Topic: Inconsistent balancing with mines

from a perfect strategy point of view, it is not an improvement, because deep mines are more expensive to operate. so the best strategy is still to mine everything possible with surface mines before upgrading. In fact, from a strictly powergamer perspective, deep mines with larger radius can be considered detrimental: they can mine superficial ores that could still be reached with surface mines. increasing the radius of the deep mines, therefore, is only a matter of convenience: one doesn't have to be bothered to making as many of those. Also, unfortunately it is nighly impossible to follow the really best strategy, because that would require either dismantling all the surface mines, not only wasting resources but most importantly losing track of where exactly one has already mined, or leaving the miner inside, which forces the game to make a replacement miner. On that aspect, it would be nice to have an option for the surface mines like "waiting to be upgraded" that stops the mine, sends the miner out, and then stay there until you actually choose to upgrade that mine.

Even if it was a buff, though, it would be ok, because atlanteans are alrready stronger in late game, so anything that reduces the differences is having limited impact. increasing the differences between the tribes is what risks giving one tooo big an advantage in some phase of the game.

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King
from a perfect strategy point of view, it is not an improvement, because deep mines are more expensive to operate. so the best strategy is still to mine everything possible with surface mines before upgrading.

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No0815 wrote:

Plus the players nerves are strained less with having to constantly upgrade mines and rebalancing the economy. That's the main reason why I would welcome this change. Playing barbarians is the most exhausting of all tribes, it seems to me.

That's the reason I also wouldn't mind such a change. less need to go remake mines all the times.

toptopple wrote:

[quote=King]from a perfect strategy point of view, it is not an improvement, because deep mines are more expensive to operate. so the best strategy is still to mine everything possible with surface mines before upgrading.[/quote]

Recently I made a calculation on some mining footprint values and, if I understand the Lua-scripts, these came to a result which puts you assertion into question and holds the opposite. Unfortunately as for now I mislaid the leaflet. If this is true, all your conclusions break down!

I seriously doubt it. I think you can only reach that conclusion by doing something wrong with your basic assumption, like maybe assuming that rations are made from bread, or that the value of one meat or one grain is the same. Definitely not the case.

Barbarians can make rations with meat, which is absolutely inexpensive with them since they can produce it with 2 small buildings. snaks and meals both require 2.5 wheat in addition, which means 250 seconds of work for a barbarian farm (determined experimentally from large numbers and times). Even if a deeper mine could produce fiive times the amount of ores from one meal than a basic mine could from a ration, the basic mine would still be far cheaper to operate. I even have an experimental verification: I made several no metal challenges with barbarians, and I made them with deeper and normal mines. Deeper mines have a 10% chance of producing something when empty, normal mines only 5%, yet you get over twice the amount of ores from regular mines. done on the same map (trident of fire) under the same conditions.

With empire the difference may be smaller: 2 wheat to operate a regular mine (one for bread to turn into ration, one for beer) and 3 for a deep one (you also need a meat to make a meal, which comes from wheat and water in the piggery). But again the simple arithmetic is misleading: A mill makes flour in 20 seconds, and a bakery makes one bread every 35 seconds, and both occupy a medium slot. A piggery makes one meat per minute, and it is a large building. So 3 bakeries and 2 mills make 6 bread per minute, while you need 6 piggeries to make 6 meat per minute, so for empire meat is vastly more expensive than bread even if both in theory cost one wheat and one water. To be exact, in a perfectly flat ground you can stuff 4 large buildings or 9 medium ones in the same space, or you can make a farm in the same space as 4 medium buildings; so with the space difference between piggeries and bakeries/millls you can make 2 farms, which together produce one wheat every 40 seconds (determined experimentally over large times and numbers); and by making meat instead of bread you lose that wheat, so making 6 meat in a minute cost you 6 wheat for the meat and 1.5 wheat that you are losing from the farms that you could have made in the building slots, and we can conclude imperial meat can be said to cost 25% more than imperial bread. On a perfectly flat map. In maps with scarcity of large spaces meat is even more expensive, while in maps with scattered large building slots you can make a large building in the same space as a medium one and the difference is smaller.

If we wanted to properly compare the cost of operating an imperial mine and deeper mine we'd have to take into account also the productivity of a brewery, and right now I don't want to do it. Or, if empire still has access to fish, then it does not need to make meat from piggeries, but it also can make rations directly from fish without farms, so the difference in cost to operate deep and basic mines is even greater. Overall, the actual cost for the empire is dependent on how exactly the map is made, but you can't just consider the amount of resources without considering the space needed to transform them. I think with those correction your datasheet should return more veritable results.

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