Regardless of extra benefits, I do think that drones are a great way to allow for multitasking.
If you enter a sector prepared, you can fire off a few drones and interact with them while you're exploring the sector yourself.
This gives you more things to do while travelling.

Katorone wrote:Regardless of extra benefits, I do think that drones are a great way to allow for multitasking.
If you enter a sector prepared, you can fire off a few drones and interact with them while you're exploring the sector yourself.
This gives you more things to do while travelling.

Hm. Didn't the second ELITE game feature something like that? Some kind of remote drilling rig? IIRC you dropped that thing and after a while, it would have extracted the shinies for you to pick up and sell. I kind of like the idea, but can't remember exactly how that thing worked back then...

Hardenberg wrote:

Katorone wrote:Regardless of extra benefits, I do think that drones are a great way to allow for multitasking.
If you enter a sector prepared, you can fire off a few drones and interact with them while you're exploring the sector yourself.
This gives you more things to do while travelling.

Hm. Didn't the second ELITE game feature something like that? Some kind of remote drilling rig? IIRC you dropped that thing and after a while, it would have extracted the shinies for you to pick up and sell. I kind of like the idea, but can't remember exactly how that thing worked back then...

That's pretty much it. Find a planet, land, leave it to mine, go and pick up the spoils. Landing in Frontier was an absolute pig.

I always got tonnes of useless crap.

The specific process for getting ore out of an asteroid and into one's cargo hold always seems to be problematic.

Either it's boring (watching a mining laser or dropping set-it-and-forget-it harvesters), or it's mindless action (explode the asteroid and fly around hoovering up the pieces).

All right, then -- here's an attempt to find a mining process that unifies the styles of play noted above:

1. Use your multispectral scanner to find a general region containing the signature of the desired ore type.
2. Switch to the single-frequency scanner to locate a specific asteroid with the target ore type.
3. Once parked above the target asteroid, deploy a mining scanner probe to take samples.
4. Based on mining scanner probe data, holographically designate mining probe drill sites on the asteroid.
5. Deploy mining probes, which crack the asteroid into many pieces of widely varied sizes.
6. Fly around to each piece to get close enough to transfer-unit it into your cargo hold until no big pieces are left.

In this design, the amount of ore you retrieve will depend on how accurately you defined the drill sites and on your piloting ability and tenacity.

Firstly, it will be impossible to define mining probe sites to get 100% of all the ore in an asteroid; you're just trying to minimize wastage by selecting probe sites that don't destroy good ore concentrations. If you can get good at seeing the patterns in the mining scanner data, you can learn to get good yields when you crack a rock.

And secondly, while you could in theory drive around looking for every little piece of dust released when you break an asteroid apart, in practice you're going to have to decide when to stop. Going after enough of the big pieces will get you most of what was available based on your mining probe accuracy.

Example: you find an asteroid that your mining scanner probe says contains about 50 tons of valuable Brobdingnagium. Based on that scanner probe data, you use the holographic map of the asteroid to designate drilling locations for 5 mining drill probes for a maximum yield of 86%. The drill probes fire in a visually enjoyable burst, cracking open the asteroid into 173 pieces. If you could collect all of these pieces, you'd have 86% of 50 tons, or 43 tons of Brobdingnagium. However, after three or four minutes of flying around you've only pulled something like the 80 or so largest pieces into your hold, comprising about 77% of the mass of the exposed ore or roughly 33 tons of ore. You have a 100-ton cargo hold, so in theory you could do this three more times, but you only have 6 mining probes left. Now you need to choose whether to go after another rock like the one you just cracked, or to find and crack two or three smaller rocks (to maximize the concentrations you can get with 6 mining probes), or to head back to the nearest station with a partially filled hold (presumably to buy more mining probes).

This model combines Josh's scanning and "holography" features with the need for you the player to learn to perceive the patterns of mining scan results, with the action of flying as efficiently as possible to collect as many chunks of rock as you can before you get bored. It also enables player choices based on making the best use of limited resources (mining probes and time).

Bearing in mind that the gameplay mechanic has not yet been invented that all gamers will universally love, does the mining process suggested above feel appropriate for Limit Theory and enjoyable by most of LT's likely players? How could it be improved? Or, if it's irreparably broken, what's a better idea that isn't only thinking or action?

