Mining Changes

[Prophet]

While we can all agree that the current mining system is boring, the real question is what would you like mining to be? These are just some ideas to spruce things up and make mining more of a mini-game or side quest rather than mindless grinding. Here are some ideas to throw around::

Mining could have an associated xp and level system, which could be used in the mining function to determine the ore yield that can be succesfully extracted as well as the price for mining claims (explained later). Missions from the mining stations would also grant xp and would not necessarily include mining but would be related.

All asteroids could have at least something in them, however, if there is a mining station in the system (or within a certain distance) the asteroids cannot be mined without purchasing a claim or having a certain mining level. Being inside your claim would attract claim jumpers and other miscreants that will attack you and try to steal your ore.

Some minor tweaks:
-System level dependent inventory, so mining in the mid-late game will yield higher level ores and items more often as well as a higher chance of a rare item drop.
-The asteroid disintegrates (non damaging) destroys all items inside.
-The asteroid explodes, damaging the player and destroys all items inside.
-The asteroid was a hideout and the player is attacked (random encounter)
-Very rare artifact or alien monolith is found.
-The asteroid contains a crystal formation.

[george moromisato]

To get down to the game design level: what player skill is necessary for mining?

1. Twitch: Maybe you have to chase down flying pieces of ore before they collide with some other asteroid. Or maybe there is risk that some ore will hit you and do damage (so you have to avoid it or shoot it down).

2. Precision: Maybe you have to precisely match velocities with the flying ore to bring it aboard.

3. Puzzle: Maybe extracting the ore requires placing mining charges in the correct location (Imagine a mini-game in a dock screen that allows you to place mining charges inside rock).

4. Strategy: Maybe you have to build mines on asteroids and decide on: (a) placement (some asteroids are better than others), (b) investment (do you build one big mine or lots of little mines), (c) minerals (price of ores fluctuates). All while fighting illegal miners and pirates.

One other big issue: The mini-game has to be compatible with the rest of the game. In other words:

A. Mining cannot be more viable than any other path.
B. Mining must be a trade-off (i.e., you must give up something in another path)

One possibility for B is to only be allowed to join the military if you have had a certain amount of experience in combat.

Another possibility for B is to have a time limit. After a certain amount of time, perhaps another pilgrim reaches various points and certain missions become unavailable (e.g., Point Juno gets destroyed/saved without you).

[Fossaman]

I really don't want to see a time limit. I like taking my time and finding everything.

A dockscreen puzzle would be pretty cool; I liked what you'd done with the Neurohack.

And I know this has been suggested before, a long long time ago, but...moving asteroids, perhaps? This would add a new dimension of strategy to selecting the best asteroid to mine. And it really should be *an* asteroid, or maybe two or three, not shooting every blasted rock in the system.

[Atarlost]

What about escalating spawns? Make moderately dangerous but nonlucrative enemies appear in increasing numbers the longer you stay in a system.

Stick a virtual timer station in every system. Have it spawn a level appropriate encounter from a stargate at an accelerating random rate (ona roll of 1 in x where x is decremented over time until it reaches 1)

Then all you have to do is select appropriate encounters. Charon Pirates (mostly corsairs or corsair IIs since they don't carry fuel for you) Outlaws Outlaw Miners (mostly hammerheads so your fuel gets depleted) Slavers (wind and steel) Marauders (mostly corsair IIs and Barbaries) Ares (mostly sandstorms, maybe a few chasms and tundras) Luminous. Penitants. Souped up penitants with the harass power on a mobile ship...

Or generate those encounters based on the value of the contents of the player's hold. Or some mixture.

[Aeonic]

Have people in the stations that you visit who will sell you the location of a deposit rich asteroid. Said asteroid, while usually worth what you paid for it, may occasionally be a ripoff, or may occasionally be discovered by someone else before you get there.

When discovering ore deposits, provide a chance based on the level of the system and the value of the ore that the local pirates will track you down and attempt to blow you away or at least get you to retreat and so they can steal your claim.

