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Re: Mineral Extraction Timetables Wed, 04 March 2020 21:48 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
magic9mushroom is currently offline magic9mushroom

 
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Registered: May 2008
Okay, I correct myself. There is an arcane coding thing going on, but it's nothing as simple or as relevant as what Cawley assumed.

Basically, minerals mined come out roughly normally when conc*mines/100 is not an integer (I'm not sure exactly how it calculates it, but it seems to work), but the "mining rate" rounds down, and for some reason the "mining rate" is what's used to calculate depletion. So if you have 99 conc and 1 mine, then you'll be mining ~0.99 minerals per turn (which you'll actually get, averaged over X turns), but the mine depletion is zero.

But it gets stranger. See, the Jeffs apparently noticed this issue, and rather than fix it by making them both run off the same thing they implemented another complication into the formula: mineral depletion is multiplied by (n+1)/n, where n is the number of mines. This happens after the round-down, though, so in the case of 1 mine and 99 conc it'll still never deplete (0.99 rounds down to 0, and 2*0 = 0). But with 1 mine and 100 conc the conc will decrease to 99 after only 63 turns (as the depletion is 1, and that is doubled to 2).

This is very weird, but it doesn't really matter under normal circumstances. It just makes mineral depletion testing rather bizarre. The only real-game impact of this (since having 1 mine, while it might avoid depletion, will give less minerals than 1000 mines at turn X for all X) is that having a number of mines divisible by 100 gives you about a 0.1% efficiency penalty (because you'll then never get the "free" minerals, but you'll still be penalised by the "correction", which is on the order of 0.1% for realistic mine numbers).

EDIT: To clarify, there's not another rounding after the (n+1)/n "correction". So if you have 3 mines with conc 99, you'll usually mine 3/turn (because it's actually 2.97) but your "mining rate" shows up as 2/turn and your real mineral depletion is 2 * 4/3 = 8/3 (~2.67) per turn (you'll deplete to 98 after 47-48 turns).

EDIT2: Also, depletion has to be more than the threshold to take effect; if it's equal nothing happens. So for instance 4 mines on conc 100 (which deplete at rate 5) will get to 125 depletion exactly at turn 25, but the conc stays at 100 for one more turn.

There is at least one more source of error which I haven't tracked down yet, of the order of 0.2%. This is bloody fiddly work.

[Updated on: Thu, 05 March 2020 00:54]

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