Now that mining speed enhancers have been fixed, I wanted to post some results after running some numbers to confirm it, and show a little bit about how “efficiency” works in excavators. As a reminder, speed enhancers add 10% per slot of an excavator’s base efficiency, or amount per pull. In short, they increase the amount per pull without added decay on the excavator itself. When the enhancers break, you can get the TT value back in shrapnel, but any MU spent on them is lost, so they can speed up mining while possibly increasing the eco of eff/pec stat you see on the wiki.
This is just a really simple experimental design for statistical analysis using linear regression, so nothing crazy. I had a tier 1 Earth Excavator ME/01 and a tier 2 Genesis Star Excavator Improved, so I used each of them both without speed enhancers, and with the maximum number of enhancer slots available to give a range of efficiency to test for TT per pull:
[ol]
[li]Earth Excavator ME/01: Eff = 6.8[/li][li]Earth Excavator ME/01 + Mining Excavator Speed Enhancer 1: Eff = 7.5[/li][li]Genesis Star Excavator Improved: Eff = 15.2[/li][li]Genesis Star Excavator Improved + Mining Excavator Speed Enhancer 1 & 2: Eff = 18.2[/li][/ol]
For each treatment, I had about 70 pulls I recorded the TT for. This was only done with crude oil and lysterium to reduce rounding error since both are TT = 0.01 per item. More on what happens with higher value resources in a bit
[IMG width=“865px” height=“552px”]https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/forum/index.php?media/excavatorplot-jpg.338864/full
Averages (TT per pull)
[ol]
[li]Earth Excavator ME/01: 0.345[/li][li]Earth Excavator ME/01 + Mining Excavator Speed Enhancer 1: 0.379[/li][li]Genesis Star Excavator Improved: 0.782[/li][li]Genesis Star Excavator Improved + Mining Excavator Speed Enhancer 1 & 2: 0.943[/li][/ol]
In short, MA definitely fixed the enhancers! As you increase efficiency by 1, there’s around a 0.05 increase in TT per pull (r-squared =0.8637) whether efficiency is increased by excavator type or by enhancer. I also ran an analysis of variance just to see what differences could be detected, and statistical differences could be detected no matter what two groups you compare except the unenhanced vs. enhanced ME/01. You can see that in the graph somewhat, and that makes sense since 10% of a small number isn’t going to change very much. That’s not to say there’s no difference if you really ramped up the sample size, but you get more out of an enhancer the bigger the excavator is. If you are using small excavators though, enhancers and tiering may not always be worth it.
Again, this was all will with small TT items like crude or lyst. Efficiency isn’t a simple X amount of stones per pull rating unfortunately. At lower TT value items the regression line in this plot will hold true. As you move up in value to other items like Alicenies or Garcen though, the amount taken per pull scales differently. I don’t have the numbers handy, but IIRC, getting around 80 Lysterium stones per pull does not mean you will get 80 Alicenies per pull, even if the claim is big enough to support multiple pulls of that size. It could change for even higher value items like Niksarium too, but that’s difficult to test without a lot of amping.
I will be doing some new testing on break rates since the last VU that will take awhile, but that’s ultimately what feeds into what MU is worth paying from an eco perspective.