Having the mining guild station could give you missions to go extract ore from a specific asteroid. They might sell you the mission much like the previous station, but the more missions you get from the guild, the better the missions they'll give you. So its like the black market stations - you have to pay into it a bit before you start getting anything really good out.

[digdug]

idea for changing completely the mining system:
what if all asteroids gives you debris to load in the cargo ?

Then processing the debris gives you the various ores to sell.
This will limit the mining to systems with special stations that can process the tons and tons of rocks that you ablate from an asteroid.

Pros i can see:
more realism, you don't get directly the ore
using a scanner will feel less spoilerous
more (or all) high level weapons could actually have mining properties (like mining1 or something)
good cash sink for players that wants to process large quantities of rocks

cons:
can be a tedious process to recover some ore (but it can be re-balanced by increasing the price of the ores)

comments ?

[digdug]

idea for changing completely the mining system:
what if all asteroids gives you debris to load in the cargo ?

Then processing the debris gives you the various ores to sell.
This will limit the mining to systems with special stations that can process the tons and tons of rocks that you ablate from an asteroid.

Pros i can see:
more realism, you don't get directly the ore
using a scanner will feel less spoilerous
more (or all) high level weapons could actually have mining properties (like mining1 or something)
good cash sink for players that wants to process large quantities of rocks

cons:
can be a tedious process to recover some ore (but it can be re-balanced by increasing the price of the ores)

comments ?

[OddBob]

Note: Some of the references to 'combat' in this reply refer to busting the randomly generated stations for loot, not fighting random spawns, or any missions or plot elements, optional or otherwise (i.e. the arena, korolev, the proposed fighting of claim jumpers, etc etc).

A. Mining cannot be more viable than any other path.

What are all of the paths currently? You have to improve your gear to progress so anything that either gives you the opportunity to find loot or earn money counts.

I see combat (station busting), missions (i.e. taking jobs of any kind, even if they are paying you to bust stations or mine ore I view it as a different path, also includes the arena, korolev, etc), mining, and trading. Of course 'missions' is a faily wide path but I only do it for easy classification as you will see.

Station busting is currently both the method of progression with the least barrier to entry as well as the easiest to do overall. After all, you start with the tools necessary and you are guaranteed several opportunities in every system.

As it stands currently, it's also basically required. No, I'm not advocating that you be able to glide through the game without firing a single shot - remember, I'm talking about killing the randomly generated stations in each system for loot, not just battling spawns and such. There simply just isn't enough stuff to do other than this sort of combat to make forgoing it it a worthwhile option. (let me again emphasize my first statement)
It's technically possible to progress without busting a single station (again, outside of missions, let me put a little more emphasis on my opening statement just so we're clear) but you would have to rely on the RNG a little to get a good korolev, to get some good trading routes, etc. With each version this has become more and more possible, and this is great. I expect future versions will have even more ways to do stuff.

But even if there were enough opportunities - missions such as those offered at korolev or the black market, fighting in the arena, trading and mining are great, but again, there is little to stop you from doing these things AND busting stations.

Why? Because, no matter how much specialization is required to do the other things, as the game progresses, you are going to have to keep upgrading your weapons (or other offensive capability, autons or domina powers or something), in order to defend yourself against the spawns. This means that the specialization required to mine or trade or join the space circus or whatever can't completely rule out fighting, since you are always going to be up against these spawns and plus, as others have mentioned, you have to get to the core and the galaxy is not exactly the friendliest place in the, uh, galaxy.

You've simply got to fight.

Okay, so? I mean this is sort of an RPG/roguelike, we knew that coming in didn't we?
Well, you've got to have guns to fight. And this just so happens to be the specialization required to bust stations. Now there is the matter of WMD - some weapons aren't great at basecracking but they are mostly a matter of convenience.
- Early on there aren't that many WMD weapons anyway and you can get by with whatever you've got (even if you have to shoot the station for a while on autopilot - I can't say I've ever just left a station because I didn't have the firepower to crack it quickly)
- Later, many of the good weapons for defending yourself against spawns and doing missions happen to have WMD anyway, and the high WMD weapons that people like for basecracking are pretty decent against ships and spawns anyway (although there is a slight degree of specialization in this regard)

Thus as long as you need bigger and better guns to progress, and bigger and better guns let you bust more and more stations, then all of the "other paths" are simply going to be optional addons to your main method of progress, destroying everything in your path.

