[CoH] Station miners mining one resource to the virtual exclusion of another - serious bug - Improved in a future build.

[CBJ]

Merged with existing reports. Please note the developer responses.

[Takichi]

If you check my save you see that i do have Probes in each sector my miner can reach. And for me they Focus only on Ore even in Asteroid Belt, they ignore Silicon for 90% of the Time even with Probes which sho 4km³ or above in Silicon. Even droping a Probe with 14km³+ doesnt change that, its definetly a AI Problem here. Nice you try to find a work around but that is basicly the same as using a "1 Solid/Gas Ressource Only" Station. Its ok as Workaround but shouldnt be the solution.

I also notice in your save the following problems.

• Silicon is not restricted trade. As such if NPCs are fulfilling it you cannot make a fair statement that it is not being supplied.
• The station has far too little solid storage. Running at full speed it empties storage in under 20 minutes from full. Getting stations to work with such small buffer times is near impossible from personal experience and so I would recommend 3 to 5 solid storage modules for over an hour of production worth of input.
• A lot of your miners are low skilled. Low skilled miners are painfully slow, especially without resource probe in the zone they are mining. Even with all non assigned miners assigned to the station and mining silicon they struggle to mine it fast enough.
• Due to a lack of resource probes miners are saturating the same highly mined locations result in them effectively being idle. This also seems to be discouraging silicon mining. Resource probes encourage mining in the local area, or not mining in the local area if the zone is low yield. Resource probes also give a bonus to mining speed in the zone they are in, important for Silicon due to how slowly Silicon mines.

What I did was assign all the non assigned miners to the station, add 4 more L solid storage modules to the station, restrict silicon to self trade, and then get a scout ship to spam resource probes in Asteroid Belt everywhere I see 2 or more mineral miners operating. After doing this the computronic substrate factory was mining both silicon and ore as needed, was running all 6 modules constantly and overall was struggling to keep up with Energy Cell usage. When all Energy Cells were depleted I stopped playing.

1) Interessting i didnt know that they dont care about Ressources, even if they cant fill the Storage currently there..... (and no even with NPC supply my Storage never even came close to more than 20% for Silicon)

2) That shouldnt matter because Miners use Station Manager Lvl for Range and therefore should use anything else.

3) Lack of Probes? What Sense does it have to do 20 Probes in 1 System, they are a mean of "Mine Here" and 20 of them kill that Purpose.... they should work with only 1 Probe if it has a good/better Value as 1 or so.

Anyway thank you for the Information, it helps me to understand the Problem.

[Imperial Good]

3) Lack of Probes? What Sense does it have to do 20 Probes in 1 System, they are a mean of "Mine Here" and 20 of them kill that Purpose.... they should work with only 1 Probe if it has a good/better Value as 1 or so.

They increase the speed at which silicon is mined within 40km by close to 100%. They also allow miners to avoid mining depleted spots nearby.

[LandogarX4]

3) Lack of Probes? What Sense does it have to do 20 Probes in 1 System, they are a mean of "Mine Here" and 20 of them kill that Purpose.... they should work with only 1 Probe if it has a good/better Value as 1 or so.

They increase the speed at which silicon is mined within 40km by close to 100%. They also allow miners to avoid mining depleted spots nearby.

First time I hear about that, and I follow the forum and reddit pretty closely. To me, that means you do have to spam resource probes everywhere, since my miners mine anywhere in a sector, not just around (a dozen or so) well placed resource probes.

[Takichi]

3) Lack of Probes? What Sense does it have to do 20 Probes in 1 System, they are a mean of "Mine Here" and 20 of them kill that Purpose.... they should work with only 1 Probe if it has a good/better Value as 1 or so.

They increase the speed at which silicon is mined within 40km by close to 100%. They also allow miners to avoid mining depleted spots nearby.

First time I hear about that, and I follow the forum and reddit pretty closely. To me, that means you do have to spam resource probes everywhere, since my miners mine anywhere in a sector, not just around (a dozen or so) well placed resource probes.

Yeah also first time i hear that... Bernd said they are meant as a way to communicate your Minners "Mine here this Spot is good" and that they arnt meant to be spammed for hundreds over hundreds in the Galaxy.

[Cobra117]

I have the same problem with my self-sufficient wharfs (300+ modules each). Station managed miners gather one ressource at the expense of others, so the station is full of ice and runs out of ore and silicium. I get the exact same problem in Matrix 9 and GE1. Adding L miners doesn't help. Most miners hang around with a full load of ice while the station is full already.

The workaround I found is to switch a few miners (I started with 20% of them) to Repeat Orders. This way I know for sure that they mine what is needed, and they deliver to the station. So far, with both systems I have less shortages (and more micromanagement because I gradually increase/decrease the amount of miners dedicated to one ressource until I get the required supply)

Repeat Orders also allows to spread miners around and avoid ressource depletion (I suppose...)

