Dual Mining Station Ideas

posted on September 30th, 2010, 1:07 pm

I had an idea where two mining stations can be placed near a single resource and have 2 freighters per station.  I've been testing it offline with 3 per station but it slowed down my resource rate.  The theory is, that if I could find the right number of freighters to use per resource using two stations to mine from that resource, I could get an increase in the resource rate per resource.

posted on September 30th, 2010, 1:53 pm

short answer: no
long answer: noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

every thing i say now is for non borg:

put simply the amount of res per second (rps) doesnt increase if u have a second mining station. miners mine at a fixed rate, the only way to get more res is to use more miners, then u reach the wall where miners are constantly circling the moon with beams. this happens at 3 miners, if the mining station is close to the moon. im assuming u are always gonna build your mining station next to the moon.

u can build 1 mining station between a moon pair. or 1 mining station per moon. but each moon must have 3 miners. for 2 miners per moon there is a very small chance it will work, its better to just go for 3 miners per moon. or 2 miners at the start, then 3 miners shortly after.

more than 1 mining station per moon will not increase your rps, ever.

the only exception is ketracel synthesizers, where u can put 4 around 1 moon and it wont matter.

posted on September 30th, 2010, 2:16 pm

Myles made the assumption that you would place your mining station close to the moon.  There is perhaps a situation where the moon is a little far away from your starbase and you may decide its worth the additional protection of the starbase to place your mining station further away.  In this case 4 miners could be used to keep the flow at max. 

Doing this though would slow down your start a little but as you spend more resources on miners and takes you a little longer to get up to max mining rate.

Its a bit of illusory protection as well as the miners themselves still need to go to the moon, and the mining station is a much more of a secondary target for raiders than miners themselves.

I'm not aware of any maps where the starting moons are far enough from your starbase that this is a real consideration. 

posted on September 30th, 2010, 2:20 pm

i have considered building mining stations nearer to the starbase on some maps.

with 3 miners u can already go some distance from the moon, not sure the exact distance though.

for example on duel/2 i build the starting mining stations a slight distance away from the moon to get a little protection for the station and some miners.

but this doesnt have huge advantages as the target of nearly all raiding is the miners. rarely do we see the stations killed. especially since most people just decom them when attacked anyway.

so adding a 4th miner for that extra distance probably wouldnt be all that helpful imo.

posted on September 30th, 2010, 11:02 pm

Yeah, same.  One thing I do as borg is to hit the resource node button when the gatherer is right next to my starbase.  They can have their node almost an entire screen away from the moon and not lose gathering speed, although the computer's tendency is to drop the node halfway between the gatherer and the moon I think, so it doesn't drop all the way back at my outpost

posted on September 30th, 2010, 11:20 pm

One of the only advantages I can think of is that it would provide the miner that's unloading (and thus unable to be moved) with a bit more protection to make it less of a target...