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I really like the new system.

127 (35%)

Better than before, but more needs to be done.

93 (25.6%)

It doesn't make a difference to me.

41 (11.3%)

The changes don't really address my issues.

6 (1.7%)

I don't like it at all.

35 (9.6%)

I have mixed feelings on the matter.

61 (16.8%)

Total Members Voted: 362

[Anathema]

Im slowly starting to like NW's conceptualization for the final game more and more.

This is a known side effect of excessive reading of NW's posts. I suggest you limit your intake

[Tarran]

With a 5-ore cluster, you've got 23.7% chance of nothing.

You also have a getting 39.5% chance of getting 1 less stone than what you would have.

That's roughly 63.2% chance of less stuff than if every stone dropped one.

It's up to you if you like less stuff. If you like less stuff, then we cannot argue further because our views are different.

Now, is that really a bad thing?

Yes. Imagine what this is like: You defeat a boss in an RPG. He was extremely difficult to kill. You have five treasure chests, with only a 25% chance of anything being in each of them. The loot is always going to be good, so not getting anything would be really upsetting.

Well, 23.7% chance is >1/5 people not getting anything. So they just fought the boss for no reason. That is a bad thing in my opinion. Especially if before, there was a guaranteed chance to always get stuff from the chests, but only a few bits of good stuff per each were allowed.

And as I showed above, on average (in chance) there was also a decrease in the amount of loot you could get. That's bad in my opinion.

goin back on topic (mining rates) - would most (or all) of peoples problems disapear by changing it from 25% from RNG to a 1/4 'counter" (where the first stone/ore of each type mined drops, and every 4th after it (so thats 1st, 5th, 9th, 13th or 4x+1)) thus we get approximately 25% (slightly more, more noticeable with small numbers)
each stone type has its own counter (only for stones that have been mined at least once to save on FPS?) so that you cant mine one ore and then 3 stone and maximise ore drops.

Yeah, this could help, but it still doesn't feel completely... right.

the question is, does everyone like randomness? i think most people actually would prefer it, but just putting out an alternative

I either like randomness or hate it, personally. This case, I don't like it since there's no way to influence it. Something like Civ4 where, while there might be luck screws in combat every once and a while, at least you can do some things to influence the chances. Here, you cannot influence the chances.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm not opposed to making mining take more thought, just more micro.  I'd rather be contemplating the best return on in-game resources than on play time.  If I wanted to do the latter I'd go play runescape or something.  Rubble is not required to counter strip-mining, any form of hazard would be sufficient.

Rubble, I still believe, makes the whole thing slower, which in turn, means that you will try to stop and make the choice of mining those things that give you the most return for your time, rather than just strip-mining everything without a thought, and hence, is required to make the rest of this more interesting.

Gasses and ventilation, likewise, is a long-term dream of mine, which adds many of the same logistics challenges that minecarts will add, although we will probably need either some sort of pumping system, or else a oxygen-producing plant that must be farmed underground to make the system have more meaning than just digging some extra air tiles. 

As I said in the other thread, something I'd hopefully like to see mining eventually become is something more akin to a board game where you would have a choice of drawing face-down cards from different decks that promise different things, or perhaps more like a game of minesweeper, where you have clues in the rock that tell you if you are getting close to certain types of minerals or perhaps dangerous events, and you have to make choices as to what you're going to risk mining into and for what potential goods. 

Then again, if we're going to that much trouble to make mining realistic, rubble would be little by comparison.

Besides, you really expect the players who think they're wasting their time hauling rubble to look for a better solution than "give up", whether that means ragequiting or just turning rubble off?

Again, rubble takes essentially no micromanagement.  It's no more trouble to deal with than hauling stone will be, anyway. 

And likewise, I already play with a self-imposed goal of using up all the stone I mine out, and I don't use low-skill miners, so I can say that the game is entirely manageable when played like this - you just have to learn to suppress that urge to mass-designate giant zones for mining when you see a vein of ore and definitely avoid the habit of designating those huge, ugly rectangular rooms, and switch to more space-efficient fractal shafts. 

Anyway, I expect that a good chunk of players will play with the init option off at first out of fear of change, and most will grow to enjoy it over time, and nearly all new players will wonder why people would ever want it off.  Players who played from 40d or before thought that 0.31 minerals were completely overabundant, and liked the return of limited minerals.  Players who started at 0.31 were outraged that they lost access to absurd numbers of minerals and ores that outweighed the actual layer stone and some still choose those absurd high mineral frequency settings.  Players since the change back to scarce minerals will just pick a median amount of minerals.


As for paints - there are organic and there are inorganic pigments.  Organic pigments means using something like blueberries (or, I guess, dimple cups) as your blue dye, but tends to work best on other organic substances.  Inorganic pigments are often used in glazes or enamels or other things that are meant to last longer.  These are generally made from oxidized metal powder.  For example, iron would oxidize to rust, and make a rust-red pigment. 

