| 967 | 🙂 | General | Feedback on the math of resource consumption and resulting need to constantly manage resource acquisition instead of deciding how to spend it: In my experience it takes about 10 laser miners spread across 5 Twinbots to keep up with the crystal production needed for constant Datacube Matrix production and still have a little left over for other projects. Datacube Matrixes of various colors are needed for all high-level research, so mainting that crystal income is required to keep up smooth progress in research. Other Metal-intensive past research projects have need similar income from Metal miners, so "10 laser miners" feels like a good benchmark of the resource consumption rates needed to maintain constant production of key mid and late-game items.
The largest crystal I've seen in this medium-resource-level map is about 6,000 crystal. Laser Miners harvest every 2 seconds, which means that enormous crystal lasts for 12,000 seconds. With 5 Twinbots each equipped with a pair of Laser Miners, we're looking at just 1200 seconds, or a mere 20 minutes, to completely mine out that giant crystal and force seting up a new mining base. If the resource dropoff point for the miners is appropriately close and delivery frames are keeping the dropoff point cleared out for new dropoffs, wait time at the dropoff depot and travel time from crystal to dropoff depot is negligible. That 20 minutes far, FAR too short. At the game's default resource levels a crystal of that size should be lasting the player for a good hour, three times as long, allowing the player time to explore, improve base efficiency, or build newly-research objects. As is, the late game player time is mostly spent on locating new reseource piles of Metal, Crystal, and Silica, setting up the nearby structure to provide power and storage for the miners, and swapping over the miners and delivery frames bringing the resources back to base. There's just not much time available to spend on expanding combat parties that clear plateus or hunt aliens, scouting ruins, or employing newly-research tech to improve your base and frames.
Short version: Triple the resource values for all mineable resource nodes across the board. And since from my quick look the High resource setting is unnoticeably more than Medium, High resource should be double what medium resources provides. | | 2023-08-21 00:55:01 |