Control over civilian shipping in game settings

[DFDelta (OP)]

When setting up a game, or preferably on the game info screen (which can be changed even in running games), give us some options to impose a limit on civilian shipping.
In longer running games I often run into situations where lines grow so large they cause significant slowdowns. Usually I get rid of them one way or another, but I'd prefer it if I could keep their numbers down without engineering "accidents" or spawn player controlled hostile ships to shoot them.


What I imagine would look like this:

Code: [Select]


Civilian shipping settings.

[ ] Unlimited     [X] Limited     [ ] Stagnant

[    5] Maximum number of lines
[   20] Maximum number of ships per line


Unlimited shipping would be what we currently have, with a chance of new lines spawning and them building new ships and scuttling older ones.
Limited shipping would cause lines to stop spawning and to stop building new ships if they are at or above the specified maximum. They'd still scuttle older ones.
Stagnant shipping would stop all spawning of lines and all building/scuttling of existing ships.

[83athom]

I do agree with being able to restrict your civilian shipping in a way. However, it is supposed to be a private sector out of the control of the government, so instead of being able to limit it directly I think it should be indirect restrictions set up like conditional orders kind of like what you have already but a little more in depth. Like have conditions to the age, technology, and number of civilian ships and have them (shipping lines) pay higher taxes exponentially the more ships it has and the older technology it uses or have them to pay higher maintenance for older ships, but have this to be set up by the player.

[alex_brunius]

I do agree with being able to restrict your civilian shipping in a way. However, it is supposed to be a private sector out of the control of the government, so instead of being able to limit it directly I think it should be indirect restrictions set up like conditional orders kind of like what you have already but a little more in depth. Like have conditions to the age, technology, and number of civilian ships and have them (shipping lines) pay higher taxes exponentially the more ships it has and the older technology it uses or have them to pay higher maintenance for older ships, but have this to be set up by the player.

Fully agreed that it should be handled indirectly. In reality government can always regulate private enterprises via subsidies and taxation.

We know that currently a shipping delivery ( of 10 goods ) will grant the shipping line 20 credits, and the government(s) will get an additional 10 in tax, So the total value is 30 and tax 33%.
Since there is zero running cost currently I will also assume this is abstracted away so that the 30 credits is actually the profit after running costs are deducted.

I suggest two levels for this control:

Global taxation:
We can during the game set the global taxation level for each shipping type ( trade goods, colonists, fuel ) and this also affect the likelihood new ships of those types are created. 100% tax = 0% chance this ship type is chosen for new construction ( but trades will still run since 100% tax just means 100% the profit is taxed ). This also gives you some long term control of what type of shipping you want to emerge in your empire dynamically depending on needs. If you think shipping is growing out of hand simply put all to 100% tax and they will not be able to afford replacing old ships and will start to decline. You can also put a negative tax percentage to show specific subsidies ( -50% tax on trade goods means each run of 10 goods will give the shipping line 45 Credits, 30 from the run and an additional 50% in government subsidies ), and this also means that civilian freigthers have over twice as high chance to be selected for new construction compared to other ship types that have normal taxation ( x1.5 modifier instead of x0.67 ).

Local (systemwide) taxation:
To promote traffic to a certain system ( most of the cases we want to control the destination of colonists and infrastructure, not the origin ) you can also addatively modify the tax rate in a system from the Civilian/ Ind Status tab. For example I want to boost traffic to my new colonization target so I set the tax modifier here to -20% which will reduce the standard 33% ( if that is where the global tax is set ) to a mere 13%, meaning the shipping line will earn some extra credits and be more likely to pick this destination at the expense of the government budget.


This way I think we could solve the problem of controlling size of shipping lines, but in a more interesting and realistic way, while also adding alot of other nice and often requested features like control over where shipping lines are going and what kind of ships they are building!

[Brian Neumann]

I like alex's idea as it gives a level of indirect control without a whole lot of work programing, or for the player

Brian

[linkxsc]

+1 for alex's suggestion
It would become so simple to "guide" shipping lines into doing what you wish. (Some games, they just make 1-2 freighters, and then start pumping out dozens of colony ships)
Quite elegant of a solution, especially the local taxation. Can't say the number of times I've sat around waiting for the civvys to start moving some goods for me to a new system, while they've been doing w/e. Only to have to drage together all my old early game freighters and do the hauling myself.