There's something that irks me about small-scale mining, with lasers and drones and whatnot... And that is that it's small-scale.

There should be no economical benefit to going out yourself and collecting iron, titanium or ice. Those are the kinds of abundant resources the big boys would have a monopoly on. You know, the corporations with their asteroid-size ships that just grind asteroids to pieces, getting every bit of raw ores and minerals they can retrieve.

In my mind I'm seeing smaller ships prospecting asteroids in a field. They're indexing the contents of the field to determine the most valuable path an ore harvester can take. Un-prospected asteroids are designated in another colour on the map. Now and then these smaller ships come across a kind of ore or material that would damage the bigger ship (volatility with the acids used to extract the ores and minerals from the waste) if it would "ingests" the material. At the same time this material is used in weapon construction (hello big business!).
So a corporation mining a field would hire smaller miners to prospect each asteroid and remove the harmful material(s) from them. It would then offer to buy this material, or would let the miners sell it to another bidder/use it.

For me, a small mining vessel would be a specialist tool. They would never deliver the most of the abundant raw materials to the markets, with big corporations going out to harvest asteroids, there wouldn't be enough profit in it.
With this in mind, it would make sense that a lone wolf type of miner would want to prospect as many asteroids at once as he can. He'd have a cargo bay full of drones, which get deployed towards an asteroid field. He spreads them out a bit, because neighbouring asteroids are probably largely made up out of the same material. The drones send a signal depending on the kinds of materials they're detecting in the asteroids, which can be interpreted by your on-board scanner by locking in on the drone.
Asteroids not prospected by drones would still have some kind of noise, but it would be a lot harder for an inexperienced miner to make sense of it. Because of this an NPC would only want to buy scan logs when they're actually made with a drone instead of manually.


Edit: a side effect of you tagging these asteroids is that NPC have a way of knowing if an asteroid is "taken" or not. Perhaps they could hack into your signal and receive your prospecting data from your drones. Drones work on battery power + solar but go dead after a while (more sun = longer life).

Flatfingers wrote:mcsven, I came within a gnat's whisker of including a link to that very post in the Prospecting bullet. I'm feeling a bit silly now for not having done so as I agree it would make for good gameplay.

One of the other notions that comes up sometimes (especially following a mention of wildcatters) is of "staking a claim" to a find -- one that's too big to take immediately and completely -- by registering it with some local authority. That implies a number of interesting game mechanics, including the idea that there is anything like a "local authority" who is capable of and interested in enforcing property rights.

It also creates possibilities such as claim jumpers, and of needing to be tight with some paramilitary types who can guard your find (and won't steal it) while you're off registering your ownership of it.

I'm not sure how much fun the typical LT player would find those things. Interesting to think about, though.

I agree that it could become a bit dry - it would need to be carefully balanced.

One thing I dont' see in your original list, but that was also mentioned in the post of mine I linked to, is the need for permits or licenses. Presumably you'll sometimes want to mine in an area of space that's "owned" by someone else. Certainly I can see this happening at the start of the game. This could be combined with the "staking a claim" concept that you mentioned (and I posted about here) and also the "contracts" idea.

Local authorities may routinely claim mineral-rich fields in their sphere of influence, even if they don't currently have the tech/resources to exploit them. You can then apply for a permit to explore them, or a contract to extract. Or something along those lines.

Too much paperwork?

@mcsven

I think you are on track with the a license. This creates more content, and more space for conflict. Thinking here that you could develop and research fast moving/mining equipment for pirate mining if you wanted to, or get the license and work on researching the massive equipment needed to start your own mining corp, not to mention fighting other mining corps for territory right, to rent the space to other NPC miners, another source of income.

Personally I'm like the thought that Josh had to deploy drilling drones and you can come and check in them while you are manually mining if you want. Also a +1 for the hologram display of asteroids to look for the best drilling sites.

I've personally felt a little twitchy about the whole "licenses and permits" idea ever since Thymine suggested and endorsed it.

I can appreciate the simulationist value of it. I just don't know if that adds to the feeling that we're intended to get from the overall game. Does needing to do paperwork contribute to a player experience of expanding beyond supposed limits (the "limit theory")?

