Too many civilian ships (again)

[Hurmdurm (OP)]

Thirty-five years into a v6.4 game, I have more than 400 ships in my civilian lines. This is far more than my empire needs to serve its economy. Turns have slowed significantly, and this is an NPR-less game where I still haven't explored beyond Sol.

I know that 6.4 was supposed to mitigate this issue by forcing shipping lines to scrap old ships more aggressively. Unfortunately this hasn't seemed to go far enough - almost every five-day increment generates interrupts from the civilians building more ships, and the total has continued to increase despite the increased scrap rate.

I've read that it's possible to commandeer civilian ships by grabbing them with tractor beams, but I can't figure out if that's still possible. Civilian ships don't appear as targets for tractor links in the F6 screen.

Is there another workaround that I can pursue to delete or scrap these speed-killing civilian ships? Will I need to resort to self-guided missiles to blast them out of the sky?

[Garfunkel]

I can't help you with your current situation but I can offer the unhelpful advice that you've rolled snake-eyes on the random number generator - as even with 50 years in Sol I have never reached more than half of your civilian ships. There is a strong random element with the commercial civilian shipping, so you must have been extremely unlucky!

And yeah, self-guided missiles are probably the best best to solve the problem. Just launch a propaganda campaign of "FOR THE GREATER GOOD!" in your colonies beforehand.

[Rich.h]

I have never suffered from this issue yet.... But should it happen are you able to simply use SM to destroy a few of the civilian ships? If so do they rebuild them almost instantly or do they once again go through a set of rolls as if they were deciding to build a new ship?

Granted it is not a solution but it could be a band aid to the issue on a temporary basis.

[Hurmdurm (OP)]

I cannot find a way to interact with the ships using Spacemaster at all. (I guess I could try deleting some of the civilian classes but I figure that would cause more problems than it would solve.)

I started a new game partly to investigate mitigating this issue. So far I am twenty-two years in and the civilian fleet is "only" 64 ships. We will see what it looks like in another ten to fifteen years since growth has sped up as time passes. I am pursuing two strategies:

1) I researched new engine techs in the hope that more expensive ships would lead to slower civilian growth. I can already tell this is not going to work. Civilians aren't dumb enough to design really expensive and fast ships. Instead they design their ships to fall within a particular range of speeds (I guess) and then they're dumb enough to build vastly more than they need.

2) I am limiting the number of shipping lines to one (previous game had two). There's no easy way to do this so I am keeping twice-yearly backups and reverting whenever a new line is formed. It's painfully annoying but I hope that having half the lines will result in having half the growth and half the resulting slowdown.

[CaptainBipto]

I've run into a problem where my civvies aren't running cargo contracts anymore:(  Back to your point thoug....is there a way to restrict resources from the civilian sector? No minerals means no new spaceships?

[Rich.h]

I've run into a problem where my civvies aren't running cargo contracts anymore:(  Back to your point thoug....is there a way to restrict resources from the civilian sector? No minerals means no new spaceships?

I believe civilian ships do not require any resources to build, they simply cost wealth. The only real way you can slow that down is by first never offering any shipping contracts, and second make all your colonies have stable population. This means their colony ships will never do anything and the freighters will only be moving around trade goods, you will slow down the amount of wealth they generate and thus slow down the ship building rate also.

[Hurmdurm (OP)]

I believe civilian ships do not require any resources to build, they simply cost wealth. The only real way you can slow that down is by first never offering any shipping contracts, and second make all your colonies have stable population. This means their colony ships will never do anything and the freighters will only be moving around trade goods, you will slow down the amount of wealth they generate and thus slow down the ship building rate also.

I think that this may be the underlying problem. When growing new colonies, the shipping lines get a lot of wealth from shipping colonists and infrastructure - then they build way more ships than they need to support the trade of a normal interplanetary economy.

Come to think of it, I think that might be the reason that my fleet grew so large: the large civilian economy on Earth was producing vast quantities of infrastructure, which was being shipped in bulk to grow a colony on Venus. Having more than 100,000 infrastructure to support a population of tens of millions on a body with colony cost > 20 is a bit of a corner case, to say the least.

[Garfunkel]

That would definitely explain it. With Lunar, Martian and Saturn/Jupiter moon colonies, I've never had a civilian shipping explosion like that. The profits they make from supplying Venus must be astronomical.

[83athom]

That is why I only use Venus as an auto-mine colony with mass drivers. The bonus of doing that is if a sneaky empire puts a colony on a planet/moon in my solar system, I can blast them to smithereens.

[Hurmdurm (OP)]

Yes, the only reason to put a population on Venus is to do something with all of the excess infrastructure that Earth will make for free (after researching economy expansion a few times). Of course it still only makes sense to colonize Venus after you've finished getting established on less hostile bodies.

The civilian sector on any given planet won't accumulate more than a year's supply of any trade good, so you use it or lose it. Once it's deployed, you have a large reserve of free infrastructure that you can e.g. ship to interstellar colonies at your leisure.

[CaptainBipto]

Re: Venus I usually send auto mines and always regret setting infrastructure but it happens anyway:p. Maybe I'll do orbital habitat. I got a lot of Duranium and my focus is building infrastructure onsite to slow town gr0wth. But I've seen lines genocidally dumping colonists with negative growth of -33.5%




edit: ack phone spelling!

[Hurmdurm (OP)]

Yeah, it seems that civilian colony ships will all try to unload their passengers at once, effectively ignoring the support maximums and leading to massive overpopulation. I've seen population growth rates of lower than -100%; hundreds of thousands died before sufficient infrastructure could be shipped in.

[CaptainBipto]

Magic number is 25 million population, then iirc you can discourage settlers from arriving. Insane Dictator is the best govt :p so I can't imagine why people ship themselves off to cert a in death:p

i think next game I'll focus on terraforming mars and orbital habitats for venus. The NPR in my system colonized luna and (Sino-Russian conglomerate) sucked up all my trade infrastructure!

[Garfunkel]

For steady growth, it's a good idea to colonize Luna and Mars. They don't require that much infra but the shipping lines get a tidy profit by shipping colonists and infra to both from Earth. As you colonize them, all that infra is then freed up and can be used for extra-Solar colonies - or if you haven't found anything yet, for the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

[Wolfius]

One option is using SM mode to create a new player-controled empire in Sol, then SM them some warships and blow the civvies up to cull their number. You can delete all their posessions when you're done.