The Hub

[Thiosk (OP)]

A continuing problem is civilian fleet stagnation in large games.  Civvies only look 4 jumps out from their current position, so given time they can tend to pool in the fringes.  The X3 series, which enabled a lot of automated trading, one good trick to help get around was to capture a structure called the Hub.  Inside the hub was 4 jump points which could be reconfigured.  The end result was that you could place the hub in between systems.  So lets say you have two major epicenters in your empire separated by eight jumps.  Place the hub between two systems attached there, and you have now cut the direct distance to two jumps.

In principle, civ freighters would then be able to look further afield for jobs by using the hub to link sectors together.

In x3, the hub was astronomically expensive and took a highly advanced trading and production network to get there.  I would imagine it would be quite the undertaking in aurora as well.

[Father Tim]

The four-jump limit is an artefact of the route-searching algorithms - expanding it to five jumps slows Aurora by an order of magnitude in calculating each time step.  Still, some sort of 'normal search plus option X' is regularly suggested on this board, whether it be permanent trade route or a 'return to system X' default order.
 

[Beersatron]

In no relation to this thread, Egosoft/X-Beyond The Frontier, was the sole reason I got an internet connection 

unfortunately, I do not play anymore but I was on the original forums and even had a Shoutcast internet radio channel as part of the community.

Also .... Split Go Splat! (you may not get the reference ..)

[ardem]

Best thing to do is be able to assign a home planet to a Shipping line.

This way you can spread out your commercial fleets, you can also request fleets to dump product on one planet and then get it chain-linked to another planet.