy dropping some mining pioneers unit on some harsh planet!

[Kristover]

Personally I would like a unit(s) components that produce MP, OP, Fuel, and do mining. I like the ability of having an expeditionary sort of support that you can get on to a planet and provide some level of additional support and capacity beyond the facilities.  I can imagine several game situations where I might not want to put an expensive facility on a remote planet but would put forward units to provide support for a squadron of fighters or early warning craft.

[NuclearStudent]

This is an interesting idea...

Currently, we have the CON component which can act as a factory, providing the capacity of 0.05 factories per component (with the caveat that they only work as factories once all entrenchment is done). A standard design with the Vehicle base class and minimum armor (2x racial armor tech) mounting two CON components costs 12.72 BP to build and 1.59 wealth annually to maintain. Ten of these are the equivalent of one construction factory, costing 127.2 BP to build and 15.9 wealth per annum to maintain. Incidentally, such a force also requires only 3,180 tons of transport capacity compared to 25,000 tons for a factory.

If we introduce a "MIN" component along the same lines, it would be significantly cheaper and smaller to transport than an automine. We can't have that, so probably the best solution would be to halve the mining capacity to 0.025 per component. Then the equivalent to an automine would require 254.4 BP to build and 31.8 wealth per annum to maintain, which is at least fair. Note that the wealth cost comes out to 318 per annum for a formation equivalent to 10 automines, which is less than you would pay for a CMC - this part is pretty fair.

The remaining issue then becomes the mineral cost. Ground units, other than STOs, cost only vendarite to build which is usually a far more available resource than corundium. This means we may create a situation where "MIN" units are better to build than automines, even if the build costs are similar, because corundium is in much higher demand as a resource. Changing the build cost to use corundium is not a good option, since that adds a unique exception to the ground unit system which we generally should avoid doing. However, given that the wealth cost is greater than the cost to collect minerals from a CMC, maybe this is not a big problem.

The other problem of a sort with this idea is overlap. Essentially, we're adding a second automated mine that works exactly the same except that it is built and paid for differently. There is therefore a lot of mechanical redundancy, so even if this idea is good from a flavor perspective it doesn't add anything new mechanically (side from a minimax decision about resource usage). This is quite different compared to CON components, which add a unique capability (there is no automated factory in the game) and has other uses besides adding construction capacity.

So overall: I think it is both interesting and mechanically feasible, but also I think it is unlikely to be added to the game since it won't advance gameplay very much in practice.

While I agree that the added functionality is marginal, being able to use the plentiful vendarite to mitigate the corundum crunch is somewhat interesting as a choice.

 It might also be more worthwhile if these GU are catchall "Pioneers" that also have some limited ability to maintain ships. The ability to fortify ground units would allow these miner/maintainers, together with construction units, to serve as highly dug in forward outposts.

[Garfunkel]

Personally I would like a unit(s) components that produce MP, OP, Fuel, and do mining. I like the ability of having an expeditionary sort of support that you can get on to a planet and provide some level of additional support and capacity beyond the facilities.  I can imagine several game situations where I might not want to put an expensive facility on a remote planet but would put forward units to provide support for a squadron of fighters or early warning craft.

That is actually not a bad idea at all. Being able to use ground units to provide limited support of all types on the frontier would be an useful alternative to facilities. It would also bring more utility to low-tech games that only use fighter-sized ships or similar, like my recent USA vs USSR game, as then it would be possible to create fully functioning outposts/mini-colonies.

[NuclearStudent]

With this in mind, it might be nice to have a ground unit component that purely allows for additional self-fortification, to combo with the theme of remote dug in outposts.

[Louella (OP)]

I would prefer that Pioneers be some form of assault engineer that lowers enemy fortification bonus.

I had a different thought about units that could do that.