Now it's certainly possible to just roll with this and force specialization for the 'optional' paths.
So if you want to think of it like a traditional rpg for a sec ('classes' instead of 'paths'), your 'class' would be 'fighter/trader' or 'fighter/miner', 'fighter/smuggler', etc, etc, with all of the 'alternate' playstyles jockeying instead for the position of 'secondary playstyle'. This is sort of the way the game is now (and honestly, there probably isn't a way around it, all games of this type suffer from it).
It's also worth pointing out that some of the main underlying themes of the game may rely around you sort of bringing destruction around with you and generally becoming all powerful, although this does not necessarily require base cracking, even in a hypothetical (and completely silly) "no base cracking, ever" situation I still see the player leaving a trail of wreckage everywhere s/he goes.

If that was the case, then one can simpyl not worry at all about combat and the money gained from looting, and instead worry about korolev vs mining vs trading vs whatever and figure out ways to make all these things mutually exclusive.

So then, what if there was a little more 'specialization' required to bust a station? I'm not talking about just making them tougher in terms of raw HP or making them immune to WMD weapons. Not only are both of those sort of boring (one would result in more autopilot-blasting, one would make half the weapons far less useful) but I don't think they address the issue. There are a few ways I can see going about it, basically applying the process George listed above with regards to mining to combat instead.

First off, a time limit (and increasing numbers of spawns over time is just another type of time limit, one that I am not so much in favor of) would even out the playing field - as long as all of the ways to get money/gear (and thus progress) are roughly equal in terms of "credits-per-hour" then you've got a fairly balanced game.

But I don't like time limits (at least a global time limit - timed missions are still cool), after all, I want to play to relax, not make every playthrough a speedrun. Nonetheless, a 'soft' time limit designed more to discourage backtracking than to urge to player on too fast might not be all that bad, or maybe it would, I'm not really sure.

Second: currently, if you are leveling up at the 'right' speed, you can destroy every enemy station in each system (you can also mine every rock and trade every item but let's just focus on combat for now). In fact, I believe in many cases, destroying them makes it easier for you to tackle the next one as they will no longer send random spawns after you (or do those persist after the station that called them is destroyed? if so, disregard this).

While I am opposed to increasing spawns simply because time has passed, sending extra enemies (and continuing to do so) after you destroy a station both makes intuitive sense (because they are now angry) and provides you with incentive to at least think about it beforehand (since the more stations you take out, the more spawns you will have to deal with). It doesn't directly further specialization in terms of gear since you are fighting ships, though. It also eventually suffers from the same problems as increasing spawns in general does.

Third: Another way to combat the necessity to 'clear' every system would be perhaps to have some stations 'out of depth'. They don't necessarily have to send spawns if they are simply the regular stations out of depth. (Or, if they are brand new super powerful stations, they could even make the spawns, instead of having them gate in randomly, I have gone on and on in tedious fashion about this elsewhere). I believe this fits in with the 'high risk, high reward' mentality many of the current encounters already have.

The mission based play styles (korolev, arena) have a difficulty ramp already (mostly because they are all in the same place due to their repeatable nature) - the more of them you take, the harder it gets.

(and yes I know stations have an inherent difficulty ramp system to system already)

I think a similar difficulty ramp could be applied to mining as well - anyone can shoot a rock and haul a couple tons of that ore back to a CW station (great for those little rocks by outlaw miner stations you know have ore in them), but if you want to mine in volume you need to buy the gear/fight the claim jumpers/etc. See the rest of this thread for plenty of good ideas).

Then you might have the problem of the most optimal (i.e. least difficult) method of play being doing a little of everything. I don't know if this is bad or how to fix it.



-actual stuff about mining, I do get off topic a lot, sorry:

idea for changing completely the mining system:
what if all asteroids gives you debris to load in the cargo ?

