Hey Didn't post this to bugs cause I'm not certain if this is me or the game. I find that depending on the map most / all of the metals are rare or non existent and I wanted to know if anyone else is encountering this. In my current colony I have explored roughly 75% of all the area between the beach and the cliffs (which seem to be designed impenetrable barriers across all maps) in the temperate forest area (sorry, forgot the name). In this area I have found a single surface mine of copper and no other metal whatsoever. This seems to be common across all maps to a lesser or greater extent (admittedly, this is the most extreme example I've encountered). In rough figures copper spawns about 90% of the time (normally widely distributed), iron and zinc about 70% of the time, although maybe half those times at a great distance from the colony. Gold may as well be unobtainium, even getting a single vein is quite rare. Am I just not going far enough from the colony or is this pretty typical?
(Have you tried surveying the mineralogical beacons that don't have accompanying ore nodes then building mines?)
Hey Dbaumgart (yep - mashing refresh because my Fridays are fun like that - although mock the week + wine + clockwork empires, so theres that) Anyway, the why of why I didn't do that 1. I wasn't aware that mineralogical beacons would spawn extra veins? 2. The only beacon I could find was over the copper node 3. The naturalist ignored my orders to do the survey (actually wasn't doing much of anything) 4. Because of the starting load out I had (the metalworking one), I ran out of the starting iron building smithing forges (because I think you need them at the minute to get plates/other finished metalwork?) and have no way to get any more. So my colony is stuck with an uncompletable copper mine. (built in proximity to the vein purposely) I mean I could in theory cancel the second smithing forge and save the second iron ingot to convert it to a plate. But even at that point I don't see a better option than blindly putting down mineshafts and hope I'm lucky. Anyway this isn't meant to be be critical, just wanted to bring up a potential problem edit: I went back into the game to double check the beacons and I did locate 2 more once I was purposefully looking for them. I have a mild form of colour blindness that makes distinguishing close shades of a colour difficult, and I think that is at play here with the green on green markers. edit 2: Is the colour blind mode working yet? Seems to uncheck itself. Still now I know its a problem I can deal with it.
I like that it's getting harder to find all the nodes you need. It's an interesting dynamic having to build mines a good distance from your colony, risking attack. That said, this makes having roads and transport vehicles very desirable.
Sorry about the naturalists not following orders - I broke this in 40B, will be fixed for 40C. Building a Naturalist's Office will make a proper Naturalist, though it's a bit expensive. Yeah, the beacon visibility is not good at all -- I imagine colour blindness doesn't help at all (and re. the checkbox- we need to do a specific pass over problem areas for this, though in general I'm trying to use visual design elements that never rely solely on colour to convey information). When we get zoom-independent icons back, the survey beacons will stand out much better. (And then at some point we should get a better UI feature for them, possibly building on the as-of-yet unfinished assignment info window ... ahem!) Edit: And this feedback very rapidly shows what we need to improve and fix with the related systems, so I daresay, thanks for writing it up for us.
Ah, so the naturalist office 'does' do something. I was sort of ignoring it because I thought it was just a placeholder or something at the moment. I didn't know it was such a vital thing to have. Also yea, the scarce ores thing does make things a bit tougher, though not impossible now that I know naturalists aren't completely useless. I've stopped spending prestige on them though, because the ones I 'buy' generally end up standing about, admiring the plantlife for the duration of thier stay. Buliding mines can also be a bit tricky, seeing how they need iron plates, but at the same time, so do many other buildings and modules towards the 'mid game', and you've only got so much iron ore on the surface to work with.
Yeah mines shouldn't take anything advanced. Getting resource stuck is VERY frustrating. time consuming or expensive is fine though.
Sorry to keep coming back to this subject, but... I'm playing about with r40c, and I've noticed that the request survey command only appears if the icon is directly clicked and not if you drag out an area select, which doesn't feel like the expected behaviour. Considering this is how I've been trying to identify the beacons mainly, I can see this likely needs to change.
