Ground Penetrating Scanner issues

[VastinArdaen]

I've had two issues with the ground penetrating scanner so far:

1) The time it took before revealing its first ore deposit was far longer than expected (~2 game years with frequent use)

2) After finally finding the first deposit it has now gone crazy, revealing new deposits every day for several days running.

[Tynan]

Hi Vastin, thanks for the report.

We changed the tuning of the scanner recently, but not that much.

What does it say when you select it while it's working? It should give the time to the next find, and time between random finds.

Can you post a savegame?

[VastinArdaen]

Alas, the savegame is too large for the forum (over 10000kb).

However I think that the way the Random Find Interval multiplies into the Find Chance results in a roughly exponential increase in real find rate for advanced operators.

Basically it seems like a 19-20 operator has a decent chance of spamming out finds every day or two, while an operator in the 1-10 range can take seasons for a single find.

So taking some screenshots and doing spreadsheet math, it looks like the Random Find Interval is basically 3/(research speed) days - pretty sure about this value.

Along similar lines, the guaranteed find % seems to increase by ~.007*(research speed) per hour? Not as sure about this because testing it adequately with my low research colonists is painfully slow and non-granular, time-wise.

The part I'm REALLY guessing on is the random find chance - I'm assuming it's just a check against whatever your current 'guaranteed' find chance is at each random check interval.

Anyway, if both those formulae hold, then a high level researcher gets exponentially more hits, because they not only have better base odds - but they check far more often as well! The fact that a successful find resets your find chance doesn't really seem to change the math meaningfully.

So... yeah. A level 19 researcher may find close to one deposit a day - around 67x what a level 2 researcher will find, and probably somewhere around 3-4x as fast as a level 10 researcher. This looks about right given what I'm seeing in the playthrough.

I'd guess it's not a bug per-se, just that if my assumptions above are correct, you really don't want to bother with scanning until your researchers are at least into the 15+ range, because their speed skyrockets as they get up there (especially with bonuses to research speed).

[Tynan]

From my math it works out like this:

Level 0 - 0.267 finds every 10 days
Level 5 - 2.183
Level 10 - 4.1
Level 15 - 6.017
Level 20 - 7.933 finds every 10 days

Here is the graph.

It's pretty low on the low end but at the same time, there's a reason skills matter in the game.

It's just a rescaled version of the research speed curve in any case. I think it's okay.

Anyway this isn't a bug, but a balance discussion, so I'll move this to general and leave the floor open.

[VastinArdaen]

Yeah, not a problem. I originally thought it was a bug just because the changeover from low level to high level was so dramatic. I got ground radar pretty early because I was playing in a low-metal environment and my early colonists really couldn't find anything with it at all over extended periods.

My researchers apparently got distracted researching real things for a long time, until they eventually got back around to using the thing after they hit 17+ and it just started spamming deposits, so I thought it was a bug until I looked at it enough to figure out the math.