Dawn of Man had a neat system where mines were finite, but towards the end of the tech tree you unlocked deep mines, to which exhausted mines could be upgraded and would then produce indefinitely (though slower than a regular mine). This seems like a better way of handling it than what we have in Farthest Frontier; regular/ deep mines and regular/deep deposits being separate from each other feels clunky, pointless, and a bit silly to be honest. It seems to be causing issues with resource generation in the current playtest build as well, so why not just have deep mines upgrade from normal ones?
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In Frontier, you can place mines anywhere, even if there isn’t a deposit, so that fundamentally does not work and would need to be changed to allow for such a mechanic.
Likewise, if you deplete a mine, if you then destroy it, what happens then? You could end up in a situation where you have no deposits left to place a mine and then deplete it. So then the way deposits are generated would have to be changed.
I haven’t personally played Dawn of Man, so I don’t know exactly how their mines are set up, but I get the impression it works differently mechanically.
Well, technically you CAN build them manually in that game, but they can only be placed on depleted veins. Depleted veins don’t disappear from the map, so even if you delete the mine you can just place a deep mine once you unlock the tech for it.
The point is that you progress organically from collecting surface-level deposits to deep mining, and you do it in a way that requires very little micromanaging. You also don’t get ironic situations like being surrounded by vast mineral riches that you can’t use for almost the entire game.
That said, you are correct that the mines work a little differently in Dawn of Man. They can only be placed directly on top of a deposit, and I’m not a tech person so I don’t know what that means in terms of adapting it.
I’ve been using a seed before updating to beta 8.3, it’s a pretty friendly seed with good resources, to focus on seeing how the rest of the game works, without worrying too much about trading. And after the update, I have found that the map of that seed is completely different, and also that ALL the gold mines have been turned into deep mines… so there is not a single sad little gold mine that I can use at the beginning of the game. The system that has been put in does not seem bad to me, but perhaps it could be programmed so that when the mines are generated, if that map is going to have gold, because it has 5 deep gold mines… that at least 1 is small, to be able to get something at the beginning, since the quarries cannot be used until you are already level 4 and to get there you have to spend a lot of gold.
Was this on a previous town or a new one you started in v0.8.3?
In both cases, although, well, in both too, it’s a new map, in an old city I rerolled the map, and then I used the same seed in a new city and it’s exactly the same. You can check it:
29A72A66466
there are gold in 3 mountains at northwest, northeast and sudeast.
Later, when I have a moment I pass screens.
Would love this idea of mines being upgradable to infinite mines!!! I’m currently on a map where I have found 0 and explored like 90% of the map. Furthermore this makes it so your town can survive indefinitely, otherwise once you have run out of every mine on the map (which actually goes pretty quickly once you have 1000 pop) your town is doomed to fail eventually. Of course, you can trade for it, but if you keep growing that would never be sustainable. Especially since there is a cap on how much you can sell (500 of any item).
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