Not getting much from Boreholes... help?

[Accendus]

Just started a new game as Spartans, and built the Weather Paradigm as soon as I can. Sank some boreholes, but they're strangely only giving me 2 mineral 2 energy instead of 6 both? I dunno what's wrong, but there's sort of a big black outline around the two symbols which implies they haven't reached their potential... why?

Thanks for any help.

[bondetamp]

You need some more research done.

I don't remember them all that well atm, but when you can build Treefarms, you'll get it all.

I wouldn't worry too much about it. The best thing about the Weather Paradigm is that you can get 3 nutrients from a tile right from the start. Put down a farm and a condensor on two adjacent tiles, and you can support several forests.

[bondetamp]

Oh, and welcome.

*bondetamp does a happy little DL-dance.

[Drago Sinio]

Ecological Engineering, E4, will give you the minerals, then once you have that and the other prerequisites, you can research Environmental Economics, B5, which will give you the energy.

Its a good idea to build the WP if you want boreholes, because you can build them twice as fast that way. I think two formers working together will build one in four turns with the WP.

Welcome, and love that sig line.

[Avenoct]

I did a search to find this recent article about just this topic: Search term? 'Borehole'.



Restrictions and Such

Happy Crawlering,

Smack

[Accendus]

Wow... thanks. Wasn't really expecting to get a reply, let alone more than one thankyou to everyone, speshly Drago Sinio for complimenting my sig And for all the welcomes. Damn, this board is nice! But yeah,, cos I was looking in the help and it said, straight, 'gives 6 mineral 6 energy' with no other modifiers, and my previous game (with the Gaians) gave me sixes. Okay, thankyou everyone and look forward to being knowledgeable at some point on the board

[MariOne]

for the sake of precision:

The statement that "the WP doubles the speed of Terraforming tasks", reported both here and in the linked htread, is incorrect.

Actually, with The WP Formers work only 50% faster.
(This does NOT mean 50% time required!)
A single Former performs then 1.5 turns Terraforming job in 1 turn play.

Thus, building for instance a Solar will require 4 turns instead of 6, and not just 3 as if speed were doubled.
This is an actual 33% off in terraforming times, and not a halving.
Building a Farm will require 3 turns instead of 4, and not 2 (actually the Former will perform 4.5 Terraforming turns worth).

Off the top, building a Borehole should require 24 TF turns.
With the WP they become 16 (not 12).
You need 4 Formers (not just 2) to build a BH in 4 turns with the WP.

You can also consider drilling early rivers with the WP, if you can make them run a long way it's a lot of added energy, and you'd also gain moisture on arid settings.
I like to also use the WP to get early elevation, landfills and landbridges (Raise land won't come till EnvEcon).

As corretly reported, it's only worth to make early BH (thanks to WP) on Mineral or Energy bonus tiles, otherwise just make sure that they come online on the moment you get EcoEng.

[WhiteElephants]

Ya know, I wasn't even going to check this thread until I saw that MariOne had posted to it last and knew that he'd probably squeezed some drip of knowledge out of something I had over looked or didn't have an explanation for.

Thanks guy.

[johndmuller]

Inspired by Marione's examination of the effects of the WP, I did some analysis of the relative merits of researching the WP versus building additional Formers with those 200 mins instead.

On a min cost only basis, one can build 30 Formers for the same cost as researching the WP plus building 20 Formers. According to Marione's analysis, you have the same terraforming power in either case.

The difference, namely the effects of building 10 Formers versus the WP, lies in the midst of some mathematical complexity, but the major trade-off is between the Turn Advantage you get from the Formers that are already in use before the WP is finished versus the costs incurred in the Support of those extra formers.

The amount of turn advantage is pretty substantial and the investment of just a handful of Former Turns in a Forest, puts each former's cash flow in the black forever.

If you produce the WP at a base with +5 net mins, you could have instead produced the requsite 10 Formers in the same time; during that period, there will be 180 Former Turns available to create enough income to pay the support (there would still be about 100 turns advantage left). Even if you could produce the WP at a +20 rate, there would still be a 45 Former Turn advantage to the Former faction, although it would probably be worth it in this case on account of the other features of the WP.

So, even though the WP does have seemingly major advantages, going head to head with extra Formers, it may not be a really great investment.

[Avenoct]

JohnD, you go halfway, but we might as well think it all the way through (though I'll leave the math alone for now)

As you've calculated, the WP has the same mineral cost as 10 formers.
Agreeably, 10 formers in the field is often worth 100 in the plans for later. Turn advantage of having those formers out is well calculated above.
But what bases make those formers?

Lets look at all 10 at one base or 10 at different bases. Assume that the potential WP base was getting 5 minerals a turn.... let's assume all 10 bases have 5 mins a turn.

Case One
In one case, you build a former, now you are getting 4 minerals a turn, and start work on the second former....maybe by the time it's finished, you've forested and increased the minerals output for the base by 1. As you can see though, building 10 formers at one base is going to at best account for their own support by the time the 10th is finished.

At the same time, the WP would be finishing up, you'd be spending (wasting?) no minerals on extra formers, and every time you go to terraform you are getting maximum terraforming per mineral spent on the terraformer. Morever, you can immediately start with more efficient terraforms, such as a farm/condenser, etc.
Really, we should just leave the math department at this point because advantages of creating
Turn Advantage , while numerically straightforward, are more or less helpful in different strategic situations.