Egg tempera paints with organic dyes would fade out, but inorganic colorations, like cobalt blue or lapis lazuli blue were prized paint pigments. 

[Arkenstone]

Well, I was aiming for a split-the-difference solution. Mining is ridiculously easy now. It seems improper that one dwarf with a copper pick should plow through stone faster than a fleet of TBMs. So not only do they go faster, but they also get better at it? Thats a lot of benefit for the skill compared to other activities. Generally the reverse happens - if you want to produce a really high quality item, you need the skill but it takes the same amount of time as a novice to make a lower-quality item. The skilled person can choose to speed up, but quality drops - so there's the ability to choose the outcome.

[...]

And maybe that's another variable that should be in this - pick material and hardness of stone. We already fly through soil. Why not make copper picks slower than iron in turn slower than steel, and make mining in granite slower than sandstone slower than chalk? And then apply the above to that. Maybe the current legendary mining speed in stone is what you could do with a steel pick in chalk, but a steel pick in granite or obsidian is ~5x slower, and a copper pick in granite 3x slower than that.

I really hate to say this, but I think what I've been trying to say is that the speed of mining is really an acceptable break from reality for gameplay purposes.  Sure, there's a lot of cool stuff that can be added, but it needs a good balance; such that we are unlikely to strike by committee.

As for picks, I believe that the speed of mining through rock would be determined by the fracture point of the rock and the maximum impulse that can be delivered.  The latter would depend on the momentum of the pick, its cross-section, how much it deforms on impact (compression strength), and other factors such as follow-through and how well-centered the weight is (i.e., quality).  The momentum would be a function of the miner's strength and to some extent technique, and the pick's mass.

Overall, I think that the difference would mainly be in how fast the pick decays rather than in mining speed.  Although, a simple comparison of the pick's yield strength to the fracture point of the rock would make copper picks, at least, worthless for mining anything but chalk etc.

[Naros]

I don't like how a master miner has the same chance to gather up something as a complete novice.

There's no poll option that conveys my feelings, so I didn't vote.
Multiple blocks from a rock I do like, for example.

[Arkenstone]

Now, is that really a bad thing?

Yes. Imagine what this is like: You defeat a boss in an RPG. He was extremely difficult to kill. You have five treasure chests, with only a 25% chance of anything being in each of them. The loot is always going to be good, so not getting anything would be really upsetting.

Well, 23.7% chance is >1/5 people not getting anything. So they just fought the boss for no reason. That is a bad thing in my opinion. Especially if before, there was a guaranteed chance to always get stuff from the chests, but only a few bits of good stuff per each were allowed.

And as I showed above, on average (in chance) there was also a decrease in the amount of loot you could get. That's bad in my opinion.

I would argue your analogy isn't applicable, since you didn't have to spend a lot of effort to find the cluster.  It'd be more like stumbling upon a random encounter consisting of five chests in a clearing.  And exploratory mining would be compared to wandering around hoping for that particular encounter in this analogy.

As for a decrease in amount, that's easily ratified with worldgen options/raw files.  But on average you aren't getting less at all.  With a 5-tile cluster, the expected value for the number of blocks is 5*.25 = 1.25  Multiply by 4 bars per block and you get an average of 5 bars per 5-tile cluster.  And that's more than you were getting before, because even a legendary miner will occasionally miss one...

[Arkenstone]

I don't like how a master miner has the same chance to gather up something as a complete novice.

There's no poll option that conveys my feelings, so I didn't vote.
Multiple blocks from a rock I do like, for example.

Hmm... I'll go change that now, then.

[Tarran]

As for a decrease in amount, that's easily ratified with worldgen options/raw files.

Both are workarounds, not solutions. And both don't work completely.

The first, is an artificial increase that doesn't really address the problem. More metal chance can help with the amount you get, sure, but now you lose generic stone. You still lose stuff. And don't say "But what do you care about generic stone?" because that's besides the point.

And as for raw editing, unless you can edit the drop chances and amounts (can you? I haven't played DF lately and am not much of a modder), simply increasing the amount generated once again does not actually address the point because you lose some of whatever they're generated in.

As for a decrease in amount, that's easily ratified with worldgen options/raw files.  But on average you aren't getting less at all.  With a 5-tile cluster, the expected value for the number of blocks is 5*.25 = 1.25  Multiply by 4 bars per block and you get an average of 5 bars per 5-tile cluster.  And that's more than you were getting before, because even a legendary miner will occasionally miss one...

Good point, but that's different from what I said.

And as I showed above, on average (in chance) there was also a decrease in the amount of loot you could get. That's bad in my opinion.

But I made a shoddy argument, so I drop the point of on average getting less. But I keep my argument of having a larger chance of getting less.

[Raunyc]

What really blows my mind is we're being handed mine carts to assist with hauling masses of objects, but then we're losing 75% of what we normally need to move the most of, even if it is to destroy it... So now we can move all the garbage stone that we don't get nearly as much of with carts, and we lose stone that we want to make our furniture out of.

