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[Bremen]

How do I use a mining module on a mining ship? I designed one, but I don't have any orders that say "mine this asteroid" or such.

Just move them to orbit an asteroid (or comet, I think). You may have to create a colony on the asteroid, I'm not sure.

[Lord Shonus]

You do.

[Shooer]

You do.

Need to have a colony designated at the target.

[Micro102]

O how I wish there was an easier way to mine. It sucks to have to find the asteroid you want to mine, make it a colony, then remove it's colony status afterwards so it doesn't clog up your list. All 3 steps are cumbersome.

[forsaken1111]

I don't even bother with asteroid tbh

[MarcAFK]

Just let the Civilians take care of them, they're a reasonable source of income when they deplete an asteroid except for a single mineral with .1 availability and huge abundance, just set to sell and rake in the cash.

[Micro102]

You won't be saying that when you have a neutronium shortage and can't build anything, and there are neutronium filled asteroids that can keep you going long enough to set up a mining station on that far away planet.

[Flying Dice]

Exceptions that prove the rule. Note that even in your example asteroid mining with your own resources is only a stopgap until you can expand.

And let's be honest, in most games any asteroid with decent deposits is going to have civvies sucking it up long before you do. 

[Micro102]

Uhhh nope I'm talking from experience. I barely had 3 systems with populations and only about 40 ships (ranging from 3000-100000 tons) when I ran out of neutronium. Mining asteroids let me keep my production going until I hit those sweet 1.0, 20mil level deposits on a system I found.

[Rince Wind]

I am 65 years into my campaign and my heaviest warships are 30000t. Not counting fighters I have a lot less than 40 ships. If I include the commercial ones and PDCs it is more of course.

[Flying Dice]

Uhhh nope I'm talking from experience. I barely had 3 systems with populations and only about 40 ships (ranging from 3000-100000 tons) when I ran out of neutronium. Mining asteroids let me keep my production going until I hit those sweet 1.0, 20mil level deposits on a system I found.

in your example asteroid mining with your own resources is only a stopgap until you can expand.

[Karnewarrior]

The mining ship is meant to be semi-autonomous,  though I guess thats somewhat in the dust now. Still, there are a few asteroids with large deposits and my civ isn't big enough for civvies to do damn near anything yet.

The asteroid in question is actually my first extraterrestrial source of minerals, as earth is running out in about a decade. I'm next going to produce a frieghter and ancolony ship and proceed to mars. After That's set up (mostly as a trial run) I'll see what I can do to terraform venus and get a mining colony on Ganymede.

Then it's on to alpha centauri to exploit natives.

[Micro102]

Uhhh nope I'm talking from experience. I barely had 3 systems with populations and only about 40 ships (ranging from 3000-100000 tons) when I ran out of neutronium. Mining asteroids let me keep my production going until I hit those sweet 1.0, 20mil level deposits on a system I found.

in your example asteroid mining with your own resources is only a stopgap until you can expand.

Calm down. I thought your "rule" was to never mine asteroids and just let civilians mine them. I also didn't see it as preventing me from expanding.


Now, I am concerned about the speed of my game. What are the average tech values/date/# of ships/# of colonies values?

[iceball3]

Depends on your starting tech levels. When in doubt, compensate by building loads of ships that can remain useful when obseleted, loads of missile-mines, and otherwise run a regiment built on a mix of saturation and efficiency.
My current setup is built around obscenely armed, we're talking nearly a hundred shots per five seconds, point defense ships, meson fighters, and missile ship designed for saturation bombing anything that closes the range. The idea is to be visible and weather any and all missile barrages, and fling fighters at any depleted missile ships. I honestly wondwonder how the ship would hold up against AMM spam.

[Flying Dice]

Uhhh nope I'm talking from experience. I barely had 3 systems with populations and only about 40 ships (ranging from 3000-100000 tons) when I ran out of neutronium. Mining asteroids let me keep my production going until I hit those sweet 1.0, 20mil level deposits on a system I found.

in your example asteroid mining with your own resources is only a stopgap until you can expand.

Calm down. I thought your "rule" was to never mine asteroids and just let civilians mine them. I also didn't see it as preventing me from expanding.


Now, I am concerned about the speed of my game. What are the average tech values/date/# of ships/# of colonies values?

Just making sure you can read it. Which you... apparently still didn't. Rule: Civilian mines will generally populate every worthwhile asteroid, so you can leave that to them most of the time. Exception: Sometimes you run short on a specific mineral and don't have any abundant sources, in which case you might plop down some mining colonies to grab the smaller deposits of it from asteroids while you expand to find a new long-term source.



stop·gap
    ˈstäpˌɡap/
    noun
    noun: stopgap; plural noun: stopgaps; noun: stop-gap; plural noun: stop-gaps
        a temporary way of dealing with a problem or satisfying a need.
        "transplants are only a stopgap until more sophisticated alternatives can work"
        synonyms:   temporary solution/fix, expedient, makeshift; More
        substitute, stand-in, pinch-hitter
        "that old plane was merely a stopgap"
        temporary, provisional, interim, pro tem, short-term, working, makeshift, emergency;
        caretaker, acting, stand-in, fill-in
        "a stopgap measure"

--

It entirely depends on what you started with. The single greatest factor in the speed of your development and growth is your starting population, everything else is secondary. There are three hard caps on growth: mineral supply, workforce requirements, and wealth. A high population directly solves the latter two and indirectly affects the first (more workers = more factories = more automines and freighters).

This is also why it's good to colonize as early and often as possible, even if you're just grabbing resourceless worlds. Every additional colony is another place for you to plop down a pop growth rate+ administrator, and even if they're not giving you minerals they serve as an R&R base as well as generating wealth, both directly and through civilian trade, which in turn allows you to build more, buy more, and invest more.

For example, my campaign right now was a low pop start (don't remember how much exactly, but it was <50m I believe) with a high base tech level, aiming for a post-apoc recovery sort of fluff. I'm 76 years into it, have only 362m pop on Earth (remember, default start is 500m) with ~1000 total factory-type facilities, 3/14 shipyards, 5 labs, 5 GFTFs, &c., but I also have 141m on Mars, 124m on Luna, and six populated colonies in three other systems with a total of 187m (and all eight of those are terraformed to 0.00 cost) with three more worlds undergoing terraforming, two in colonized systems and one in a new system, as well as a network of DSTS colonies, some my own and some captured.

So I've not researched a single tech for those 76 years (the one I started on has seen three different lead researchers and is still 27.5 years away from completion at the current rate). Keep in mind, low pop starts pretty much need high starting tech unless you want to be stuck with TL2-3 shit for decades, because labs are the second biggest consumer of workforce capacity at 1m workers a pop. It helps to remember that your workforce is ~20% of your total pop.

You're going to see roughly equal development over a timespan of ~50y from a high-tech low-pop start and a high-pop Conventional start, but the latter will always eventually outscale the former because population is king. Starting tech level only matters in the short term because it doesn't have much of an effect on your scaling; population is first in that regard followed closely by the starting minerals on your homeworld and in your starting system, then by your luck with system generation. It's vastly easier to succeed with 1b population, conventional tech, and 1x automine + 1x construction factory start than it is with 10m population, T8 tech, and a thousand/dozen of each small/large facility (not least because of the inefficiency modifiers, lol).