Asteroid/Mineral Distribution

[slapshot]

What do you think of WhyteDragon's asteroid distribution idea?

Care to recap? I cant find it.

This is why the idea that the thread is about needs to be in the first post.. as a complete, stand-alone thought, not a response to a response to a response to an altered suggestion to the original post (and why I pulled the visual upgrade modifications out of this thread and into it's own)

[Dreadnought]

ok ill start, this thread is about asteroids (and im to lazy to make a new thread) and I probably wont focus on a specific part of asteroids that was intended but here it goes...

The spawn-rate and recreation of depleted astroids needs to INCREASE, not decrease over the game o.o

[Puppetbones]

The 4th post of page 1 is when WhyteDragon first proposes the idea. I didn't make a new thread because it was his idea and I feel it is not my place to create the thread.

[Siretu]

The spawn-rate and recreation of depleted astroids needs to INCREASE, not decrease over the game o.o

Technically, it does increase. At first the spawn rate of asteroids is 0, until the late game, where it starts recreating fields for each that is mined away. Therefore, it's increasing.

For Whyte's idea: I don't see a reason to increase the amount of fields, but I'm willing to make fields not spawn close to the BC.

[Puppetbones]

For Whyte's idea: I don't see a reason to increase the amount of fields

It's an increase in fields with fewer asteroids per field. In my understanding, it would be roughly the same asteroid count at the start of the game (and starting count is also something discussed in this thread). I think Whyte was also going for more spread in the asteroid distribution, because right now there are usually large clumps and large dead spaces.

This would have several benefits:

• Telling AI miners to mine specific resources types would not make them utterly useless. Thus making mining for specific resource types a little easier.

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  AI miners don't understand the concept of asteroid fields being primarily one color; that is, if you find a certain color of asteroid there are probably several others nearby of the same color. So thus they often miss some asteroids in a field and go out looking again. If there are more asteroid fields that are smaller, AI miners are more effective at mining specific colors.

• Small ship battles would be more interesting (personal opinion I guess, not actually a fact)

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  Generally, there are large dense clumps of asteroids that you can't really fly through, and the rest is a completely empty void ("dead space" as WhyteDragon put it) This idea will make smaller obstacles that you can actually utilize in battle rather than most battles taking place in purely empty space. Additionally, long range spamming (especially on kinetics) wont have as many gaps for projectiles to go through.

• Mobile BC gameplay

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  This is straightfoward: with asteroids being spread out, you will need to keep moving the BC to keep miners near

• Better Miner/Chomper balance/identity

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  There once was a time when winners weren't decided by who gets the chompers out the fastest. In fact, I remember early chompers being somewhat rare. It used to be that miners and chompers had their identities. Miners where more mobile and could go for specific resources, whereas chompers were vulnerable and a gamble whether you were mining what you actually need or not, but yielded large results in mineral count. Now with recent kinetics changes and chomper upgrades, especially chomping while moving, its more like they're both nearly equally vulnerable (both insta die to kinetics), but the miner can specifically mine just what you need whereas the chomper just mines absolutely everything in significantly less time. With asteroids being more spread out, this makes chompers less effective and helps bring back the old identity.

The sole major negative impact I can think of is that miners will now have to go around sampling asteroids more (mining a little from an asteroid to see what color it is). With asteroids being more spread out, a scanner sweep will not reveal as many asteroids, making you more likely to have to rely on the mining laser during the cooldown. I think this could be easily fixed by just reducing the cooldown.

[slapshot]

the mining laser during the cooldown. I think this could be easily fixed by just reducing the cooldown.

I wouldn't want this as a freebie - make the mining laser upgrade have like 5 levels, each one increasing the range/reducing the cooldown - make people work for it!

I also think you missed one of the biggest benefits: miners will be moving around more looking for minerals, which right now they don't do that much - they need red, they find a red field with 5 asteroids, and then they park there and have a boring job for the next 2-3 minutes.

[Puppetbones]

I also think you missed one of the biggest benefits: miners will be moving around more looking for minerals, which right now they don't do that much - they need red, they find a red field with 5 asteroids, and then they park there and have a boring job for the next 2-3 minutes.

Running around looking for asteroids is hardly more exciting than sitting around mining them. One side benefit, however, is that now you have a choice of sitting still and maybe not mining what you want most but having a good chance of catching moving kerm, or moving to the color you want and having almost no chance of catching kerm.

[slapshot]

Running around looking for asteroids is hardly more exciting than sitting around mining them.

It is much more exciting - there are things to think about: what was scouted across the mirror? can the BC laser scout fields? is it safe? is it spread out enough from allied miners? while moving, can I catch a kerm? - now if your just aimlessly wandering around, hoping to stumble upon something, then yes, there isn't much to do

but compared to mine asteroid X, mine asteroid Y, mine asteroid Z, and potentially mine the passing kerm for a split second (no, no maneuvering to catch it, as it takes too long to throttle up), and spamming Q as often as possible, it's a mindlessly boring job.