Upkeep free mining stations

[Attitude Adjuster]

Is it time to maybe reconsider the idea of every mining station requiring upkeep?

I always see it as kind of odd that it's in the game, I can sort of see the reasoning for research stations because research isn't a direct and tangible marketable ware.

But for a mining station with rare resources or minerals, it could be assumed that the mining station (which one could imagine as a huge economic undertaking) was given a cost/benefit analysis before it's construction, and it likely wouldn't be built If it couldn't pay for it's own upkeep.

I'm not saying a big mining station wouldn't need upkeep, but that I feel it's unnecessary for that upkeep to be an ingame calculation. Especially considering performance is one of this games biggest Achilles heels, I'm not a programmer but on my neanderthal level of understanding less to calculate = better performance.

 

[Alspego]

This should be something, that can be tested quiet easy, but I do not think that this causes any real performance issues: In midgame, most of the possible mining stations are already build, but the performace issues are in the end game. The performance issue seems to be related to the number of pops and (to a smaller extend) ship movement.

 

[nestorius]

Ignoreing the performance issue.

If Upkeep is bigger than the market price of of the minerals mined then something is very wrong and would encourage extreme multi tasking to destroy small mining stations This is quite silly so either this should be done automatically or get rid of the upkeep costs.

Of course if it can never happen it is fine. I am not sure if there are 1 mineral mining stations if there are then Minerals must always have a price where both the bid and offer price is above 1 energy otherwise it would make more sense to buy the minerals than to mine them

 

[Attitude Adjuster]

This should be something, that can be tested quiet easy, but I do not think that this causes any real performance issues: In midgame, most of the possible mining stations are already build, but the performace issues are in the end game. The performance issue seems to be related to the number of pops and (to a smaller extend) ship movement.

I don't think for a second this is even in the top 100 impactors of performance, but sometimes a broader approach and tackling a dozen smaller issues can also have a benefit.

 

[Bleuhelmet]

In general im starting to feel that mining stations as they are now lost their purpose. Its a lot of expense and effort for very little gain. I never understood the idea of mining from space anyway. It would be a lot more sensical of you have to invest in setting up facilities on the surface or something for greater production.

 

[Ryika]

To be honest, I think what stations really need is to be turned into something that's impactful again. They seem like an afterthought right now with the planet overhaul and don't really feel like they make much of a difference to your empire development at all after the very early parts of the game. I've been playing around with 1.0.3 lately, and one of the things that I had almost forgotten about from back then is how important developing those stations was - and how much of an issue it was to have to deal with the energy upkeep they caused, at least in the early game. I would very much prefer to have that feeling back instead of making them into something that has even less impact than the current station model.

But for the performance argument... as far as I understand it, the game only loops through all stations once per month to "collect" the yields and calculate the maintenance.

Compare it to something like the repugnant trait that has a modifier as part of the calculations of nearly all amenity-related jobs. As far as I understand it, every open job (type?) is calculated for every pop on every day. There are more pops in the universe than there are mining stations, the number of pops isn't hardcapped and basically explodes throughout the game, which the amount of stations stays mostly linear. There are multiple calculations per pop, and they happen 30 times more often.

That's the magnitude of difference we're talking about here. As far as I can tell, mining station maintenance calculations should have such little impact on the game performance that we might as well mark it down as 0. It's not just a small part of the overall performance, it's so small that it's basically not even there.

 

[BarbeQ]

In general im starting to feel that mining stations as they are now lost their purpose. Its a lot of expense and effort for very little gain. I never understood the idea of mining from space anyway. It would be a lot more sensical of you have to invest in setting up facilities on the surface or something for greater production.

My understanding of this approach is, that those mining stations are a smaller bite of your overall income in case of you losing some in a war. I.e. losing some systems does hit your economy less hard. And those system with high production values are better defended/secured - or at least should be