How do civvies choose which trade run when presented with multiple options?

[Xenogenic (OP)]

Hi Guys,

I'm fairly new to Aurora and have been getting by by just searching existing posts.

But now I couldn't find the answer on the forum or the wiki:

My Civvies only seem to trade between Earth and Mars.  Venus and Mercury also have a demand for infrastructure, and sometimes are even closer in orbit than Mars, but they still only trade with Mars.

I have a commercial spaceport on Earth and on Mars.  Do they factor loading time into the calculation as well?

I wanted to ask before expending the resource to build a spaceport on all the other colonies.

It would make sense for them to prefer sites with a better port system. . .

[Steve Walmsley]

Civs don't factor in loading time.

When you say a 'demand for infrastructure', is that a based on government contracts or normal trade?

Steve

[Xenogenic (OP)]

Just normal trade supply.   I haven't used contracts for infrastructure, just my own freighters. 

Infrastructure Supply (available for export):
Earth: 479

Infrastructure Demand:
Mars: 2836
Mercury: 673
Venus: 465

Will they always look for the highest demand? At some points in the year they could sell that same load of infrastructure on a much shorter run to Mercury or Venus, depending on the planet's positions.

Edit: I guess I should add the civvie colony ships work just fine.  They distribute the colonists evenly.  But I've had to set up a freighter task group to handle the infrastructure runs for Venus and Mercury manually.  The demand shown above is despite this task group's operation (the civvies have A LOT of colony ships).

[xeryon]

One way to deal with it would be to turn off colonist destination at Mars if you have more then 25m people there.  The colony ships will stop unloading there and the demand for infrastructure will decline and allow your other ships to distribute products to other colonies.

[Xenogenic (OP)]

Hey thanks, that makes sense.

Mars is at 80 million and I've still got it set up to receive colonists.  So I'm essentially asking them to build up an already built up world.  I'll untick it and see what happens.

[Steve Walmsley]

I've checked the code and it appears that civ freighters will always go to the oldest colony in the system if there are still opportunities for trade. Colony ships will select destinations without colony ships en route if there are any available. I'll revisit this code at some point to spread the trade around a little more.

Steve

[Xenogenic (OP)]

Wow thanks that was a really fast response!

This reminds me a bit of programming Excel sheets at work: wondering why it's reading one set of data in a certain order which is causing undesirable effects elsewhere.  In the end I usually have to change the base data in some way as I cannot reprogram how Excel works.

Maybe a quick fix could be to just introduce a random element to the selection of suitable planets in the system?

Xeno

[Xenogenic (OP)]

Okay, so Mars reached 100 mil and I set it to a source of colonists.  Now, all the freighters go exclusively to Mercury, which was indecently the colony I set up right after Mars.

So that confirms it: Current code is set so that freighters choose targets in a system based on age of the colony in that system.