Bad mining AI logic, fix needed

[user750]

I've placed a Silicon Wafer production factory in Grand Exchange IV. Sector filled with silicon. Miners assigned to the station fly to the Grand Exchange I to mine Silicon. Why? I played on and found out that miners assigned to the station do exactly that, mine at furthest possible distance. Why?!

I've placed Silicon Wafer production factory in Argon Prime. Miners assigned to the station refused to mine in Argon Prime AT ALL, while NOT assigned miners doing automining and selling mine with no problems. Where do Argon Prime Silicon Wafer miners go? Second Contact VII, two jumps away.

I've placed AM-elements factory in Antigone Memorial, sector filled with Hydrogen, where do gas miners go to mine? You guessed it, to the Asteroid Belt, two jumps away.

I've hired miners to do the Automine in Grand Exchange III, i specifically chosen GE III (and GE IV, this doesn't matter) where do they mine? You guessed it, in Grand Exchange I. Why do i have to specify the sector if they do what they want anyways and go wherever they like?

Devs need to look into this and fix this, this is just plain stupid. I found in the info how many jumps a miner can go, but if there's 2, i cannot even set it up to 0, or 1, why?

And the mainest quetion of all: why do they want to go the longest route? This is bug of an AI? In a 5yo game? Really?

[GCU Grey Area]

I've placed a Silicon Wafer production factory in Grand Exchange IV. Sector filled with silicon. Miners assigned to the station fly to the Grand Exchange I to mine Silicon. Why? I played on and found out that miners assigned to the station do exactly that, mine at furthest possible distance. Why?!

There's a lot more silicon in Grand Exchange I than in Grand Exchange IV, hence the station manager thinks it's a better place to mine the stuff. If you disagree with the station manager's decision recommend setting up a travel blacklist to prevent the miners leaving Grand Exchange IV.

[chew-ie]

In general - doing less micromanagement helps. If mining wouldn't work the whole game economy would die.

[user750]

There's a lot more silicon in Grand Exchange I than in Grand Exchange IV, hence the station manager thinks it's a better place to mine the stuff.

What a way to say "game has bad AI". If you need 2 packs of sugar, you go to the nearest store, not the sugar production plant, which has 99999999 packs. I don't get it, why there isn't a simple "allowed jumps" input? And the Asteroid Belt has times less Hydrogen then Antigone Memorial, AI still goes there. That's why i assume the AI logic is to mine as far as possible. And yes, i did the blacklisting rule, but the problem is so obvious waste of efficiency that it just bugs my mind, why is it even a problem.

In general - doing less micromanagement helps. If mining wouldn't work the whole game economy would die.

I never said it's not working, i'm saying the AI logic is bad, it's nonsence to travel further to mine what is near, to risk the ship without no purpose to get the same result, and why there is no jump management. These are my first stations, i'm looking closely because i need the profits, not time wasting...

[chew-ie]

If you need money use independent L miners. With silicon they roughly make 600.000 credits every 30 minutes.

[GCU Grey Area]

There's a lot more silicon in Grand Exchange I than in Grand Exchange IV, hence the station manager thinks it's a better place to mine the stuff.

What a way to say "game has bad AI". If you need 2 packs of sugar, you go to the nearest store, not the sugar production plant, which has 99999999 packs. I don't get it, why there isn't a simple "allowed jumps" input?

I didn't say that. You've simply misunderstood how the AI works. It sends miners to the densest source for the material it needs because it can mine faster there & the resources will be available for longer before they are depleted. Your analogy seems poor, better to look at at it as there being a second store the next street over which has higher stocks & won't run out of sugar as fast. This may not be a concern for small stations, however the same AI has to work for both tiny single module stations & gargantuan structures with 1000 or so production modules (from what I can tell the main limit on station size is what fps I'm willing to put up with when flying near them) & everything in between.

And the Asteroid Belt has times less Hydrogen then Antigone Memorial, AI still goes there. That's why i assume the AI logic is to mine as far as possible.

Not in my game:
Asteroid Belt: 1,494k https://www.dropbox.com/s/z10a445w4adpp ... 1.jpg?dl=0
Antigone Memorial: 749k https://www.dropbox.com/s/kxoqtnbij6hh2 ... 1.jpg?dl=0
As I understand it the quantities listed in the encyclopedia reflect the amount of stuff available in the parts of the sector you have explored. If you haven't done much in Asteroid belt your encyclopedia data may be somewhat unreliable.

why there is no jump management.

Jump management is handled by the blacklist system. Well worth getting to grips with it. You can be very explicit in defining which sectors miners are permitted to mine in & which they are only allowed to travel through.

[LameFox]

Mineral density issues aside, I often do wish I had a setting for jumps on a station like you get when setting up an individual miner/trader. When all I want to control is the distance of travel those settings are much quicker to deal with than creating a blacklist.

[Mightysword]

What a way to say "game has bad AI". If you need 2 packs of sugar, you go to the nearest store, not the sugar production plant, which has 99999999 packs. I don't get it, why there isn't a simple "allowed jumps" input? And the Asteroid Belt has times less Hydrogen then Antigone Memorial, AI still goes there. That's why i assume the AI logic is to mine as far as possible. And yes, i did the blacklisting rule, but the problem is so obvious waste of efficiency that it just bugs my mind, why is it even a problem.

