Topic: An idea for temporary mining structures
Comments posted here http://forums.perpetuum-online.com/topi … to-change/ prompted me to post an idea to improve mining. I started playing perpetuum because of the promise of building, but as it hasn't yet appeared, how about temporary structures?
In this case I'm thinking of deployable mining drills; you deploy them in an existing mineral field and it increases the amount of minerals in the surrounding tiles and the rate of mineral replenishment (the number of tiles it effects could be linked to tech level). These structures should be relatively expensive to produce a new money sink, last a long time (something like 8 hours basic with increasing time by tech level), but be destuctable. This would also bring something to PvP which I think is currently lacking oustside of intrusions; point defence (my pvp experience is limited so I could be wrong).
Imagine a group of rivelers around a drill on a patch of epriton. The drill should look quite big so it is visible from a distance, maybe even showing up on the structures list in the landmarks menu. The increase in minerals would allow afk mining, but would flag up where your miners are so they would have to have defenders. Rather then roaming to find a fight you would have a focus point creating squads of armoured bots defending the miners and the structure, with new offensive tactics to crack them. Obviously the mining rewards would have to be significant to justify the risk, and different types of structures for alpha and beta (think syndicate mining rights/restrictions on alpha islands).
Some of the ideas here might be better for permanent structures, but as they are probably a while away yet temorary structures could be a nice stop-gap.