combating the inequality of mining/salvaging

[Axen Marik]

Just a few ideas on how to make mining at least as useful as salvaging.

 

Right now, salvaging seems to be superior as you not only get ore, but you earn cash and harvest modules and fancy paint colors. Mining only gives ore at a rate determined by what your lasers can do and how rapidly you can get from asteroid to asteroid.

 

Fix 1- reduce material gain from salvage, perhaps offset with a slight bump in drop rates for modules

 

Fix 2- increase mining yield rewards perhaps adding small chance to get a better mining laser after each full asteroid mined. On the large asteroids have a better chance of this occurring.

 

Fix 3- make ore use cargo and increase current cargo hold ratios, use a S&D model for economy with ores at the resource depot's instead of seemingly flat rates and the occasional mission that offers a premium price. This would allow for more trade in the ore market.

[J4H3AD]

Maybe one way to help with that is make divergent efficiency curves on mining/salvaging lasers. Say, starting efficiency at tech 1 is 10% across the board. Make mining lasers efficiency go up steeply, say to 20-30% quickly, while salvaging lasers have lower efficiency, in the same tech range getting only to 15-20%.

 

Although now that I think of it, deeper in Naonite and Trinium territory, ships get progressively bigger, while asteroids remain the same. It's far more effort to get 10,000 Trinium from mining than it is to get 10,000 trinium from salvaging, sometimes getting many times that in a single broken shield or generator block.

 

A better suggestion for this I think would be change the concentration of resources in asteroids the deeper in you go. For example, say a single iron asteroid has 5000 iron, while an equivalent sized Naonite asteroid has 7-10,000, and Trinium 10-15,000, etc. Alternatively, just increase the size of asteroids as you get closer to the core.

 

The solution of making resources cargo based versus, for lack of a better word, "Cloud" based, it would make a significant change to how the game works, particularly ship building. But I can see that working fairly well in all honesty. Make shipyards a requirement for opening the build menu (since nearly every starter sector has one, and making them more useful), forcing players to be sure they have the capacity to gather enough resources, the infrastructure to get them from place to place, and be sure the shipyard has the resources to build what they need. This would give resource gathering and management meaning and importance, but however could get difficult for new players. In any case it might be worth looking into.

 

 

[Ravien]

The problem with salvaging versus mining is this:

You can salvage thousands of material from a single generator block in just a few seconds using only 1 or 2 salvaging turrets. It takes much longer to mine the same amount of material from asteroids and you need many more mining turrets to do it.

You can find ships that contain a hundred thousand of a material and it only takes you a couple minutes to extract most of it. Mining out a large resource asteroid with an equivalent amount of resources will easily take 10x-20x as long.

 

Possible solutions:

 

Lower efficiency of salvage turrets slightly.

Increase size of resource asteroids the closer you get to the core, so mining scales better with salvaging.

Make mining turrets scale better in damage, so you can mine quicker when you get high end mining turrets.

Add more variants of resource asteroids, such as "dense" asteroids that contain more ore but don't take longer to mine.

Add more variants of asteroid fields that contain better asteroids, such as asteroid fields that are guarded by a pirate base but have asteroids that give a much better yield per minute.