Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » The Academy » On mine number vs. efficiency and the Mineral Alchemy LRT.
| On mine number vs. efficiency and the Mineral Alchemy LRT. |
Sun, 16 July 2017 09:19  |
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 magic9mushroom |
 | Commander |
Messages: 1361
Registered: May 2008 | |
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My impression of received wisdom in the Stars! community regarding race design and, in particular, mine settings is this:
1. OBRM is a fantastic LRT except for narrow-hab factoried races and AR.
2. Mine efficiency over number is viable to increase your long-term mineral yield.
3. MA is a terrible LRT that should never be taken.
I still believe #1, but about a year ago I ran across this apparently-forgotten article by the grand old man of Stars! Jason Cawley, which, by showing Mineral Alchemy catching mine number given time but mine efficiency failing to do so, suggested that #2 and #3 might be rather suspect.
Now, of course, Cawley's test has some flaws which favour MA and mine number over mine efficiency. It's well-known that mine efficiency isn't particularly useful on the homeworld, because of the mineral concentration floor reached fairly early on, and having only 15 worlds magnified that homeworld effect. In addition, Cawley put 100% of resources from the worlds into alchemy during the test, which isn't what happens in a real game; you'll always be using some of your resources to build stuff with both your mined and alchemically-produced minerals.
So, I decided I'd replicate the test with much more favourable conditions for mine efficiency, to give an upper bound to match Cawley's lower. I used 60 planets, which is more than the planet-to-homeworld ratio in almost all PBEMs. I put Beginner: Max Minerals on to increase the amount of mined minerals (weakening MA) while further weakening the "homeworld effect". And I researched and built a fleet of missile ships, using up some resources (I would have used beam ships, to further reduce the minerals going to alchemy, but it takes so long to exhaust mineral stockpiles with just beamers that no alchemy will take place for well over a century whatever your settings, obscuring the results).
For replicability, and because the design needed testing, I used the most recent version of my Mimigas:
HE
NRSE, OBRM
3i 6%
1/1000 15/8/21 ***
Weapons cheap, rest expensive
*** I switched this around between the tests - "more mines" used 10/3/23, "more efficiency" used 11/3/18, and "Mineral Alchemy" took the LRT and used 10/3/18. Note that as mine number greatly exceeds the efficiency, this gives efficiency a further boost.
I then put each of these variations in a small packed with Beginner: Max Minerals, Accelerated BBS Start and No Random Events, expanded using the same colonisation strategy (HW -> 3 colonies 2 years away giving 4 planets, each -> 2 colonies giving 12 planets, each -> 2 colonies giving 36 planets, then each newly-colonised world -> 1 world giving 60 planets), filled the worlds the same way (grow to 50%, then hold each world to fill itself separately), researched 18/24/11/16/19/0 (with the overshoot soaked up by manual alchemy), and then set every world to build 1000 of these ships with alchemy "as needed":
Battleship
4x Interspace-10
20x Armageddon Missile
4x Battle Nexus
3x Jammer 30
6x Valanium
8x Elephant Hide Fortress
(I figured this was a decent picture of a "final" BB design before going to Nubians.)
Here are the results.
Some thoughts:
- I really had it hammered home to me how much "more mines" costs you in resources. Those extra 5 mines in the race wizard translate to an expenditure of 50,000 resources over and above the other two options. As a result, those two were nearly half a turn in front in research; they all ended up getting the tech at 2473, but the "efficiency" and "MA" races had a much larger overshoot.
- You'll notice that the curve turns into a weird stair-step past about 2550. This is an artifact of being a 3i HE; the way Alchemy works causes the worlds' BB production to slowly synchronise, and once the time interval between one BB and the next from a given world exceeds the discrepancy between worlds, this "beating" effect occurs.
- At the start of the test, "more efficiency&q
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