Here is the result of the most important question:
While the majority of you agree with changing the main asteroid fields along the highway ring, there are still a quarter of you who don’t like it. So for todays beta, we have tried the following compromise:
- We are reducing regions in 6 central systems significantly, but not completely. The much reduced yield still comes with a relatively high replenishment rate.
Let me try to show you what this means, as yesterdays discussions have shown that there are quite a few misunderstandings:
Even after drastic change, there is still a healthy baseline!
The most extreme change has happened in Argon Prime, but even after a massive reduction of its total mining yield, here is how the sector developed in last nights test run with the currently reduced values:
As you can see there is still mining by NPC factions going on and this mining is not draining resources faster than replenishment happens. Low yield regions like the new Argon Prime, replenish fast compared to their total yield even if the absolute numbers are much lower than those of a high or very high yield region.
So while the economy can still work off of such low yield regions, they are a lot less profitable compared to high yield regions, because mining ships should be able to fill much faster in high yield regions.
No risk of running low on resources:
Another thing to understand is that there are still many sectors in the universe, which have capacity enough to sustain the entire universe on just a single sector!
Have a look at this graph:
This shows the total consumption of resources per hour for each resource for the base NPC economy.
Some of the most resource rich sectors, have close to 20 million units of ore and silicon and can replenish completely within about 2.5 days!
So as you can see, there is no danger of the economy as a whole running out of resources. Shortages are always “just” local phenomena.
Placing resource probes:
There are also a few misunderstandings regarding the need to place resource probes. This is in part because the different betas came with a couple of bugs related to how mining commands took advantage of the resource probes you place.
The intention is definitely NOT that you have to place hundreds of probes. It is a good idea for you to place one probe in a newly discovered region and, with the now functioning AI, placing many more, does not hurt, because the ships will still prefer to mine away from probes as soon as the area around a probe is below the average of the surrounding region. We do toy with the idea to give you more tools in the future to identify local high yield pockets, so that placing probes there, can be a fun activity to squeeze out additional pennies. But again: This is NOT necessary to run your economy or to make a decent profit.
I hope this clears up a few of your questions and helps those 25% who voted “NO” to maybe change their mind

-Bernd