FreeOrion

As I mentioned in another thread, I believe Heavy Mining should be superior to Mining in every situation.
Also, some specials, such as Eccentric Orbit, gave bonuses so minuscule as to be irrelevant. I made those bonuses small fractions of the population (0.25, to be exact).

Therefore, I tweaked specials.txt a bit.

The patches are identical when it comes to the likes of the Eccentric Orbit. They differ when it comes to the Mineral Rich special.
1) Mining -> 4x planet pop; Heavy Mining -> 8x planet pop
2) Mining -> 50; Heavy Mining -> +100

I didn't modify anything else - not the specials that affect construction, nor ancient ruins, nor anything...

Good, idea, but it sounds like you are working off old script files.

Those examples values aren't in line with whats been changed in the last few weeks. Base average production is now .5 resources per population unit, for instance.

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I lifted the specials.txt from /default of my latest install (rev 4776).

You should always be working against the latest SVN.

in most cases, script files will work with a slightly older binary-- in some cases a much older binary.

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I already mentioned I can't use SVN (drat my ISP), so... what rev FO is now at? ...

4803, at the time of this post.

You can download individual files, or see what's been changed from here without going through SVN

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Downloaded latest version of specials.txt and applied my changes.

Eccentric Orbit is 25% pop.

1) mining -> 4x pop heavy mining - 8x pop
2) mining -> +50 heavy mining - +100

Other stuff was unchanged.

Couldn't decide which version is better, so here you go.

Your still not attending to the point i made in my first post.

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Mineral rich shouldn't add 8x to base production.
Refer to species.txt.

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I don't think the point was to replace mining focus, but rather to give an alternative that was useful in some situations. See Bigjoe5's posts about it, such as: viewtopic.php?p=45471#p45471

That said, if there's never a cost to heavy mining that would make it preferable to use regular mining, the two might as well be combined into a single focus option, with the heaving mining tech just increasing the effectiveness of mining in some situations.

Edit: Someone posted a sourceforge bug report that's relevant to this thread:

I haven't paid much attention to this focus until my most recent test game.
I agree that an "always superior" heavy mining has no claim to a different focus setting. To compare to foci is pointless micromanagy number-crunching.

Currently the cost is a negative to target population-- but still from a game design perspective it seems needlessly complicated to have an additional mining focus which may or may not actually improve your bottom line, depending on several factors, and on top of it all it is calculated differently.

To streamline pick either:
A) Take away it's focus, and make it simply a tech that makes mining large planets more viable.
B) Make it always more effective than regular mining, but with a real cost-- so that it is always a significant decision with significant consequences. The fluff should be revised to be truly dystopian-- like strip-mining entire continents, industrial created volcanoes, or having nanites devour holes from the surface to the core.

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Making Heavy Mining a tech (doubling the output, but at increased population/food/whatever cost) is my preferred solution to the problem.

If there's any drawback to using it, it can't just be a tech, because a player can't turn a tech on and off at will. I prefer eleazar's B.

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