Don't think that's the right comparison. Traveling 1 more sector at most add a minutes or two to the cycle time, while the majority of time is your miner spend mining resource. Higher density = faster mining = less time spent. So if by spending an extra minute to go somewhere farther which result in 5+ min cut down in mining time, that's still a netgain for production time.

A better comparison is the store near you is small and have a big queue, you may spend less time walking but stuck in the check out. As oppose walk a bit farther to a bigger store where you can just grab the item and able to pay right away.

[user750]

Mineral density issues aside, I often do wish I had a setting for jumps on a station like you get when setting up an individual miner/trader. When all I want to control is the distance of travel those settings are much quicker to deal with than creating a blacklist.

Well we had it only in
X-tension

X2

X3


And then Rebirth happened.

[blackphoenixx]

What a way to say "game has bad AI". If you need 2 packs of sugar, you go to the nearest store, not the sugar production plant, which has 99999999 packs. I don't get it, why there isn't a simple "allowed jumps" input? And the Asteroid Belt has times less Hydrogen then Antigone Memorial, AI still goes there. That's why i assume the AI logic is to mine as far as possible. And yes, i did the blacklisting rule, but the problem is so obvious waste of efficiency that it just bugs my mind, why is it even a problem.

Don't think that's the right comparison. Traveling 1 more sector at most add a minutes or two to the cycle time, while the majority of time is your miner spend mining resource. Higher density = faster mining = less time spent. So if by spending an extra minute to go somewhere farther which result in 5+ min cut down in mining time, that's still a netgain for production time.

A better comparison is the store near you is small and have a big queue, you may spend less time walking but stuck in the check out. As oppose walk a bit farther to a bigger store where you can just grab the item and able to pay right away.

Except that's not how it works out in practice. It's not a netgain for your mining efficiency in most cases.

M miners only have a cycle time of 5-10 minutes between sales if you use them in the same sector.
Adding a minute or two to that is already a large loss in efficiency and unless the closer sector has absolutely abysmal yields the faster mining won't make up for it.
Multiply that by however many M miners you use and we're talking possibly dozens of extra ships you wouldn't need if you used blacklists to limit their sector choice.

The issue is even worse for L miners which lose a lot more than 1-2 minutes (they lose those just by having to re-engage their travel drives once).
If your manager sends your L miner 2+ sectors away you suddenly need 3 times as many of them as if you just used a blacklist to make them stick to the sector they're selling in.

Losing two thirds efficiency if you leave the manager to decide where to mine is bad mining AI. Which is the rule, not the exception, so you should always use blacklists for your miners to avoid it or you're just throwing away credits.

[flywlyx]

Don't think that's the right comparison. Traveling 1 more sector at most add a minutes or two to the cycle time, while the majority of time is your miner spend mining resource. Higher density = faster mining = less time spent. So if by spending an extra minute to go somewhere farther which result in 5+ min cut down in mining time, that's still a netgain for production time.

A better comparison is the store near you is small and have a big queue, you may spend less time walking but stuck in the check out. As oppose walk a bit farther to a bigger store where you can just grab the item and able to pay right away.

AI is not capable to estimate the travel time they wasted in the travel, especially for L ships. When I check the ETA on the building material, I could not figure out what that number means.
Ego should reveal the logic for all these behavior and ask players for advice.

[GCU Grey Area]

Mineral density issues aside, I often do wish I had a setting for jumps on a station like you get when setting up an individual miner/trader. When all I want to control is the distance of travel those settings are much quicker to deal with than creating a blacklist.

Problem with a simple distance control is how to tell ships that, for example, you want them to work in the second best sector within that range - maybe the best is on a frequent Xenon travel route, while the second best is a quiet sector where nothing much ever happens & both sectors are the same distance away. Easily done with a blacklist system, whereas relying on simple distance control will send them straight towards the Xenon.

[Alan Phipps]

@ flywlyx: The good news is that the 6.00 betas may have addressed that delivery ETA clarity: * Improved estimated arrival time of incoming deliveries.

[LameFox]

Mineral density issues aside, I often do wish I had a setting for jumps on a station like you get when setting up an individual miner/trader. When all I want to control is the distance of travel those settings are much quicker to deal with than creating a blacklist.

Problem with a simple distance control is how to tell ships that, for example, you want them to work in the second best sector within that range - maybe the best is on a frequent Xenon travel route, while the second best is a quiet sector where nothing much ever happens & both sectors are the same distance away. Easily done with a blacklist system, whereas relying on simple distance control will send them straight towards the Xenon.

I'm not talking about replacing blacklists with it, just having control over distance as well. This shouldn't cause any conflicts, considering it's basically doing the same thing as manager skill does, and that blacklists and a distance setting work together already on independent autominers.

[flywlyx]

@ flywlyx: The good news is that the 6.00 betas may have addressed that delivery ETA clarity: * Improved estimated arrival time of incoming deliveries.

Good to know, do you have a tolerance I could test against?
Edit: Tested, tolerance is above 200%, still totally useless.

