Looking for advice re:Geologists

I'm fairly new to the game (been playing just over a week) and I'm enjoying, except that is, Geologists, they are just annoying me, and getting more annoyed by them each day.

My mines and quarries run out it feel like every day, or perhaps every other day (build them to level 2), and I have send out the Geologists to find more, but even with 3 of them, I'm having to keep sending them out pretty much constantly, if I'm online (and I'm normally online 12 hours a day) I need to make sure they are out finding deposits. It's boring, repetitious and doesn't seem to me to add anything to game play.

I do know about deposit refills, but the only place I see them are on the Trade Office and the prices demanded are not only out of my reach, but I'm trying to understand how or why they are that valuable.

So I guess I'm missing or misunderstanding something? Anyone care to enlighten me?

Geologists are something you will spend many hours sending out. You will be able to speed them up eventually by reading enough books to them. You can also buy some (with gems) that are twice as fast, or ones that will find two deposits at once. Some adventures give refills as reward, or you can buy them in trade as you say, or also in merchant (but personally I would never spend gems on refills). For gold, iron and coal I have one big mine of each (used to be level 6, later on I swapped them for industrial mines) that I do not have open all the time. I use the refills for these mines and put a good buff on them when I do have them open. The other coal and iron mines, and copper, stone and marble - just keep doing exactly what you are doing.

^^this....and dont forget with all production to check economy overview....do you need all production running?
I see a lot of lower levels with gold mines at level 1...they will cost more in resources to build than you will get back at level 1 and not buffed..
Also imho better to have 1 building at level 3 than 2 at level 1...build near stores....fishermen near water....build pine cutters around a forrester
gl with game:)

Sending out explorers and geologists does become part of the daily routine of maintaining your island. It is a little boring, yes, but only a few clicks.

Refills are abnormally expensive in my opinion, don’t know why. So I don’t tend to bother with them. One option is to sell them on for the actual resources you would have got with them. For example, selling a 500 iron ore refill for 1500 iron, x2 to x3 the value often sells....

Melhmqn pretty much said everything i was gonna say.

keep at it, it does get easier as the game goes on and u get more and better geo's. some from events and lots in the shop, but they do cost gems. also don't be surprised to see some in the guild shop from time to time. I have 9 which works ok for me (bare in mind i can search for a lot more resources than u atm) and when we were stuck at lvl50 i never used the tavern geo's.

the jolly geo is the best imo and at 300 gems per are a bargain :)

i find upgrading and buffing mines tend to make them run out faster and in the end u dont get anymore out of them. u just use up res faster rebuilding them. IE upgrading a copper mine to lvl 2 costs 50 tools. it will run out in half the time and the copper u mine has to be used to make the tools to replace what u used to upgrade it. so ur no better off. like wise with buffing them. they just run out a lot faster without mining any extra. Gold and coal mines r very expensive to keep rebuilding. so for those its better to use refills and turn them off before they run out till u can refill them again. but there is achievments to find a set number of gold mines. for that u will need to let gold mines deplete and send the geo,s out to reaquire them.
U can get refills from the excelsior when u high enough lvl to unlock them. explores sometimes find refills as well. It does get very repetative having to keep rebuilding deposits. everyone has to go through the same thing.

i have 3 tavern geo,s 1 jolly and 1 conscientious geo (Halloween event only). out of those i usualy only use jolly as he is the fastest. with the right skills on he is even faster and can find 2 mines in 1 search and sometimes picks up extra res. usualy i use the tavern geo,s for stone and marble searches as they dont take too long. the conscientious geo i use for coal and gold as they take 4 hrs to find but he will find 2 per search. jolly being the fastest i use for copper and iron as they tend to run out the fastest. the key to making the Geo,s better is putting skills on them to find bigger deposits so they dont run out so fast.

Those are some weird theories you have there. Some new players might get the wrong idea.
Buffing does not make mines run out faster. It increases output a lot. 2, 3, 4 or even 5 times. very useful if you want to spend less time searching and rebuilding.
Upgrading makes mines run out faster and increases their production accordingly. very useful if you use an expensive buff and want more production during its run time. upgrading to lvl 2 should be a no-brainer even with normal buffs. higher levels depend on a lot of factors.

+1

You sort of answered your own question, those that have been here a while sort of work on the principal of life's to short to be rebuilding mines all the time. Some players will work on a basis of buffing an Industrial mine with at least a x4 buff sometimes x5 so obtain far more value from each refill than you can. Thus they are willing to pay far more than it's apparent face value.

Use this to your advantage as you go forward and when short of cash do adventures that drop more or bigger refills and sell them, the first of these that drop significant numbers of refills would be outlaws, during events some adventures drop x3 loot so you get bigger refills. There will be a pirate mini event soon where you will get x2 loot for any adventure with pirates in.

the amount you get from any mine is fixed...and only varies by the buff you use on it. You level your mine up to get the most out of whatever buff your using on it. having a 4x's buff run out on a level 1 mine is silly so you want to level your mine up to take as much advantage as you can out of your buff.

Reducing the search times for ore and minerals by using books is good but I like having some that take the maximum search time. Having 8 hours to find something like a granite deposit is actually an asset at times since that lets you keep production going. It pays to get extra jolly's(buy them from other players) and send out searches timed to find deposits right after the mines collapse.

without refills rebuilding mines is a daily thing. investing books for larger deposits pays off.