Nutrient penalty from mines

[Mithril26]

This has been bothering me recently, but why don't mines remove the +1 nutrient from a moist/flat or moist/rolling tile? As in, moist/rolling produces 1/1/0 normally. With a farm by itself, it produces 2/1/0, with a mine by itself it produces 1/2/0, and with a mine plus a farm, it still produces 1/2/0. But the alpha.txt file says that a mine should have a -1 nutrient effect on the tile, so that a mine by itself should produce 0/2/0. So, what game mechanic am I missing here? It seems that there's no point to make a farm/mine on a moist/rolling or moist/flat tile.

[Flubber]

With all due respect to you question, the answer is irrelevent. You should never put a farm mine combination on ANY tile ever. A forest produces 1-2-1 with less terraforming time.

Mines are for rocky tiles and should be crawled
Farms may be combined with condensors and crawled or with a solar collector and worked.


Back to your question . . . I don't know the answer but once you discover the joy of forests, it won't matter to your gameplay

[gwillybj]

Originally posted by Flubber
... Mines are for rocky tiles and should be crawled ...
... discover the joy of forests ...

I take these a little further, even.
Mines are for rocky tiles with mineral bonuses and are crawled.
Rocky tiles without mineral bonuses are reduced to rolling and then forested and worked.

As for the original question, I wonder if a line in the Resource Information section of alpha.txt has a bearing on it. The line is under #RESOURCEINFO:
Improved Land, 1, *, *, 0, "*" columns are ignored entirely
The * columns are for mines and solar collectors. The part I'm curious about is the 1 in the nutrients (farm) column. Could it be overriding the -1 mine penalty somehow?

[vyeh]

There is a footnote (7) on p. 53 of the manual, where it says the effect on nutrients by a mine is -1(7). On p. 54, footnote 7 says "A mine will not reduce nutrient production to zero."

[Chaos Theory]

Putting a farm-mine on a rolling mineral bonus is reasonable, as it will yield 5 minerals and 1-2 food, potentially better than the 1-4-1 of a forest on the same tile.

[Mithril26]

Originally posted by gwillybj
As for the original question, I wonder if a line in the Resource Information section of alpha.txt has a bearing on it. The line is under #RESOURCEINFO:
Improved Land, 1, *, *, 0, "*" columns are ignored entirely
The * columns are for mines and solar collectors. The part I'm curious about is the 1 in the nutrients (farm) column. Could it be overriding the -1 mine penalty somehow?

This might be the case, although with arid/flat (0/0/0) and arid/rolling (0/1/0), a farm makes them (1/0/0) and (1/1/0), respectively; a mine makes them (0/1/0) and (0/2/0), respectively; and a mine/farm makes them (1/1/0) and (1/2/0), respectively. That means if what you say is true, then the -1 nutrient penalty is applied before the farm bonus is applied (and thus the effect is nullified because you can't go below +0 nutrient production, after which the farm bonus of +1 nutrient is applied, making it (1/2/0)). Otherwise, the -1 nutrient penalty should cancel out the farm bonus, and the mine/farm shouldn't be better than the mine. But in reality, a mine/farm is better than just a mine(1/2/0 with a mine/farm compared to 0/2/0 with only a mine).

Also, I understand that the question is irrelevant in the context of strategy, but in terms of game mechanics and how the game adds things up in the background, it's kind of an interesting quirk. The annoying thing is that nothing in the manual or other help files suggests that something like this would happen.

What file contains the information on how the terraforming improvements add bonuses to tiles, or is this information hard-coded in the game?

[Flubber]

Originally posted by gwillybj

I take these a little further, even.
Mines are for rocky tiles with mineral bonuses and are crawled.
Rocky tiles without mineral bonuses are reduced to rolling and then forested and worked.

I disagree. Reducing rocky tiles to rolling takes too much time IMHO and I am quite happy to have each base have a couple of crawled mines-- BUt then again, I like crawling and specialists


Same with CT's example--I would mine the minerals special to get 5 minerals and crawl it-- The uplift of even 2 food is not enough for me to assign a worker to it or spend the extra terraforming time


But usually my bases work almost nothing but forests and boreholes with maybe the occasional farm/solar

[CEO Aaron]

I like crawling and specialists too, but given that your specialist limit is governed by nutrients, I'd think a forest square would be more desirable in the long run, given that all a rocky road square will produce is 4 minerals, where a farm square can eventually produce 3 nuts, 2 minerals and 2 energy. So even though there's a few more former turns involved in levelling the square, the long term gains will easily balance them. Also, this paving activity usuallly takes place at a point where my former armada is quite large, and former turns are not quite so dear.

[Straybow]

But if it's being crawled it only gets one resource and the food or energy is wasted.

[Darrell01]

The idea behind crawling is that it frees up your population unit to either specialize or work another tile. Now, if you never crawl things, you'll work every tile and you'll get all the resources. You'll get the 4 food per nutrient farm, one mineral per rolling, and 1-4 energy per height. Now that is great and all, but look at it this way. If you condenser farm the tile, you'll get 6 food only. The power of this is you now have 3 population units you can support with no food. An engineer has 3 energy and 2 labs. That's equivalent to 5 uncorrupted energy. If this energy is on the other side of the world, you might have to harvest 20 or 30 energy before you get that 5. With early specialists, you get 2 or 3 energy from the specialist. Now, you have 3 people you can support from that tile, so at a minimum, that's 3 doctors. 6 psych, 6 energy and no drone riots for the rest of the workers. Sure, you don't get the minerals and energy. What makes up for that is if you go technitions, they give you 3 energy. Each unenhanced mineral is worth 2 energy. So one technition out of the bunch will make up for the lost mineral and have one more energy to spare. Anyway, the point here is there isn't really a point to a farm/mine on a rolling/flat tile at all. The AI will do it, but if you read the posts, you'll learn that this is one of the reasons the AI isn't all that great. This is why SMAniaC and the Alderon Project have a big following and long threads. They have boosted AI terraforming. In the long run, farm/mines are not good. One, you've just destroyed the food you get from the farm by putting the mine there. It also creates more ecodamage than just putting up a forest/sensor and it ties up the former for a long time. Any way you cut it, you're getting only one food on a moist farm/mine tile anyway. Might as well get the 2 minerals/1 energy with the future upgrade of +1 food and +1food/energy in the future. You get less ecodamage, a place to put a sensor for +25% defense, and if you condenser farm it or borehole it later, you'll get +5 minerals to the terraformer's city that cuts the forest down.

[vyeh]

Originally posted by Darrell01
Each unenhanced mineral is worth 2 energy. So one technition out of the bunch will make up for the lost mineral and have one more energy to spare.

Let's be careful. 1 min = 2 ec, if (1) the base is building a facility and (2) there is already 10 or more mins accumulated. The "raw" economic points generated by a technician is affected by energy banks, tree farms, hybrid forests, and some other base facilities.

Energy does not support units. If you have a support rating of +2 (2 units supported "free"), and the base is only producing 2 mins (from the base square plus recycling tank) and there are five military units homed to the base, you're going to lose one of those military units.

[Darrell01]

Crawling Mechanics
#STRAT26
Yes, yes, we've all heard the forum posters babble about "mineral semantics" being "beautiful" and "holy". But let me tell you that this kind of energy to mineral conversion certainly isn't pretty and if you're not careful it will scare the bejeezus out of you.

-- Anonymous Apolyton Technician,
MorganLink 3DVision Live Interview

[The_Reckoning]

^hahaha