[jlehtone]

I'm not talking about replacing blacklists with it, just having control over distance as well. This shouldn't cause any conflicts, considering it's basically doing the same thing as manager skill does, and that blacklists and a distance setting work together already on independent autominers.

Well we had it only in
X-tension ...

On every game (don't know X-Rebirth) there is a "jump limit". It is a property of station (manager).
(Some third-party scripts might have had per-ship limits too.)

On the previous games we had direct control of the limit.
In X4 we have only indirect control: we can choose a Manager with "suitable" skill level.
It is not very convenient to replace a Manager whenever they learn too much.


AFAIK, the Manager gathers a list of offers within the "jump limit". The ships pick from that list, if their blacklists allow.


Yes, it would be nice if we could tell our managers to not flaunt their skillz.
That is what I did in the previous games too; did limit jumps to 1, 2, or (rarely) 3.

[Mightysword]

Can you get around it to just use Free Miners (not assign it to a station), and limited it to only trade with stations you own? If you want to have absolute control over the miner that would be a better way to do it I think?

On the previous games we had direct control of the limit.
In X4 we have only indirect control:

Tbh, that's pretty much the gist behind the crew system of X4 I think. Ever since the beginning I felt the hidden message is "you're too good and too efficient, so here is this system that gonna handicap you on purpose". It's almost feel like an attempt to level the playing field with the AI by making the player's empire to share (suffer) similar decision making process.

[LameFox]

Can you get around it to just use Free Miners (not assign it to a station), and limited it to only trade with stations you own? If you want to have absolute control over the miner that would be a better way to do it I think?

You could but I think it would be less convenient than having them assigned to a station. I'm not sure how well loose miners would prioritise the station's needs, or if you had multiple stations, which particular one to sell to. Plus you need to level them up individually to have them harvest multiple resources or make any jumps at all. A manager is generally a better option IMO.

[blackphoenixx]

Can you get around it to just use Free Miners (not assign it to a station), and limited it to only trade with stations you own? If you want to have absolute control over the miner that would be a better way to do it I think?

You could but I think it would be less convenient than having them assigned to a station. I'm not sure how well loose miners would prioritise the station's needs, or if you had multiple stations, which particular one to sell to. Plus you need to level them up individually to have them harvest multiple resources or make any jumps at all. A manager is generally a better option IMO.

It actually works better than leaving it to the manager. You generally don't want L miners to leave the sector of their mining station anyway because it kills their efficiency, so local automine is fine.
You also generally don't want to use the multiple resources function since the AI doesn't take into account pilot skill when deciding which miner mines what, so manually assigning high-skill miners to silicon and less skilled ones to ore is pretty much always more efficient than leaving it up to the AI.
So being limited to one resource is more of an advantage than a disadvantage too, aside from the slightly more complicated setup.

You can even still have them assigned to a station while doing the normal automine behavior to avoid cluttering up your object list (just set up automine as normal without hitting confirm, assign to commander, then confirm).

The only downside of the approach is that miners assigned to one resource won't switch to another when they overfill demand, but just making one of your stations in the sector a mining station to sell it on to other sectors takes care of that.

[Halpog]

I've placed a Silicon Wafer production factory in Grand Exchange IV. Sector filled with silicon. Miners assigned to the station fly to the Grand Exchange I to mine Silicon. Why? I played on and found out that miners assigned to the station do exactly that, mine at furthest possible distance. Why?!

I've placed Silicon Wafer production factory in Argon Prime. Miners assigned to the station refused to mine in Argon Prime AT ALL, while NOT assigned miners doing automining and selling mine with no problems. Where do Argon Prime Silicon Wafer miners go? Second Contact VII, two jumps away.

I've placed AM-elements factory in Antigone Memorial, sector filled with Hydrogen, where do gas miners go to mine? You guessed it, to the Asteroid Belt, two jumps away.

I've hired miners to do the Automine in Grand Exchange III, i specifically chosen GE III (and GE IV, this doesn't matter) where do they mine? You guessed it, in Grand Exchange I. Why do i have to specify the sector if they do what they want anyways and go wherever they like?

Devs need to look into this and fix this, this is just plain stupid. I found in the info how many jumps a miner can go, but if there's 2, i cannot even set it up to 0, or 1, why?

And the mainest quetion of all: why do they want to go the longest route? This is bug of an AI? In a 5yo game? Really?

the mining AI is not bad .... the fact the devs limited the orders is ....
u cannoit fix any AI .. when there is abasic order for miners missing after all
an order for miners , even station miners like .. mine or, or silicon, or ice is needed
as long as miners have to mine all 3 different types at tthe same time , there will never be a fix for the bad AI availible ...

when i assign miners to a station ....i must be able to tell them what they have to mine ...and i need to tell them where to mine ....
also the limitation of 5 secotrs for a miner is the buggest bull they could have done to the game after all

so far the ming, regardless if it is automin in a sector, or miners concerning a station is like u take a formula 1 car, remove all wheels. and tell the driver he has to beat the track record every round now ...
but the bad and realky realy sad thing is, they dont wanna change this fact...even if they know themself we are right about it