Coal: Mine or Thump?

[Obz3hL33t]

I just can't bring myself to force those poor kids into hard labor, which means no children gathering coal.

This also meant skipping the Coal Thumper on the tech tree and rushing to Coal Mines.

Was this a bad idea? Should I be saving up those Steam Cores for more important things?

[Levnekaethian]

You can do child shelters as opposed to child labor fairly even up to hard difficulties, if you're going for extreme though (especially on endless) you definitely need to go Child Labor. As long as you don't pass the next child labor law which opens up all jobs to children you'll be fine. If you don't, you end up being incredibly short on labor and losing quickly. I was never able to complete extreme missions without Child Labor. It may be possible, I just wasn't able to do it.

[amordron]

First to correct the guy above. Both child labor and shelters are fine for all diffs in a new home and both has been used for deathless just fine on extreme. Only refugees on extreme really “forces” child labor. While winterholm dosent give a option as the law is signed of the start.


Both coal thumpers and mines are fine.

For steam core use the order for best to worst use by labor savings is.

Wall drill. The top not since it’s the best labor per wood but since it is good labor per wood and wood is limited if you don’t use so need one. It’s well worth in every case but rifts to rush it for first core.

Hothouse. Hothouses are the highest labor saving per core in the early game pre tech and even after tech is compairable to mines labor per core. It starts about 30 percent better and ends about 5 percent worse core per labor.

Mines.


This is always comp the steam core industry vs the non steam core. The main reason hothouses stand out so much is since hunters can’t work extended shifts. Child labor has nothing to do with which industry is better per core. But child labor dose make hothouses nice as it gives them a place to work esp paired with thumpers that do the same.


You should always pick either thumper plus hothouse or hothouse plus coal mines. Rarely do you got the cores to take both steam core industry right off and you don’t want to not use cores and take non. Both ways are viable and fine. You should not take both of the same industry thou as that is a waste of tech time.


For a new home thou mines have another event that take away from there power thou. As mines have issues durring the storm using them has further complications. These are minor but it is a factor.


Also you shouldent need to rush mine tech but only wall drill tech skipping sawmill. Your starting coal piles last a long time unlike wood. So you can freely get coal at a much later point after both steel and wood income is set with some basic upgrades.

[Levnekaethian]

Originally posted by amordron:

First to correct the guy above. Both child labor and shelters are fine for all diffs in a new home and both has been used for deathless just fine on extreme. Only refugees on extreme really “forces” child labor. While winterholm dosent give a option as the law is signed of the start.


Both coal thumpers and mines are fine.

For steam core use the order for best to worst use by labor savings is.

Wall drill. The top not since it’s the best labor per wood but since it is good labor per wood and wood is limited if you don’t use so need one. It’s well worth in every case but rifts to rush it for first core.

Hothouse. Hothouses are the highest labor saving per core in the early game pre tech and even after tech is compairable to mines labor per core. It starts about 30 percent better and ends about 5 percent worse core per labor.

Mines.


This is always comp the steam core industry vs the non steam core. The main reason hothouses stand out so much is since hunters can’t work extended shifts. Child labor has nothing to do with which industry is better per core. But child labor dose make hothouses nice as it gives them a place to work esp paired with thumpers that do the same.


You should always pick either thumper plus hothouse or hothouse plus coal mines. Rarely do you got the cores to take both steam core industry right off and you don’t want to not use cores and take non. Both ways are viable and fine. You should not take both of the same industry thou as that is a waste of tech time.


For a new home thou mines have another event that take away from there power thou. As mines have issues durring the storm using them has further complications. These are minor but it is a factor.

I did say it may be possible, I just wasn't able to do it cause I'm bad.

[amordron]

Yes you did but even saying that is bad adviceand needs to be corrected as many vet players will argue child shelters as the better option than child labor and it is esp on a new home where the value of children is really quite small in many builds. (As faith and orders pick comes so much later than endless). You have to use the one better for your build as such you telling him not to take child shelters when his build is based on it is a bad thing. As if his build is based on child shelters going labor vary well might be a loss not a gain in power. ESP if like his question expressed he had no jobs for them.

Eg taking order plus hunters for food and mines for coal which vary well might be his build child labor is next to worthless and hardly even helps you in the early game. He would have no jobs for them late game as such the tech boost from child shelters would be the massively better option.

This is complete viable and one of the better builds to boot for extreme.

[CureAga Wine]

Coal mine is trash at worst, situational at best. It's fairly expensive for the early game, when you scrapple for manpower the most. I only consistently use them in the arc scenario, because you know, automatrons.

[MozarteanChaos]

iirc thumpers give you more coal, at the cost of taking more manpower to operate efficiently. if you have enough people to use them, the high rate of production (and relative cheapness) makes them useful buildings.
coal mines are best when you have automatons or will have them very soon - without them they're a bit... eh. definitely not useless, but not great until later in the game.