Case Two
Suppose you build all 10 formers at your 10 bases. Unless you rush-build all of them (let's just leave rush-build out of it for convenience), they will take 4 turns.
There are now 36 turns of terraforming to be done before the WP would have been done.
Suppose they each plant forest first-off. That's one turn move, 4 forest: 5 turns.
On the sixth turn, they've 'paid' for their support. 10 turns to the WP
Move and build forest twice more? something like that.

Basically, you've gained a few more FOP's, taken a small hit from the former-support (untill you've terraformed it away..but that's also arguable..at some point you have to consider support 'wasted' minerals). You've used 360 former turns terraforming that later could have been done with 244.5 former turns. The advantage is primarily in the immediate: you've been innefficient, but gotten needed results more quickly.

Case Three
One base works on the WP, the other 9 make formers.
In this case, the most likely one, you've 'lost' the 40 turns of terraforming that the WP base would have given by it's own former. You've gained an SP that increases your terraform speed by 50% and allows better terraforms. A trade off, but not as bad as you make it out to be!

Also, as you indicate with the number 180, but didn't illucidate: you have to take into account that a single base making 10 formers will not produce them on the first turn, nor will the formers immediately solve their support problem, which would be pretty big considering that the base has not made any additional crawlers.

The math for sequential Formers (non-rushbuilt) and Former-turns is like a staggered factorial:
[An explanation of the magic 180 former turns number]
Turn1: Start Former
Turn4: First Former done, moves somewhere
Turn8: Second Former done
Turn12: Third
Turn16: Fourth
Turn 20 Fifth
Turn 24: Sixth
Turn 28: Seventh
Turn 32: Eigth
Turn 36: Ninth
Turn 40: 10th

Total Former Turns, including moves: 36+32+28+24+20+16+12+8+4+0=180

And from one more angle: When would the efficiency of the Weather Paradigm 'pay' for the lost terraforming?
(X*.33=180)=545.45.
-->So, in the maximum possible additional terraforming you could gain by not producing the WP is 180,
-->OR this will be cancelled in 545 Terraforming turns after you build the WP.

Thus, when you've built the equivilent of 34 boreholes worth of terraforming, post-WP, all additional terraforming is Net Turn Advantage, like having the WP for free. Of course, getting it for free is by far the most reccomended route! Let the AI build it, then take it...then we need no numbers, for they are all positive.

-Smack

[Blake]

I think the main thing turn advantage fails analyis fails to capture is the need for the terraforming done.

It takes 4 turns for a former to farm / forest a tile, which are the two usfull early terraforms, accounting for road building / moving say 8 turns per terraform. A base can only use 1 terraform per population, and it is very unlikey a base can grow fast enough to need another terraformed tile every 8 turns (indeed, it could be 50 years before a base grows above size 2 or 3). In the early game it is almost inconveivable that a base needs more than 1 former.

Any terraforming which is done, but not worked, is turn-disadvantage, because it costs you former support.

Indeed, comparing the WP and the equivilant cost in formers is almost meaningless, because it is very unlikely you could actually use the terraforming done by the extra formers. (you could use the extra former time if you already had the WP...)

Once CLEAN arrives former time becomes free in terms of support... and a builder can easily afford to buy heaps of them.

The real question is to snag the WP and do heavy terraforming early, or wait until ecoeng and clean then do the heavy terraforming. I consider that any freemarketeer is wasting his time on the WP, because forests are extremely cheap former wise, and +2econ provides plenty of energy. However for the Hive (and to a lesser extent the Gaians, Drones and Believers) the WP can do wonders for the economy and industry.

[Drago Sinio]

The major advantage of building the WP, in my opinion, is the ability to have boreholes at each base, ready to go -when you get the tech. That way you get to actually use the tech from the first turn you have it. I am not gonna start a whole math thing, but my instinct tells me that the turn advantage is in the energy/minerals from the boreholes, not actually the terraforming of them. That is to say you dont need to wait twenty turns from the time you research the tech until you can do anything with it. Bang! All those minerals and energy kick in right away as you get the respective techs.

[Sikander]

Wow, the boys are back in town!

Great thread so far. I prefer to do as Drago suggests and get a jump on my terraforming. A lot of this has to do with me beelining for crawlers (and usually playing the University). Once you have crawlers it is pretty difficult to keep up with the terraforming, because within a fairly short time every base is kicking out crawlers every other turn. Eventually pop boom time comes around, and I end up needing even more productive squares (and re-forming a lot of forest). Over the course of the game the WP saves me a lot of minerals in formers which I didn't have to build, even after clean comes about and obviates support (at a cost).

Blind research, tech stag, and slow researching factions all benefit as well from the opportunity to build condensors and whatnot before researching the tech that normally allows this. I like this SP, though there are others which I like better.

[WhiteElephants]

I've found the WP allows nme to build a condensor/farm on top of a nutrient special pre restrictions lifting which is nice indeed. In this case you still net the +6 nutrients, because of the special square, quite early in the game that can set a base up for an early pop boom.

I can see where the idea of netting turn advantage is quite a boon, but this is assuming that the game, or at least your faction, last long enough to net those turns. Otherwise you've most likely let your opponents get the Merchant Exchange, The Command Nexus, The Human Genome Project, that Holo Theatre Project, and The Planetary Transit System (have I missed any other "early" projects?).

Perhaps it's my playing style, but I prefer almost every one of those projects over the WP. The only one I'm really "iffy" on is the Merchant Exchange, though it's a nice project nonetheless.