What about refillable mines/resources?

[Black]

I see a lot of posts complaining about mines depleting to fast, not enough resources in mines. I also think something is wrong with the design here, when later in the game i need to build new mine(for example silver mine) every 5 or 6 months because its empty already. I know its balanced now so cost of aqquiring a mine early in the game isnt to high, but later it does not work well.
What about making option to "refill" mine with resource (like plant new trees near logging camp, or expand mine with new mine shaft, that will give us acces to new supply of resource). The cost should be the same as it is for creating new mine, so everything stay balanced. This way you dont have to hop to new mine often, and then loose your clients or supply chains, you can also build factories near your mine to save on shipping cost (which is not the case now if you not move all your industries when you change a mine), for example oil industry near oil well. Also, finally mine will now have time to train their extraction units, or sales units, before it gets closed.

What do you guys think about this?

[David]

We are interested in hearing what you guys think about this matter.

While refilling a mine is convenient, you may not want to see your competitors being able to do so, as it means companies can have mines that will never deplete. Let's discuss and see if there is an ideal solution.

[Dav3]

How about small/medium/large resource amounts on the map? Right now just the quality of the resources makes the price but why not use the model like you do with firms and farms and make three different amounts of resources available on the map of course the largest one would cost the most but would also have a huge amount of resources in it.

Example:

"Gold ore"

small amount (between 40-100.000 oz)

Would cost 40 -80 million $ to buy.

medium amount (120.000-230.000 oz)

cost 120 - 240 million $.

large amount (250.000 - 500.000 oz)

cost 270 - 550 million $.


So you could buy the large resource amount and would have not to worry about it for a long time.
Just an idea.

[counting]

The problem we are facing is that we want a mine to be both durable when we need to, at the same time it can be depleted. So instead of increase the mining construction price, we increasing the game play options by introducing a tech cost that needs time to build up.

It can be implemented as "resource production technologies" in R&D, representing real life geological survey expenses, mining equipment advancement, or new extraction method.

If there's no tech at all, it's the original model. A geo-survey tech will make the total amount that company can extract from every resource site increases (the setup cost per site goes up as well). A mining equipment tech can make extraction rate go even faster than "crew training" so a company don't need to build a lot of resource sites of the same type (it can also make overhead cost and number of crew per extraction unit drop, but also make depletion goes faster, hence a game mechanic balancer for specialized natural resource company). A extraction method tech can improve the quality of mine extracted, so even if a company start with poor resource quality can get resource quality boost, and view every site in higher quality range. Different resources will need their own set of "techs"

The above proposal should be quite flexible. If a company wants to be a pure mining corporations, they can start with reasonable initial start up cost (even with poor quality sites), and if they wish to scale up like any other industry, they have to sink investment earlier to reap the benefit in the future. Or if they wishes, they can follow the current model without techs at all (doing business "brute force way") but facing potential competitors who could have better "resource production techs" (in production duration, scale, even quality); But if a company only wishes to have a steady source, they either find a mining company that have high resource production tech as upstream, or they invest/purchase tech with the types they want for themselves (facing R&D cost) and gain access to better resource sites in the future. And players can beat "competitors" who don't focus on resource production tech (like they are now), however it would become harder and harder to beat those specialized in resource production (it makes sense to beat armature, but difficult to beat experts who invest in this arena). We can even have "tech disruption" in resource production tech to "normalize" tech lead in relative scale.

The things need to be aware of are these techs should have quite high base cost (at the same level of resource sites), and the resource quantity gained by geo-survey tech should grow exponentially per level, thus making these techs useful in practice (but at the same time with "penalty" of exponential R&D cost as well). Also, a problem might occur in the accounting aspect, where we might need some new items to balance out intangible assets or introducing more realistic depreciation and amortization equations into financial reports.

[WilliamMGary]

Hmm.. what about the Training & Development within the mine. Once you hit 9 unit level on mining if you continue it add additional reserve?

[Black]

While refilling a mine is convenient, you may not want to see your competitors being able to do so, as it means companies can have mines that will never deplete.

I dont see it as a problem as long as competitor is making money, and paying for resource refill. Now companies can also have continuous access to resource, one difference is that they need to hop to another resource site when mine depletes.


I really like counting idea about technology improvements that can speed up mining process, or extract better quality resource from mine. However, im not sure if its the right solution for resource capacity (geo-survey tech). It can complicate things too much, and high resource sites will not be available from game start, as we need time to research/develop technology for it.

I want to be able to build factories and warehouses near actual exctraction, and dont be afraid of mine closing in 5 years max, and ususally within 2-3 years. In real world (like in my country) there are mining sites that are active for 60-70 years already with industry build around them, and there is still plenty of resources to extract.

[Inarius]

I agree mostly with the idea of counting, they are really interesting and reflect what I wanted to say.

I add that, for every mine (and to avoid the "THE mine is depleted NOW !" effect which is quite abrupt), the cost should raise slowly months after months.

At the beginning the ore is easy to find, the cost of extraction is low, and % after %, extraction cost raises. After a time, you can still extract ore, but it's not interesting anymore (unless the selling price is very high). Once you have extracted XX% (80,90,95%?), if you destroy the mine, the deposit vanishes, too (or you will quickly have dozens of nearly depleted deposits all over the map)

[counting]

We can still can have mines with different quantities from the start like Dav3 suggested, and later scale up even further with "geo-survey" tech. (I think its real life counterpart are more like harvesting/drilling/refining tech combined allowing extraction of ores from less rich source area, thus effectively making the total quantity available APPEARED more for those with techs than others). The reason why I choose tech as a quantity scaling factor is due to tech progression can adapt and react over time, as real world nature resourced firm really do get depleted, and major producer moved from one country to another (this fact is the reason why we have depletion/depreciation mechanism for nature resource films in real life in accounting)

Game mechanic wise, let's assume we allow a reasonable initial setup cost with 10m to 80m ranged default quantity (like small(1)-medium(2)-large(4)-huge(8)), even huge ones can only prolong the lifetime of a fully-utilized source from say 6 months to 2 years top, still not close to a stable source. But with tech as scaling factor, we can have an early source say 1 year, but during that time with "survey tech" improved, the new found source can last 2 years, and in 2 years' R&D, you get source that have 4 years worth of quantity or more. So after decades of investment in "nature resource techs", a company can have mines that last decades as well, growing more and more stable over time. And the good thing is that these scaling techs can be traded like any other techs, so players can choose to buy techs, or merger a company with techs, instead of research them on their own. IMO this is much more reasonable than infinite refilling mechanism, where "armature" resource producing AIs can get major market share with low quality mines for low price and very difficult to get rid of them (you will feel the need to have depletion mechanism in place, if you've played a game as an upstream B2B corporation. Sometimes the only way to find an opportunity is to either wait for a AI's source to dry out, or buy their raw material out yourself, just to get rid of these armature AI competitions. This is also one of the major strategy to strangle a much stronger opponents if you are able to cut off their upstream)

Inarius's idea of production cost curve is also an interesting one, thus mining equipment tech can effectively both increase mining speed as well as dropping cost per unit, making the investment in this kind of tech more worthwhile and the last bit of resource more cost-effective.