There's a lot of dead pointless time in the process of mining once you're in a ring. moving rock to rock where you have no real gameplay going on. Why? because mining is a single tier grind gameloop.
Solution:
The laser, surface, subsurface, and even deep core mining methods should have a second tier gameloop that allows you to continue mining a roid at ever increasing difficulties of success.
I'll suggest some easy options to make it at least plausible.
laser: First tier unchanged
second tier involves sending a second prospector. You must launch your second prospector as distant from the first as possible on the roid. Based on the distance vs potential distance the mining reaction game begins. This game is harder the worse you are at reaching the ideal distance between prospectors as well as harder for as many times you've re-mined the roid with additional prospectors. This includes failures. Upon success, you get a varying range of additional mining ability at increasing concentrations of the existing commodities per chunk each iteration.
Surface: first tier unchanged
second tier involves launching a second prospector. same as in mining. This will trigger an additional set of surface deposits if the first set were broken off. This can be reapeated until it's too hard to win the prospector mini game. The concentration/quantity of deposits increases slowly as you repeat and win. The difficulty increases each attempt / prospector and how far off of ideal your prospector is distanced from the other prospector sites. same as laser.
subsurface: same deal as surface, only with subsurface deposits. You dont have to completely clear a subsurface deposit of all deposits before attempting a tier 2 mining mechanic.
Deep core : First tier does not fully break a roid. It instead if you launch and are successful at targetting using only one detonation, it cracks it, but it's still whole. Your reward is the same as current full detonation.
second tier: Once again, we launch the prospector mini game (you must have aleady launched a prospector - since this is only trigered by being the 2nd+ prospector you have fired on a roid. You can then launch a second missile, this if successful, further cracks it but it's harder to succeed. Again , you get rewarded with a better reward than last time provided. This can be repeated, until you want to finally break the roid by launching multiple detonations in a single pass. The reward there is greater than your last reward.
The laser and subsurface and surface second tiers can also trigger new deposits of eachothers types. Although the roids will favor their initial layout.
In this way, the time you spent mining is spent less on uneventful and unrewarding travel and instead of using time to balance the game mechanic, we use some actual gameplay to balance the game mechanic. win, win. Balance can be tweaked via difficulty of the targetting and fuzziness of how ideal placement factors into things and players dont feel like they've wasted their life getting nothing done like how the gameplay is currently balanced by increasing how often they have to move from roid to roid.
again, this isn't how i'd love to see how mining works in a game, it's just the solution with the least amount of work i can think of that would be somewhat decent at resolving the problem of wasteful game time in a fair way.
Solution:
The laser, surface, subsurface, and even deep core mining methods should have a second tier gameloop that allows you to continue mining a roid at ever increasing difficulties of success.
I'll suggest some easy options to make it at least plausible.
laser: First tier unchanged
second tier involves sending a second prospector. You must launch your second prospector as distant from the first as possible on the roid. Based on the distance vs potential distance the mining reaction game begins. This game is harder the worse you are at reaching the ideal distance between prospectors as well as harder for as many times you've re-mined the roid with additional prospectors. This includes failures. Upon success, you get a varying range of additional mining ability at increasing concentrations of the existing commodities per chunk each iteration.
Surface: first tier unchanged
second tier involves launching a second prospector. same as in mining. This will trigger an additional set of surface deposits if the first set were broken off. This can be reapeated until it's too hard to win the prospector mini game. The concentration/quantity of deposits increases slowly as you repeat and win. The difficulty increases each attempt / prospector and how far off of ideal your prospector is distanced from the other prospector sites. same as laser.
subsurface: same deal as surface, only with subsurface deposits. You dont have to completely clear a subsurface deposit of all deposits before attempting a tier 2 mining mechanic.
Deep core : First tier does not fully break a roid. It instead if you launch and are successful at targetting using only one detonation, it cracks it, but it's still whole. Your reward is the same as current full detonation.
second tier: Once again, we launch the prospector mini game (you must have aleady launched a prospector - since this is only trigered by being the 2nd+ prospector you have fired on a roid. You can then launch a second missile, this if successful, further cracks it but it's harder to succeed. Again , you get rewarded with a better reward than last time provided. This can be repeated, until you want to finally break the roid by launching multiple detonations in a single pass. The reward there is greater than your last reward.
The laser and subsurface and surface second tiers can also trigger new deposits of eachothers types. Although the roids will favor their initial layout.
In this way, the time you spent mining is spent less on uneventful and unrewarding travel and instead of using time to balance the game mechanic, we use some actual gameplay to balance the game mechanic. win, win. Balance can be tweaked via difficulty of the targetting and fuzziness of how ideal placement factors into things and players dont feel like they've wasted their life getting nothing done like how the gameplay is currently balanced by increasing how often they have to move from roid to roid.
again, this isn't how i'd love to see how mining works in a game, it's just the solution with the least amount of work i can think of that would be somewhat decent at resolving the problem of wasteful game time in a fair way.