I like this idea the most (but only if I can scoop up the ores by flying over them, even if I have to fly slowly or something. Please don't make me navigate that many dockscreens). It could be combined well with a strategy style of mining, I think.

It would also encourage more gear based specialization. You would need something to not only detect the ore (so you can scoop up as little junk as possible) but to actually grab it and process it and all of these can have several levels of effectiveness.

[Atarlost]

I'm not sure why you have a problem with spawns ramping up over time within a single system. That's exactly the sort of soft limit you then went on to request.

[Aeonic]

I'm in favor of highly radioactive asteroids that, while yielding valuable ores, also damage you just for being in proximity to them, and have a tendency to explode, sometimes with a radiation explosion. That would ramp up the difficulty a bit, especially if there are bad guys after you periodically, too.

[Aury]

I'm in favor of highly radioactive asteroids that, while yielding valuable ores, also damage you just for being in proximity to them, and have a tendency to explode, sometimes with a radiation explosion. That would ramp up the difficulty a bit, especially if there are bad guys after you periodically, too.

>:D send them through the asteroid field!

[Aeonic]

What if they're radiation-shielded and they like the asteroid field?

All you really would need is a shield that recharges faster than the asteroids can drain it, and some radiation-immune armor. That won't help you if an asteroid explodes in your face, but it would protect the enemy ships from their effects.

[Aury]

All you really would need is a shield that recharges faster than the asteroids can drain it, and some radiation-immune armor.

That translates to any shield other than a cyclotron or superconducting shields... XD

What about a shield that is strengthened by the radiation? (ie, radiation field's damage adds HP to the shield instead of subtract it, or perhapse stats boosts in it?) /just random ideas/

[Aeonic]

Don't be making assumptions about something that hasn't been invented! These asteroids could very well do horrendous amounts of damage just from being nearby!

As for shields - I don't know that you'd want to give the player shields that would protect from fully from these asteroids unless said shields were seriously weak for other reasons.

[Viperion]

Here's a thought. What if you combined the MARD mini gane (the find the anomaly mission in heretic) with mining?

You also talk about tradeoffs, so let's see if we can do this. A multi-path mining system.

First, you could, from a mining station, get a cargo hold, mining laser, and a sensor pod system. It works like the MARD in that you can use it to find specific ores in asteroids. This sensor pod would take some of the tedium out of mining, and the RNG could be tweaked to have fewer asteroids of value, but higher yields.

Next, I think that the game is currently slightly inconsistent with how the miners ask you to go hunt down claim jumpers but then you can mine that same asteroid. I think what would be good is if you use the sensor pod to find an Asteroid then you use that to file a claim. How I would expect this to be implemented would be that you have to deploy a sensor pod within, say two ls of an Asteroid and then go back to the station and file a claim on it. You would have a limit on how many claims you could file at each station. If you mine an asteroid you don't have a claim on, the station fines you.

When you go to file a claim, you have the option to buy a mining Auton. You could buy three different kinds, a bulk auton, cheap but not efficient (let's say 50%), a medium auton, (75% efficient) or a precision auton, 100% efficient. So it would be a waste to use an expensive precision auton on an asteroid with 5 tons of Titanium, but you would want to use one if the station had 35 tons of gold.

Also, I personally don't really like the shooting mechanism for mining that much. But I think it should stay. So, you can illegally mine using a mining laser, but the mining stations won't buy it or will confiscate your ore when you try to dock with them.

Doing this, you can combine the claim jumper aspects as well, for example it takes 15 seconds for a bulk auton to work, or 60 seconds for a precision auton, during which time you have to keep it safe.

Maybe by doing this mining and completing enough missions for enough guilds, you get some kind of Ferian ID ROM that lets you buy from Ferian stations? So it gives you a path, you can buy from or farm Ferians?

Maybe if you are an outlaw miner, Outlaw miner stations would have a 75/25 chance of being friendly to you, and would send you on Ferian Killer missions?

Not sure these are all well organized, but I personally think that 'training' a player for the Heretic missions is a good idea, especially when they feel kind of out of place to me right now.

The Hyper Viper