[Gregorovitch]

I wanted to update this thread with another example, a case study if you like, which can be seen from this save:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/t2wibcpwgpl04 ... ml.gz?dl=0

The situation relates to a supply chain I've set up with an ore mining station in Gaian Prophesy harvesting ore and silicon in Antigon Memorial and shipping it to a computrinic substrate factory in Neptune.

As can be seen the computronic substrate factory is currently bereft of silicon and so is the ore station in Gaian Prophesy. Conversely they are both stuffed with ore. The ore station miners are currently mining silicon. But immediately previous to this save point they were all mining just ore, hence the glut or ore and the shortage of silicon. However they were not always doing that. As the transaction log for the computronic substrate factory shows silicon has been mined and delivered previously.

The conclusion is therefore that the ore station is putting all it's miners on ore and then putting them all on silicon resulting in wild fluctuations in the supply available to the computronic substrate factory and continually interrupted production.

The bottom line is this will not do. It is clear that whatever is done to solve this problem the result must be that this ore station in Gaian Prophesy divides it's miners between ore and silicon according to a) how much is needed and b) how fast it's being mined. One way or another, buy hook or by crook, the station manager AI must balance it's miner's mining task allocations to reflect the actual throughput/outgoing/consumption pattern/whatever you want to call it of the station and the speed with which the miners are harvesting the respective resources.

In this case the result should be approximately half the miners being put on ore and half on silicon continuously (which is why I think it's a good case study, it's easy to see what the incontrovertibly "right" answer must be) because:

a) the yields for ore and silicon in Antigone Memorial are roughly equal
b) the computronic substrate factory in Neptune consumes 18k of each resource per hour
c) the computronic substrate factory is the ore station's only customer.

A further mandatory requirement is that in the event the station manager hasn't got sufficient miners allocated to fulfill total demand then it scales back miner allocation to each resource proportionally. This is necessary in order to answer one simple question, the answer to which is manifestly impossible to answer in the current situation with this save:

How many L miners do I need to allocate to the Gaian Prophesy ore station in order to supply 18k ore and 18k silicon to the Neptune computronic substrate factory on the hour every hour?

[Zamiex]

Having a similar issue in my current game after building a very silicon hungry TER shipyard.

The station requires these base materials:
Methane
Hydrogen
Helium
Silicon
Ore
Ice


My observations:

When assigning mineral miners directly to the station they seem to prioritize ice and ore, eventually they will fill up the absolutely huge storage assignment for both of these and then try to mine silicon in the tiny amounts left in their holds.
When assigning Gas miners directly to the station manager ( I just have 3) all is fine for some strange reason...all gasses get mined and storage is never skewed in favor of a single material .

My current workaround is to assign mineral autominers to neighboring sectors and the local sector to spread the mining love and limit their trade to my faction and the selling sector to where the shipyard is in (luckily I have no other stations in said sector or this would become more difficult)
This has worked wonders for my storage levels for ice, ore and most importantly silicon as I can indirectly decide how many miners mine what resource. (1 on ice, 8 on Ore and 10 on Silicon) seems to keep my levels rising at least, but will see if I have to tone down the number of miners in the long run.

Somehow as stated in earlier posts I think the manager AI is not splitting the gathering of these base resources properly at least for minerals (as stated before, for some reason liquids are never a problem even with station managed miners )


Personally what I would like to see is one of 2 things:

1: Maintain Station control of miners but:
Stations that require resources need to have at least 1 miner for each of said resources and they are assigned exclusively to this resource.
Taking my example shipyard above, I would need a minimum of 3 gas and 3 mineral miners for the station to be able to operate fully.
The added benefit of this is that miners wont 'pollute' their hold with materials that might be overflowing from the storage already.
Downside is of course you HAVE to invest in more ships to get big stations operational, but lets be honest if you're building stations of that size , a few extra miners wont matter.
If more than 1 miner per resource is required this should either be determined by the AI based on something MAX consumption level or preferably manually determined by the player (THINK!), only problem I see here is when the station is modified I'm suspecting the manager AI isn't taking those changes into account. Not to mention changes caused by possible AI miners if allowed, inventory allotment, etc.


2: Give more control to players (my personal preference and most fool proof imo).
Manual control of assigned miners on what resources they can mine and how many sectors they are allowed to go for said resources.
Currently when an miner is assigned to station its set to 'automine' for ALL resources and will travel to the max distance your managers' skill allows.
Being able to at least limit/force the resources being mined would help heaps as it simply prevents pollution of miner holds (multiple resources mined when one is already full in storage while other is empty) and ensures there is at least a steady income of said resources.
it will be up to the player to determine if 1 miner is enough or not of course for a given resource (I'd say this would apply to the THINK part of the X games )