The civilian space centres are back in v3.1. This time though they will be building civilian shipping. So far I have implemented colony ships and will soon be adding civilian geo and grav survey ships and perhaps terraformers too. The chance of a civilian space centre appearing or increasing in size is dependent on the size of the population. Once the civilian space centre is in place, the chance of a ship being built is dependent on the level of the civilian space centre, the type of ship and the combined expansionism rating of the population species and the Empire-level government type.
I will probably play with the figures but at the moment the chance of a civilian space centre being built is equal to 1% per annum per 100m population. The chance of a colony ship being built at that space centre is 15% per annum x level of CSC x (Pop/Empire Expansion Rating / 100). For geo ships it is 6% and grav survey is 4%.
Civilian ships are actually still part of your Empire but you have to detect them as if they were alien ships. However, they will start with transponders active so you can still see the transponder even if they are out of sensor range. Of course, that could really be an alien ship mimicking the transponder so don?t entirely trust transponder-only contacts
Alien civilian ships will not look any different to your sensors than alien government-owned ships. In other words, you can only tell a ship is a civilian ship if it belongs to your own race. This was one of the issues I had with creating the concept of civilian shipping. If I set them up as a separate race then each alien race would really be two different ones and would be detected as such. Which led to the question of how aliens would be able to tell which ships were government owned and which were civilian. I finally hit on the idea of creating them as a subset of a race so other races couldn?t tell which ships were civilian. This meant some changes to the detection code as you now have to detect some of your ?own? ships.
Because you do not have direct control over civilian shipping, the civilian fleets and ships will not appear in any of the windows relating to racial shipping, such as the fleet, class and ship windows. They will not appear on the system map unless you detect them and they will be missing from the various tree-view displays, such as on the galactic map or the battle control window. You cannot give them orders or move them between fleets.
The class of ship that civilians will build will be a current (i.e. non-obsolete) racial class. So if the civilian space centre builds a colony ship, it will select one of your current colony ship designs.
Colony ships will decide for themselves what orders they have. They will look to load colonists at populations of 20m or more and unload them at colonies of less than 20m within four transits. They will select their destination based on the number of transits and will select the smallest colony if two are equally distant. They are aware of any infrastructure limitations on colony size and will not take colonists to a colony if that would exceed the capacity of any infrastructure. The colonists will be deducted from your colonies and the colony ships will refuel using your stockpiles of fuel. To offset this, each civilian space centre will produce an amount of fuel equal to twenty refineries by using stocks of Sorium obtained through civilian sources.
Although you cannot detect the civilian ships without sensors, you will be notified if a civilian colony ship loads or unloads colonists at one of your colonies and you will be informed of its intended destination when it departs a colony, on the basis that the ship commander would file a flight plan.
I haven't coded it yet but I intend to add an option to "nationlise" civilian shipping. This will add all civilian shipping to your Empire but there will be a lower chance of civilian shipping appearing in the future. Every time you nationlise the chance will decrease further (I am thinking of halving the chance for each nationalisation).
Steve