[Bobywan]

Coal thumpers dont freeze.

[jklinders]

Coal mines are a bit more labor efficient but if you can put together the workforce thumpers outclass them in every way possible. I've decided on my own to bite the bullet on the large space needed and learn to love the thumper. The tech is cheap, requires far fewer cores and produces a LOT of coal.

[snuggleform]

Coal mines are labor efficient at higher tiers. I.e. you're spending steam cores to get manpower. Coal thumpers you're dumping purely men to get manpower. It comes down to whether you have steam cores to spare, your tech level, and any "event" considerations like the mines blowing up in New Home.

Generally thumpers are the go-to since steam cores tend to be scarce and are first shoved into hothouses/wall drills, but for example in the winterhome scenario I try to go for coal mines as you're losing manpower very quickly as the scenario progresses and you have some steam cores to spare.

[Bobywan]

Advanced mine is 3 cores expensive. Let's say 4 with an automaton.
Now with 4 cores you can make 4 automatons to work the thumper and gathering posts. That's what I like the most.

[Ad Hominem]

Put them kids to work. They can haul coal safely.

[dreamerInSilico]

Amordron's emphasis on what your build/priorities are in a given scenario is very much the way to be thinking about this - the fun thing about having multiple scenarios (and some achievements that also force you to adjust your build if you want to go for them - incidentally, I found doing Vegetarian and Charcoaled paired well together on New Home) is that there isn't a one-size fits all "best build."

I personally haven't ended up using thumpers much in New Home except explicitly when I wanted Shai-Hulud Summoner. xP If you set up the resource outpost at Tesla city (and in case it isn't obvious, fully scout the Frostland and gather all the steam cores available out there) you end up rolling in cores, and I like the labor efficiency of mines. But I also never use Child Labor on New Home, and with Child Labor, thumpers become more attractive come mid-game given that they provide safe workplaces for kids.

Something probably worth pointing out, specifically for New Home (since it sounds like you're pretty new, OP), is that there is enough coal lying around on the ground that you don't really have to "rush" coal mine research - if you're able to keep research going continuously, you have plenty of time to research all your essential tier one tech and THEN go for the second tier unlock.

[Obz3hL33t]

I'm as noob as noob can be.

In the newbie scenario the one hard limit is on metal. You do have to spend a lot to beeline to the Babbage Computer to upgrade the metal factories, but metal is the hard bottleneck, so it seemed to make sense to back-fill other research after getting the metal going.

Thus I built a 4-pit fracking operation with a "temporary" extra level 1 thumper until I could get around to researching the steam one. Turns out my researchers have been so busy with the grand metal-upgrading-project the temporary extra is more of a permanent fixture.

On the design of a thumping industry I discovered it's best to build the AE parts first then construct the industry around it. AE buildings are attached to roads, so they're hard to position after-the-fact.

The newbie scenario hands out cores like candy, but skipping the sawmill tree wasn't practical. The supply of scrap lumber was very scarce, and there are some pretty hard rails in the scenario's first couple of chapters.

I've noticed that infrastructure is pretty cheap once you have a couple of sawmills up, and if you overbuild you can transfer your workforce around as needed. This is especially true of the workshops: that fourth workshop doesn't add much, but if you have extra manpower it's there.

At night everyone builds, and I have 'em building all kinds of stuff, especially roads and idle sawmills. Wood is plentiful, and I don't want my workforce doing construction jobs during the day. The power to transfer workforce around is huge, especially if you have one AE heater warming your coal fracking site. The humongous-sized storage silos cost a lot of metal, but you can really optimize your workforce if you can take advantage of massive surge production. I have huge stockpiles of everything but metal. The level -4 cold snap is coming, so we'll see how I hold out.

Transferring the "Panopticon" discussion of roads from that thread to here -- as per the mod's request -- the idea of straight spokes all the way to the edge seems impractical. I think it might be better to just build whatever needs heat in the inner rings, whatever doesn't on the outer ring, and whatever's insulated in the middle. Keeping buildings of uniform length on a given ring seems like an achievable goal, especially since you can rotate by middle-clicking.

I also noticed that the outermost generator heat-ring "rounds up" if you place an oblong building half-in, half-out of the outer heat ring. The Children's Shelter, Workshop, and Sick House are examples of this. Half-in is good enough.

Wait, you can rotate oblong buildings? Which I just learned like 5 minutes ago, yes, you can. But I did say I'm a noob.

Lastly, upgrading housing works better if you have an extra house. But with metal being limited in the newbie scenario it's tents and inner generator rings for the poor slobs. Want houses? Find metal!

Thanks for all your comments. I hope you find my newbie thrashing entertaining.