It's really a bit baffling to me that we get something to manage something else that's then no longer a problem...

I like that legendaries produce 100% of the time, I would avoid veins that I wanted to make all my thrones/tables out of until I had legendaries, but now it's a moot point to even have a miner on embark beyond novice, minor speed increase seems negligible to me now...

I'm sorry I have a mental problem that makes me string sentences together for weeks.

[Arkenstone]

As for a decrease in amount, that's easily ratified with worldgen options/raw files.  But on average you aren't getting less at all.  With a 5-tile cluster, the expected value for the number of blocks is 5*.25 = 1.25  Multiply by 4 bars per block and you get an average of 5 bars per 5-tile cluster.  And that's more than you were getting before, because even a legendary miner will occasionally miss one...

Good point, but that's different from what I said.

And as I showed above, on average (in chance) there was also a decrease in the amount of loot you could get. That's bad in my opinion.

But I made a shoddy argument, so I drop the point of on average getting less. But I keep my argument of having a larger chance of getting less.

Essentially, your argument is about the variance.  With the old system, the variance was practically nil.  But under the new system, the variance is very high (3n to be precise).  Still, the odds of you getting less are always balanced out by the odds of getting a lot more.

The odds of you getting less hovers around 50%.  In four such clusters of five ore, the odds are 45.5%, while in five the odds are 56.1%.  But the odds of you getting less than half are now only 9.6%.


I try thinking of the fact that, no matter if one happens to get more or less than before, one spends a lot less of one's own personal time getting it.

[Ubiq]

Players who played from 40d or before thought that 0.31 minerals were completely overabundant, and liked the return of limited minerals.  Players who started at 0.31 were outraged that they lost access to absurd numbers of minerals and ores that outweighed the actual layer stone and some still choose those absurd high mineral frequency settings.  Players since the change back to scarce minerals will just pick a median amount of minerals.

I played 40d and I certainly don't remember ever thinking 0.31 minerals were overabundant; especially since the default mineral scarcity is 2500 and 700-800 is what gives a 40d style embark. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the entire reason the mineral scarcity setting was added in the first place was that people overwhelmingly thought that minerals were far too uncommon and that the severe lack of them was crippling their ability to play the game in a way that they want. Not to mention that it was a fairly common complaint that it was easier to find adamantine than iron since you were now guaranteed to find it with the proper map settings while the latter cannot be said for iron.

Beyond that, the 40d spread was far superior not only in terms of the amount of minerals one could find but also the variety. As is, the tendency is still to wind up with a vast host of metals that are largely useless for military matters. I've had plenty of 0.31 forts where I could pave the surface of the entire planet with gold bars and probably three or four forts where I actually found iron.

[Johuotar]

Id prefer if ore dropped 100% of the time  but dropped less to keep some balance. Very small vein might not yeild  anything.

[Tarran]

Still, the odds of you getting less are always balanced out by the odds of getting a lot more.

Statistically, I agree completely. In general practice, I don't think I can ever agree with that kind of mindset for rare stuff. The chances of getting less are still quite high at 60%--too high for rare minerals (where each piece counts). For normal stone, I have no real problems with the new system at all. For rare minerals, if you miss your chance how many more chances are you going to get?

I try thinking of the fact that, no matter if one happens to get more or less than before, one spends a lot less of one's own personal time getting it.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here.

[HorridOwn4ge]

Didn't Toady say he didn't change the way ore is mined (aka ore still drops like it is now) but only changed how many bars you can get from 1 piece of ore?

[Arkenstone]

Still, the odds of you getting less are always balanced out by the odds of getting a lot more.

Statistically, I agree completely. In general practice, I don't think I can ever agree with that kind of mindset for rare stuff. The chances of getting less are still quite high at 60%--too high for rare minerals (where each piece counts). For normal stone, I have no real problems with the new system at all. For rare minerals, if you miss your chance how many more chances are you going to get?

I try thinking of the fact that, no matter if one happens to get more or less than before, one spends a lot less of one's own personal time getting it.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here.

Actually, if I'm not mistaken where there's one platinum cluster there's usually more.  But then that doesn't account for, say, modded-in metals that occur as single tiles, et cetera.

As for the latter part, I'm trying to say that while before you'd have to spend a lot of time in micro to make sure only your legendary miners dug into that platinum cluster, possibly even having to wait to train up a legendary miner, now there is little reason not to dig into a cluster as soon as you find it.


What I've been trying to say is that maybe you should give the randomness a shot.  It might not be as bad as you expect, and if it is then we know Toady's not finished with mining yet.

Didn't Toady say he didn't change the way ore is mined (aka ore still drops like it is now) but only changed how many bars you can get from 1 piece of ore?

Right now, ore is just a form of stone that happens to be smeltable.  This means the changes to mining stone apply to ore as well, i.e. it now drops 25% regardless of skill.