Author Topic: Civilian shipping woes  (Read 5125 times)

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Offline Shadow (OP)

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Civilian shipping woes
« on: April 01, 2011, 01:08:43 PM »
As of a couple game years ago, the majority of the civilian sector's freighters seem to be stuck travelling back and forth between two of my outer colonies (on adjacent systems). Funny thing is they aren't transporting anything on either trip. This is hurting my logistics across the board, since those stupid skippers are ignoring the contracts I set up in favour of their pointless one-jump hops.

The colony ships of the companies seem to be working just fine, so there must be some kind of bug involving interplanetary trade. :-\

Or a pathing issue. But that'd be odd since the two systems in question are respectively 3 and 4 jumps away from Sol, and there's a jumpgate network connecting all of my colonies.
« Last Edit: April 01, 2011, 01:10:21 PM by Shadow »
 

Offline Thiosk

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #1 on: April 01, 2011, 01:22:41 PM »
I've noticed some funny business for civvies as well.

In the shipping lines overview tab, there is a button that lets you clear their orders.

Try that, maybe?  I had about 8 freighters that were just sitting at a planet, presumably stuck in an orders loop.  I cleared their orders and they slowly started transporting things again.
 

Offline Shadow (OP)

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #2 on: April 01, 2011, 01:34:56 PM »
I guess I could see if that works. Problem with that feature is that you have to do it one ship at a time, and every time you click on one it takes you to the System Map, so you have to go back to the Shipping Lines window every time. Damn hassle. And the whole civilian sector has close to 200 vessels in service at the moment. :-X

EDIT: I cleared ten freighters, and I'm not noticing any changes...
« Last Edit: April 01, 2011, 01:42:08 PM by Shadow »
 

Offline Tarran

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #3 on: April 01, 2011, 03:00:31 PM »
I guess I could see if that works. Problem with that feature is that you have to do it one ship at a time, and every time you click on one it takes you to the System Map, so you have to go back to the Shipping Lines window every time. Damn hassle. And the whole civilian sector has close to 200 vessels in service at the moment. :-X
...200?! Wow, you've got a long game. Either that or your civies are way too ship-happy.
 

Offline jseah

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #4 on: April 01, 2011, 03:27:35 PM »
Really?  My shipping lines tend to reach insane numbers of ships. 

When I played 5.20, a 20 year game had 1 shipping line owning ~180 ships, and launching roughly 6 ships a year. 
I had 8 lines total, going all the way down to fresh starters, each owning a proportionally smaller number of ships. 
Which puts me at a whopping 800 ships.  Give or take a hundred or so. 

Might be because I heavily subsidized my lines and used civ. contracts for basically every bit of moving I could get them to do. 
It is very nice to put in a contract to move 400 construction factories from X moon to X other moon and have it all enroute in less than a week. 

EDIT: My current game at 5th October of the 3rd year, civ lines in total have ~50 ships. 
« Last Edit: April 01, 2011, 03:30:04 PM by jseah »
 

Offline Tarran

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #5 on: April 01, 2011, 03:37:44 PM »
My game is 28 years after start and I've only got 17 ships and two lines. Though I designed the ships 18 years ago. I did subsidize a decent amount.

Ehh, must be because I made the ships large and expensive. You guys must make your ships pretty small.
 

Offline Shadow (OP)

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #6 on: April 01, 2011, 04:15:49 PM »
Mine aren't particularly small. My colony ships are around 20 kilotons (except a larger design I just finished, which is thrice that), whereas my freighters are between 40 and 70 kilotons.
 

Offline jseah

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #7 on: April 01, 2011, 04:19:20 PM »
Huh, my ships are tiny then. 

Cargo ships are 38.8 ktons, Colony ships are 21 ktons, Luxury is 17.2 ktons. 

Might have too little engines in that case. 
 

Offline Tarran

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #8 on: April 01, 2011, 04:26:03 PM »
Both my Freighter and Colony Ship are 200,000 tons. The cargo ship can take 175000 (tons?), the colony ship 700000 people. Both go 1000 km/s, but that's on old engines. Their costs are 2646.2 and 9301.2 respectively.
« Last Edit: April 01, 2011, 04:27:49 PM by Tarran »
 

Offline Thiosk

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #9 on: April 01, 2011, 04:57:34 PM »
Huh!  Thats crazy.  Im thirty years in and barely have established a proper resource base.

If you create intersystem supply demand requirements, will civvies buy jump-capable ships and move stuff about?
 

Offline Beersatron

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #10 on: April 01, 2011, 05:30:07 PM »
Huh!  Thats crazy.  Im thirty years in and barely have established a proper resource base.

If you create intersystem supply demand requirements, will civvies buy jump-capable ships and move stuff about?

Fairly certain they only take into account Jumpgates when pathing.
 

Offline Deutschbag

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #11 on: April 01, 2011, 05:49:02 PM »
I tend to standardize my freighters and colony ships to 30ktons exactly, with five cargo holds on the freighters and 10 cryo stores on the colony ships, plus some cargo handling systems and extra fuel. It makes it so I can build my freighters on shipyards tooled for colony ships, so I can just have one shipyard with, say, 10 slipways tooled for colony ships churning out both colony ships and freighters.
 

Offline Shadow (OP)

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #12 on: April 01, 2011, 07:04:25 PM »
Both my Freighter and Colony Ship are 200,000 tons. The cargo ship can take 175000 (tons?), the colony ship 700000 people. Both go 1000 km/s, but that's on old engines. Their costs are 2646.2 and 9301.2 respectively.

I guess that saves on pathing calculations, but I'm not sure those designs are efficient in other regards. They're terribly slow, and each purchase, at least in the colony ship's case, is a big hit to the civilian lines' wallets. And I'm also guessing they're comparatively spending less than they would on a larger amount of smaller vessels with a similar tonnage. What I mean is that, perhaps, they'd be more inclined to buy ten 20-kiloton ships than one big, 200-kiloton vessel.

I'm 36 years in (started in 2050 with 1500m pop instead of 500m), and my civilian sector has precisely 203 ships in service, massing a total tonnage of 7,407,200.
 

Offline Narmio

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #13 on: April 01, 2011, 07:28:57 PM »
How do you people attract such blooming civilian sectors?  I've played dozens of games to the 15-20 year in mark and if I'm lucky I'll get 5 civilian ships. And they each do about one trip a month (despite an Earth-Mars trip taking only a days).  And then the civilian shipping lines pay out my thousands in subsidies as dividends and never buy anything.

So what am I doing wrong?
 

Offline jseah

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Re: Civilian shipping woes
« Reply #14 on: April 01, 2011, 08:05:49 PM »
I don't bother building my own freighter fleet in fact.  I rarely use my own colony ships and freighters.  

Ever since I found the civilians will honour contracts to transport infrastructure to empty colonies, it was a simple matter to colonize with zero government ships.  

In fact, I only use government transport for research labs, critical infrastructure, and moving minerals.  Colonists... well, leave that to the civvies.  I have just a few on repeat to build up population centers away from the homeworld.  

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I think building a "blooming civilian sector" is a matter of designing low cost budget ships.  The huge 200kton ship is expensive, and the money the civ lines build up to save for the ship could have been in use as a few low cost ships. 
During which time, the less efficient low cost ships have long paid for themselves before the huge 200kton ship even gets built. 

Like I learnt the hard way in Star Ruler, it's all about economic doubling time.  In a long term game like Aurora, you want your doubling time as small as possible, even if you have to start tiny.