Or does it feel more like Bureaucracy Simulator 2014?

It's not something I'd react strongly against (unlike, for example, denying quicksave/quickload for a single-player PC game). I'm just not at all sure it supports what I perceive as the overall design vision for LT.

I'm still open to persuasion on it, though. But the argument will need to be a pretty compelling one, for me at least.

Flatfingers wrote:I've personally felt a little twitchy about the whole "licenses and permits" idea ever since Thymine suggested and endorsed it.

I can appreciate the simulationist value of it. I just don't know if that adds to the feeling that we're intended to get from the overall game. Does needing to do paperwork contribute to a player experience of expanding beyond supposed limits (the "limit theory")?

Or does it feel more like Bureaucracy Simulator 2014?

It's not something I'd react strongly against (unlike, for example, denying quicksave/quickload for a single-player PC game). I'm just not at all sure it supports what I perceive as the overall design vision for LT.

I'm still open to persuasion on it, though. But the argument will need to be a pretty compelling one, for me at least.

What he just said. I'd probably word it "screw this license and redtape crud". You want that ore? You TAKE it. You want to keep me from grabbing the ore? Then STOP me from doing so, FFS. But please, spare me the "you need a license to do stuff" bullcrap. Without force to back them up, rules and regulations are not worth the paper they're written on. You try to write me a "mining in a no mining zone" ticket. I'll blow your sorry excuse for a faction to kingdom come. There is no need for civility in this game. There is also no need to separate resource gathering from fighting. This isn't a bloody MMO, we don't need no stinking niché protection or "holy trinity" of any kind.
You want to mine in peace? Get good with the local faction. Or blow them up till they cry uncle and leave you alone. Choices, ladies. I didn't boot up the game and strap guns to my ship to fill out paperwork.

Lots of things seem like they'd emerge out of the gameplay mechanics already envisaged.

• For example, "licenses." Well that just means "the people in charge of this system will let you do it." If there's nobody in charge of the system, it's not an issue. If there are, and they're patrolling with military ships to ensure their exclusive rights, then the idea that they might charge a fee to allow freelancers access isn't unreasonable, nor is it inconceivable that such behaviour might emerge out of the AI (or that the AI could be expanded to allow such an emergent behaviour).
• Drones? Well they're just independent ships, something which the game already has. I buy a small mining ship (or research/build one) and tell it "go prospect here." Job done. Or, for better results, I could go out and do the prospecting, landing my "99% unobtainium" probes, then send the ship a list of instructions to follow behind and pick up the ore, leaving my small cargo space free and cutting out the need for constant back-and-forths to the space station.

What I'm interested in, from a procedural point of view, is the amount of variation in base minerals to mine, the ways in which these can be combined, and the ways that statistics can be derived from materials used.

Let's give an example. Say there are 12 base minerals in the game. All these can be used as components in other things, probably based on a fixed set of rules (missiles require X% explodanium and Y% hulltonium, with Z% variance).

Or, these 12 minerals can be processed with each other, giving 144 possible materials, and *these* can then get used in blueprints, allowing for much more variation.

Now what are you going to do with base rules if you have 144 materials? That's complicated and requires a lot of entering stuff into databases manually, which is epic dullsville and also incredibly limiting. Well you don't, you classify things into material "types." And then you derive stats from the type of material you used on your machine. So, if your fighter is made out of Steel it behaves differently from if it's made out of Titanium and differently still from if it's made out of Unobtanium. Want a solid gold fighter? You can make one. It'll handle like a pig and cost a bomb but maybe it's the kind of status ship you want to fly around and show off.

This means blueprints won't call for "unobtanium" or "anthracite" but will call for "hull material" or "splodey stuff" or "electronic material" and it's up to you to decide whether to throw the expensive, good stuff at it, or whether to make the strength/weight trade off, or any number of other decisions. More ways to combine things = more variation = more unique gameplay.

