when to build mining station

[GHerr]

i thought i posted this the other day but maybe i didn't hit submit. in DWU i would only build mining stations when the total amount of all resources added up to at least over 100. is there any rule of thumb that folks use for dw2?

[Miravlix]

What are you trying to do?

Are you trying to reduce the number of mining station due to the small maintenance cost, that seems flawed logic, the stations doesn't come with high enough private maint cost for it to be a factor and we don't really care if the private econ make 1 cent or 10 cent pr. trade, as long as they make money.

I always felt the player logic that resulted in the above 120% rule was weird and flawed. The value of a 20% deposit vs 120% deposit depends on travel time.

You want construction deposits around your ports/planets, to allow for low travel time of freighters, it's really hard to transport large quantities of goods pr. freighter, so you want less travel time, not larger deposits.

I tried making mining stations with 10+ cargo bays, but no freighter is picking it up, you don't get high enough volume of freighters to a single station or a single freighter wanting large enough quantities.

For fuel you want to mine EVERYTHING, for Lux you want to mine EVERYTHING and for Construction stuff you want a few stations and every planet you settle, you want a ring of construction mines around each planet.

[SirHoraceHarkness]

I can't think of any time in DWU that I ever had too many mining stations. Unless you are playing with only an empire or two that is hostile to you the extra resources are always able to be sold on the galactic market.

[Emperor0Akim]

Yep, my rule of thumb for building mining stations was that the location should have at least two different ressources ( except caslon and hydrogen )
and I usually developed colonized systems completely before moving outward, trying to have a source for any strategic(construction) ressource nearby.
That way covered most luxury goods by default and the only places I got aggressive for were the big three.

[Almora]

The AI isn't the best at resource distribution yet, so I'd say build them close by whenever there's helpful resources, supposedly avoiding having more than a certain amount of luxury goods (I don't remember how many but I think it was 30) is a good way to keep logistics working better, but idk.
Mainly just be careful not to put them too far out from your infrastructure, or too close to enemies

[Psycho78]

My rule of thumb is to always build one unless there are only tiny amounts of common resources. It seems like sought-after resources have a red box around them, I always build in that case.

[GHerr]

Hmmm. I could have sworn there were times when I let the ai just build mining stations all the time and they would end up not having enough money in the private sector to buy ships. But maybe the correlation wasn't the mining stations.