Cruiser Command

Because money has come up as a balancing factor multiple times in discussions, I took it upon myself to do some math and figure out how much money a team can be expected to have at the 20 minute and 30 minute mark. Here's what I've come up with as the final numbers:

Unupgraded miner: 82 minerals/minute

Upgraded miner: 200 minerals/minute

First thing to note is that upgraded miners mine faster than 2 unupgraded miners. It's such a massive increase in mineral income, it's pretty much required that this be your first upgrade for efficiency reasons, the upgrades pay for themselves in 2.5 minutes of mining. If your BC starts near minerals you should be able to fully upgrade your miners before the 2:30 mark, which means from the 5 minute mark on you're ahead of the team that didn't get this upgrade first (plus, the vessel core upgrades boost everything, including your BC's core if you have any ships docked).

It's hard to estimate how much mining time is lost due to not knowing where asteroids are due to the random nature of the map. If we assume 25% of a miner's time is finding rocks, we come out with 150 minerals per minute for an upgraded miner and 62 for an unupgraded miner. With 3 undisturbed miners, we get:

(unupgraded miners)
2.5 minute mark: 465 mins
(upgraded miners)
5 minute mark: 1590 mins
7 minute mark: 2490 mins
10 minute mark: 3840 mins
(Kerm pops now)
15 minute mark: 6090 mins

Not all of these minerals are going to be the color you want, but by the 15 minute mark you should have a lot of every color. If you are being color screwed, remember that your opponent is as well.

So what can we afford by the 20 minute mark? Whatever the hell we want, because we can afford literally every upgrade before the 15 minute mark (We have enough minerals to buy every upgrade at the 10 minute mark, but they are probably not all the right colors). By the twenty minute mark, we have enough money to buy every single upgrade twice, and still have enough money left over to get 10 chompers and 6 predator missiles. This is all with just miners too, no chompers, which are even faster at mining.

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Okay, so, the entire game hinges on those 3 miners being unharassed for 10-15 minutes. Lets assume miners never get cloaking (because they usually don't, even though the cloak will pay for itself in a minute). If there's any huge asteroid fields, the 3 miners can fly together there with the BC, and those miners are going to be exceedingly tough to harass, but that doesn't happen every game (it happened in the test game I made to get all these numbers but sometimes it doesn't). If your wraith pilot isn't pro, then they're probably going to lose the wraith when it gets sniped by the battlecruiser, but we can assume a pro wraith pilot for now.

Because miners have turbo boost though, even a pro wraith pilot will have a tough time getting a miner kill (it is still possible but it's up to the miner to let it happen). Lets assume that the miners split up so that they can't all be guarded by the BC and by defensive wraith/corvette. Lets assume the wraith can permanently keep one miner distracted from the 0 second mark on, so that it never mines ever the entire game. How much money does this team have at the 10 minute mark? 2560, which is still enough to get 'most' of the upgrades. By the 15 minute mark, we have enough money to get every upgrade and a full powerdock. Note that this is with only 2 miners mining. Keep in mind the kerm pops at the 10 minute mark, how many times has a game you've been in ended before then?

So, whenever I read 'it's balanced by the fact that it costs a lot of minerals', what it's really balanced by ATM is:

• Being cursed by the map RNG.
• Having newbie or AI miners.
• Someone not upgrading miners first.

In other words, its balanced against new people.

I've been mining for awhile and these numbers sound right, but I think I spent a bit more time flying around looking for ore. I watch the teams resource levels and look for what we don't have.

Newbie miners are a blight. IMO it's the good players that should mine not those that will lose the miner.

well the thing about miners is that they are easily countered and are outclassed by chompers. If there was no way to counter it (like upgrading the refiner which was why it was removed) then it would be OP.

I think you completely missed the point of this thread if you're bringing up chompers as a counter to miners...

forget countered, call it outclassed, chompers are more epensive and slower but in a big feild with upgrades, they turn up many more minerals then a miner, plus a miner has very little defense (besides turboing into the person) and you can reduce mining time by making the miner run away

The point of this post is to state that, when balancing things, "this costs money therefore it's balanced" is not a good argument because the free miners you start with collect more money than you'll ever need right now.

I don't understand how your point about chompers ties into this at all.

my point is that miners with their upgrade is needed but they still arent the only option, there are other ways to get money faster and can be more reliable to not get harassed and destroyed as easily while maintaining their cargo, chomper there is no reason to tweek the miner

This thread has nothing whatsoever to do with tweaking miners. Or tweaking chompers. Or tweaking anything. It's an entirely off-topic point.

cost is a form of balance weather you want to admit it or not o.o teams ignore upgrades due to their cost, in example kinetics, wraith corvette laser upgrades. im not sure if you posted this because you wanted to prove that its not ok to give an OP upgrade and just have it cost a lot, but at this time i dont see anything in the game that is unbalanced enough to claim that the mineral cost makes it ok.

Mineral in pub game is still a hard ressource to get. I had to go penta + 1 laser rush, not any other upgrade at the 20 minutes mark because my miners sucked balls.

basically, after 20 minutes, all I got was 150ish red, 20-30 yellow and like 300 blue.


Mineral is still a balancing factor.

Balancing mineral will have to happen when and if we get enough goods players to do 6v6 without newbs.


My opinion.