This sort of leads on to the fact that manufacturing is more than just metals. It's chemistry and biology. It's oil and plastics. It's biomass and fossil resources. Y'know, the sort of thing you might find on planets. Maybe the idea of planetary mining is waaaaay beyond the scope of what's planned, but it's not totally utterly infeasible - you'd just need a way bigger bit of tech to extract stuff from a planet than you would from an asteroid. An orbital platform that deployed satellites and gave you a ping on "rich" areas of the planetary surface, for example, which you'd then go down to with a big ol' assaying vessel (or send one down with orders to sort it out for you). You might stick a refinery down there, but maybe you're only getting one resource and you need to combine it with something else which you're getting from another system to maximise your profits, so you stick a refinery in an asteroid field at a midpoint and get transport ships to take ore from your planets/asteroids to your refinery/factory base... and on and on it goes.

Or you could just fly around finding other people's factories and refineries and blow them up, as long as you know that in doing so you'll be angering whoever's supply chains you've just disrupted and making life incredibly hard for yourself.

I think this fits with the overall theme.

• It's optional, not necessary - you don't have to do it at all if you don't want to, but it leads to a rich long-game experience if that's the way you want to go.
• It's based on a number of small base units and the complexity emerges from the way these things can be combined.
• It rewards specialisation.
• It's scaleable almost infinitely, or at least for long enough that taking a small mining vessel all the way up to a multi-system industrial conglomerate can eat up many happy decahours of gameplay.
• It provides an explanation of where all those ships you blow up *come from*, while also providing something for people who want a different experience to "blow things up, buy bigger ship, blow bigger things up."

Aaand, first post on the forums is a big ol' TL;DR wall of text, so I'll shush now.

"splodey stuff" is now my personal favourite kind of stuff

Hardenberg wrote:

Flatfingers wrote:I've personally felt a little twitchy about the whole "licenses and permits" idea ever since Thymine suggested and endorsed it.

I can appreciate the simulationist value of it. I just don't know if that adds to the feeling that we're intended to get from the overall game. Does needing to do paperwork contribute to a player experience of expanding beyond supposed limits (the "limit theory")?

Or does it feel more like Bureaucracy Simulator 2014?

It's not something I'd react strongly against (unlike, for example, denying quicksave/quickload for a single-player PC game). I'm just not at all sure it supports what I perceive as the overall design vision for LT.

I'm still open to persuasion on it, though. But the argument will need to be a pretty compelling one, for me at least.

What he just said. I'd probably word it "screw this license and redtape crud". You want that ore? You TAKE it. You want to keep me from grabbing the ore? Then STOP me from doing so, FFS. But please, spare me the "you need a license to do stuff" bullcrap. Without force to back them up, rules and regulations are not worth the paper they're written on. You try to write me a "mining in a no mining zone" ticket. I'll blow your sorry excuse for a faction to kingdom come. There is no need for civility in this game. There is also no need to separate resource gathering from fighting. This isn't a bloody MMO, we don't need no stinking niché protection or "holy trinity" of any kind.
You want to mine in peace? Get good with the local faction. Or blow them up till they cry uncle and leave you alone. Choices, ladies. I didn't boot up the game and strap guns to my ship to fill out paperwork.

Maybe. Thymine's original license stuff was much more restrictive, if I remember rightly, and involved making you earn the right to own and use equipment, travel etc. I'm talking about something much narrower than that.

However... if we had the concept of staking claims then actually, on reflection, you simply wouldn't need it permits to be different from contracts.

When we are taking about licenses I am thinking more about the mid to late game when you've already amassed some sizable realestate. These could be a minimal form of empire control that really only provides income from NPCs. Personally, in the beginning of the game I would rather enjoy sneaking about to get what ore and other materials you can, licenses be damned. I think that would be enjoyable in the sense that you are taking what you need until you become big enough to take the space by force.

In order for licenses to work you have to have central control and enforcement. Otherwise what's the point?

McDuff wrote:In order for licenses to work you have to have central control and enforcement. Otherwise what's the point?

Not central control and enforcement, but just a central standards committee with the possibility of factions enforcing those standards (or not) within their own territory. This has been discussed extensively in Restrictions on Equipping Modules. Kind of like the idea of CONCORD in EVE Online, except CONCORD do the enforcing as well.

The idea of a central standards committee makes sense at least insofar as explaining why all factions agree to using one currency system with a universally agreed upon value.