Terran mining in Saturn 2 broken?

[Comander-07]

I am running a little test to see if M miners or L miners fare better, since terrans dont really have to worry about Khaak attacks from my experience and once again I can not make any sense of why my mining in saturn 2 is so miserable. It takes my L miner 2 or 3 minutes to fill up on silicon in Gaian Prophecy, meanwhile after 20 minutes my miner in Saturn has just 5% of its storage filled. My M miners sit at ~40%.
Yes there is a ressource probe. The data from it looks even better than in Gaians Prophecy. 0.65 vs 0.5 /km³ with 0.79 vs 0.57 max, yet my results dont match.
Is it just oversaturated by AI miners? I count 14 Ai miners, mix of M and L. + my 5.
Meanwhile there are 20 or more in the Asteroid Belt and they also fill up quickly.

I thought the ressources here could supply way more ships than just 20?

[chronobomb]

Originally posted by Valnak:

Saturn is weird. It's something to do with the respawn rate only making a few asteroids, plus the AI resulting in all 500 Terran/PIO Hokkaidos mining the same 6 rocks, moving as a group to the next rock.

Just forbid Saturn II. Belt / Oort has plenty.

Hopefully this gets put on the bug forum to fix Saturn mining

[DaBa]

I ran tests like these myself once, then used a tool somebody made to do the math on all miner and engine configurations. I can already give you the answers you're looking for:

- L mining ships perform best when mining in the same sector as their delivery point. In those circumstances a single L miner is worth almost 3 M mining ships.

- When adding travel between sectors L ships become worse with each new jump, for example: when jumping two sectors to mine resources, a single L miner is only as efficient as 2 M mining ships. L ships lose a lot of time when jumping gates because they stop every single time, need to re-engage travel drive and then slowly accelerate.

- Overall there are no circumstances where L mining ships are more cost-efficient than M mining ships if that's what you're looking for. The main advantage of L mining ships is they are durable and won't get destroyed by random Kha'ak attacks or anything else that wants to kill your ships. That's what you are paying for. Otherwise, M miners are always the best bang for your buck.

- Best performing M miner is Plutus Sentinel, Alligator being close second. Best Performing L miner is Crane Sentinel. Vanguard variants of all mining (and trading) ships are always worse at their job because of their smaller storage, and by a decent margin, so avoid them. The extra speed doesn't make up for their shortcoming.

- Best Engines for mining ships are Terran All-round engines for both ship sizes. Terran Travel Engines outperform them only when doing very long distance mining (like hundreds of kilometers of distance with multiple gate jumps). If you can't get Terran engines, go with Teladi Combat Engines, they outperform all others in almost all circumstances (thanks to their faster than average travel mode acceleration).

[Comander-07]

Originally posted by DaBa:

I ran tests like these myself once, then used a tool somebody made to do the math on all miner and engine configurations. I can already give you the answers you're looking for:

- L mining ships perform best when mining in the same sector as their delivery point. In those circumstances a single L miner is worth almost 3 M mining ships.

- When adding travel between sectors L ships become worse with each new jump, for example: when jumping two sectors to mine resources, a single L miner is only as efficient as 2 M mining ships. L ships lose a lot of time when jumping gates because they stop every single time, need to re-engage travel drive and then slowly accelerate.

- Overall there are no circumstances where L mining ships are more cost-efficient than M mining ships if that's what you're looking for. The main advantage of L mining ships is they are durable and won't get destroyed by random Kha'ak attacks or anything else that wants to kill your ships. That's what you are paying for. Otherwise, M miners are always the best bang for your buck.

- Best performing M miner is Plutus Sentinel, Alligator being close second. Best Performing L miner is Crane Sentinel. Vanguard variants of all mining (and trading) ships are always worse at their job because of their smaller storage, and by a decent margin, so avoid them. The extra speed doesn't make up for their shortcoming.

- Best Engines for mining ships are Terran All-round engines for both ship sizes. Terran Travel Engines outperform them only when doing very long distance mining (like hundreds of kilometers of distance with multiple gate jumps). If you can't get Terran engines, go with Teladi Combat Engines, they outperform all others in almost all circumstances (thanks to their faster than average travel mode acceleration).

I probably know the tool you are talking about, but that only takes traveling into consideration and is artificial. I wanted to know how fast they actually mine in the system I was looking at. Just buying the ships, sending them out and waiting in SETA does not take that long. Especially when you hang out on steam in the time.
Its not really about the ships right now, but their odd behaviour in saturn 2.

Because its legitely faster to mine in Gaian Prophecy and ship it to saturn instead, which is super weird.

