Business And Economy Archive

There is aslo a section on the bazzar for asteroids now as well I'd love to try some space mineing.

Message Edited by Ackew on 01-26-2005 07:57 PM

Hmm! We did a bunch of nagging before JtL shipped about how space ought to be about more than just combat.

The response was something like, "Yeah, yeah, maybe we'll get to that later."

Is it "later" now?

On the possibility that this is really in the works, here's a (revised) version of some ideas I had a while backfor asteroid mining and how it can be integrated into the existing game economy.

1. Limit the impact of asteroid mining on the overall economy by requiring the use of ships with specialized cargo holds (inventory containers) whose sole use is carrying resources mined from asteroids. (If your ship is destroyed, you lose some or all of whatever is in your cargo hold.)

2. Some parts of space are more dangerous than others.The quality of resources obtained from asteroidsshould tend to improve with proximity to danger -- not 1:1, but often enough so that the risk vs. reward relationship is reasonably strong. Note that this also helps limit the impact of asteroid mining on the overall game economy by keeping the number of miners low.

3. Require a "mining rig" to mine resources from asteroids. This is a device that attaches to a ship in place of a weapon, modifying the appearance of that ship appropriately. This will distinguish mining ships from non-combatant ships (although pirates might look for ships with mining rigs!), and would improve the game experience by requiring players to make interesting choices between firepower and commercial abilities. It would also affect the game economy slightly by providing another interesting item for crafters to be able to build and sell.

4. An even simpler approach might be to dispense with the mining rig concept altogether and just let the player sample from the nearest asteroid. The player wouldhave to imagine that some kind of drilling rig is in use, but as this is pretty much how the ground game works now, players are already used to it. The advantage of this approach is that it eliminates the need for new art and coderesources (for the mining rig) to be created.

5. It would be nice if asteroid mining generated a unique animation similar to ground-based sampling/surveying.

6. Requiring players to be present to mine resources from asteroids allows reuse of the existing "sampling" UI, minimizing the new UI code that would otherwise have to be written. Not allowing harvesters on asteroids means that more casual players are at a disadvantage to the truly gung-ho asteroid miner, but on the plus side, it also means that since asteroid-mined resources are rarer, they're more valuable to anyone who digs them up.Finally, requiring manual harvestinghelps to limit the impact on the economy of asteroid-mined resources.

7. Minimize crowding by restricting individual asteroids to one miner at a time. Alternately, base the number of active miners allowedper asteroid on the size of that asteroid (assuming the sizes of asteroids vary appropriately).

8. To keep things simple, give each asteroid its own random percentage for all current space resources. Or if more "realism" is desired, calculate resource percentages just like on the ground (except in 3-D) so that the asteroids nearest the highest percentage location have the best percentages, but others farther away have decreasing percentages. Alternately, some asteroids might be large enough to have several "hotspots" for a particular resource on their surface.

9.As yet another alternative, consider setting a total number of resource units for each asteroid when new resources are spawned, and thenlet mining operations on a particular asteroid actually "use up" all the resources on that asteroid as they're mined. Rather than players sitting in the same spot for days, you'd have miners constantly moving through asteroid fields, which would be a lot more interesting. Running out of asteroids with "good" resources shouldn't be a problem as long as space is full of asteroids (compared to the number of miners) and resources shift often enough. It would however still help limit the number of space-mined resources, thus minimizing the impact of these resources on the overall game economy.

10. Way-out idea: Allow tunnelling into sufficiently large asteroids. The resulting hollowed-out asteroids could then be mined for internal resources, could have houses built on it, and (to really go nuts here) could have engines strapped to it to turn it into a very slow butmobile city in space. (Mounting weapons on one of these things could also be fun, but might be unbalancing.)

Comments?

--Flatfingers