[Ostia]

Actually I would prefer a combi-solution. The tax rates are a good  idea, but worst-case the shipping lines will just go crazy with whatever makes them the most buck at a given time. The ability to hard limit the shipping lines would be very much appreciated.

[alex_brunius]

Actually I would prefer a combi-solution. The tax rates are a good  idea, but worst-case the shipping lines will just go crazy with whatever makes them the most buck at a given time. The ability to hard limit the shipping lines would be very much appreciated.

That's why my suggestion included only making the profit a run will give the company modify the chance / likelihood of selecting a given destination. Not sending all the ships there ( unless you charge 100% tax on profit from everything else!)

My idea was that if the shipping line makes 15 credits from run A, and 5 credits from run B, they will pick run A 3 times more often ( 75% of the time if only these two exists ). Perhaps this wasn't very clear from the way I worded the post.

This also means you can raise or lower generic taxes to have your own civilian contracts be more or less attractive in comparison, ( as I understand these are not taxed at all but the profit is 100% commission right from the pocket of the government ).

It's not perfect ( ideally we want more complexity like time needed and if a profitable return run is possible to be factored in too ), but I think it would be a good start.


If you are still afraid of a company going crazy with new ships despite higher taxation it might be a good idea to also display more information in the civilian shipping interface like how much profit each ship made last year, so it's easier to figure out how much they need to afford to replace the ship when it's decommissioned and keep taxes at that level.

[linkxsc]

I am bumping this post. Simply due to the fact that in my current game, I have 45 civilian freighters running around between my 4 systems.

I know its partially my fault, from shipping so much infrastructure around to all these planets. (after surveying mars, I put earth, for almost a year, into 100% infrastructure production) But dang, would it kill them to launch a colony ship? Actually the only non-freighter any of the 3 shipping lines have is 1 "luxury liner" with accommodations for 1250 passengers. You'd think after the thing has been working full tilt for ~7 years, they might catch onto the idea.

(mars got basically homeworld minerals except for sorium, WIN. Barnards star is a dead end system that its 1 plant got basically a homeworld setup, but with 560 infrastructure per mil pop. Ross 154 has 1 amazing planet, and another alright 1. And Gliese ### managed a col cost 0 planet with homeworld minerals also. I'd have a 5th path too, if not for the fact that you have to go across a class 2 black hole to get to the system, and the civvy freighters can't handle that till I get better tech or find a way around)

[Barkhorn]

Posting this here because its very related.

I've had an idea on how to deal with the late-game slowdown due to civilian shipping for awhile now.

Just stop simulating them perfectly 100% of the time.  Switch to a trade route system instead, abstract the whole system 90% of the time.  The routes would have a density, i.e. number-of-ships / length of route.  Trade and installation shipment rate should be computable without calculating exactly where every cargo ship is all the time.

Then, if a hostile ship's sensors are within range of the route, you roll some dice and decide based on the density of the route if one or more civilian ships are there.  If yes, spawn them and then its business as usual.  If no, sorry alien raider, no juicy freighters for you.  Any civilian ships that survive an encounter get despawned and put back in the abstraction once the alien leaves.

This idea would cut the civilian shipping CPU cost down from O(s) per increment where s is the number of ships, to O(r) where r is the number of trade routes.

[MarcAFK]

More abstraction would be great, an option like the new sensor one.

[gamedesign69]

This is a very good idea for longer running games.  I don't really buy into the arguments against this, since it's just another game setting that you can switch on and off, just like Precursors or Invaders, as something that you do before the game even starts.  Yes, it's somewhat arbitrary, but you being able to regulate whether intergalactic aliens decide to use their wormholes to attack you is just as arbitrary, don't you think?

Not sure how difficult this would be to implement, though.  I know Steve is looking into helping us out with NPR bloat in the next update, so I hope he takes a look at this too, because together these are basically 90% of Aurora's performance issues.