[Valnak]

Originally posted by Comander-07:

I just wonder how other people make it work, I see people putting 20 or 30 miners there.

In one of the betas I made a custom start with an admin module on Saturn II. For some reason I had no problem mining there when I controlled it. I think it has something to do with the AI preferring their own territories when mining.

[Comander-07]

Originally posted by Valnak:

Originally posted by Comander-07:

I just wonder how other people make it work, I see people putting 20 or 30 miners there.

In one of the betas I made a custom start with an admin module on Saturn II. For some reason I had no problem mining there when I controlled it. I think it has something to do with the AI preferring their own territories when mining.

did you have an issue like I do without the admin module? Because I mine very fast everywhere else.

Though as the game goes on I understand mining less and less. Some sectors show 800k silicon but when you deploy ressource probes everywhere its at 0 stars with a 0.001 regen rate.

[Valnak]

Originally posted by Comander-07:

Originally posted by Valnak:

In one of the betas I made a custom start with an admin module on Saturn II. For some reason I had no problem mining there when I controlled it. I think it has something to do with the AI preferring their own territories when mining.

did you have an issue like I do without the admin module? Because I mine very fast everywhere else.

Though as the game goes on I understand mining less and less. Some sectors show 800k silicon but when you deploy ressource probes everywhere its at 0 stars with a 0.001 regen rate.

Sorry, I wasn't clear.

When I played one of the betas and immediately controlled Saturn II (it starts the game unclaimed) I had no problem mining there. I have not retested this to see if it was a one time thing. When I play, even to today, and try to mine in Saturn II I have the issue you describe. I do not know if I got a lucky mineral distribution (is that still a thing? I get confused by some mechanics) or me claiming Saturn II had an effect.

[Comander-07]

Originally posted by Valnak:

Originally posted by Comander-07:

did you have an issue like I do without the admin module? Because I mine very fast everywhere else.

Though as the game goes on I understand mining less and less. Some sectors show 800k silicon but when you deploy ressource probes everywhere its at 0 stars with a 0.001 regen rate.

Sorry, I wasn't clear.

When I played one of the betas and immediately controlled Saturn II (it starts the game unclaimed) I had no problem mining there. I have not retested this to see if it was a one time thing. When I play, even to today, and try to mine in Saturn II I have the issue you describe. I do not know if I got a lucky mineral distribution (is that still a thing? I get confused by some mechanics) or me claiming Saturn II had an effect.

I would not be surprised if the physical presence of asteroids was necessary to mine well, on the map it looks like every ship tries to mine the same spot which leads to poor performance

[DaBa]

Originally posted by Comander-07:

I probably know the tool you are talking about, but that only takes traveling into consideration and is artificial. I wanted to know how fast they actually mine in the system I was looking at. Just buying the ships, sending them out and waiting in SETA does not take that long. Especially when you hang out on steam in the time.
Its not really about the ships right now, but their odd behaviour in saturn 2.

Because its legitely faster to mine in Gaian Prophecy and ship it to saturn instead, which is super weird.

Weird behaviors in Saturn 2 aside, I ran tests way before I even found the tool that calculates ships efficiency. And the tool gave me numbers that were close enough to the ones I found out myself. Of course there are some factors it doesn't account for, but it still gives you a very useful baseline from which you can extrapolate further, and helps you understand differences between different ships and engines better, something that would take an enormous some to test properly yourself.

[Comander-07]

Originally posted by DaBa:

Originally posted by Comander-07:

I probably know the tool you are talking about, but that only takes traveling into consideration and is artificial. I wanted to know how fast they actually mine in the system I was looking at. Just buying the ships, sending them out and waiting in SETA does not take that long. Especially when you hang out on steam in the time.
Its not really about the ships right now, but their odd behaviour in saturn 2.

Because its legitely faster to mine in Gaian Prophecy and ship it to saturn instead, which is super weird.

Weird behaviors in Saturn 2 aside, I ran tests way before I even found the tool that calculates ships efficiency. And the tool gave me numbers that were close enough to the ones I found out myself. Of course there are some factors it doesn't account for, but it still gives you a very useful baseline from which you can extrapolate further, and helps you understand differences between different ships and engines better, something that would take an enormous some to test properly yourself.

But thats the fun part, I dont need to do that. For my terran playthrough I decided to use only terran ships, atleast in terran sectors. So its Hokkaido or Bolo. And I want to know how fast they mine, not how fast they travel. In system for example Hokkaido is pretty good, atleast compared to the performance drop it gets from gates.