Civilian Colony Ships in 6.41

[Konisforce (OP)]

My civilians have built probably 2 dozen ships, but they've all been either fuel harvesters or freighters.  Do I just have an amazing string of random numbers going on, or is there some logic that's not being fulfilled to create cryo ships?  I have off-world colonies, both with and without headroom in the infrastructure.

[xeryon]

Luck of the draw as far as I know.  My experience has been that they are created weighted based on need.  My current 6.41 game I am about 30 years in and have one company with 29 ships (the fact that I only have one company is a bit baffling now that I mention it).  Close to 20 are small colony ships and the rest are large and huge freighters.  No idea why it built the wonky distribution that it has.  I don't really need colony ships as the two colonies I am growing are on high cost bodies and they far outstrip Earth's production if infrastructure.  The colony ships sit idle for months and when a infrastructure load is delivered they all transport colonists in a gigantic pack and extremely overload the poor colony and most of the colonists then die off.  Now that I mention that I think it's time for a bug report...

But the part that is more relevant.  I seem to have luck getting a couple of each early on by founding a colony on the moon.  Then deliver a few infrastructure and a few colonists and sit back and wait.  I intentionally don't colonize more and don't give the civs any contracts.  Each time they build a worthless freighter I give them 1000 or 2 credits and wait a few turns for the next ship to appear.  As soon as a colony ship appears your civilians should self fund up to a small armada in a year or two.  Any size colony ship, even a spaceliner, can colonize the moon to 25m in relatively short order.

[MarcAFK]

The colonist dumping bug has been around as long as I remember, one option rather than micromanaging the damn colony ships is to use space master the fill up the planet whenever an infrastructure load is delivered, balance it by taking the same amount off earth or wherever your colonists are coming from. A better solution is to find some way of taking most of the colony ships out of action untill you need them.

A very easy partial fix for this which I highly recommend steve to implement is to make the "stable" option available on populations below 25 million, also the 'source' option while you're at it. Leave "destination of colonists" as default as before, but at least make the player able to ban every body from having it's population taken or conversely you can choose where they're being dumped.

[xeryon]

Enabling the 'stable' button has been a suggestion for a long time now.  I think it should have been enabled long ago if only from an RP standpoint.  If you want to create a colony to man a forward maintenance post for your navy you want just enough colonists to run the maintenance facilities and maybe sensors, not 25m.  Likewise, if your colony is of strategic military importance I don't want it growing enough to develop civilian industry which will attract civilian traders which just become target practice.

[Konisforce (OP)]

Ya, I'd never run into this issue with my civilian shipping before, but also didn't see any references to a change in the logs since 6.3.  Ah well.  Moved 60 million the hard way so far, I'll just keep at it until someone else wants to help . . . /government-with-martyr-complex.

And the stable issue would be nice.  I'd prefer classifications, where different ones have different definitions of 'stable'.  Open to abuse, certainly, but it would help from the RP standpoint.  Either that, or 'stable' is defined by the employment rate of a given colony.  2 mines - low pop to man them and therefore only a few want to go there.  200 mines - a bit higher.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Using orbital habitats is a good workaround. AFAIK they can't be overpopulated.

[xeryon]

How about this:

Keep stable, source and destination radio buttons.  Enable them for any population size.  Add an additional radio named target population with a field.  Civilian craft will transport colonists up to the target population and stop.  If population losses occur civilians will begin to transport colonists there again.  If the colony is prospering and growing civilians will transfer colonists off the system as well.

[Prince of Space]

Personally, I don't object to unlocking the stable and source options from the population restrictions, but I don't think anyone here has addressed Steve's stated reason for keeping it:

The reason for this is so you can't completely control the civilian sector. It is supposed to function with some free will, whereas if you could set every colony to stable and only one to colonise, you would have complete control over it.

Steve

Setting a target population would be an even more radical step in the direction of player control over the civilian shipping industry, which makes it seem unlikely.

[MarcAFK]

Oh yeah that, I knew there was something I was forgetting.

[xeryon]

Depending on the government style you are role-playing having a greater control over the civilian sector is expected/normal/logical.

[Hazard]

It's also possible to handle it by not making the control absolute; it's the general preference of the civilian shipping companies to take colonists from planets set to Source over Stable, and to deliver them to planets set to Destination over Stable. Some (randomised) colonisation activity still occurs, if all planets in range are set to Stable, with the odds skewed towards colonists moving from planets with excess labour towards planets with a shortage of population.

The number and size of colonies and what they are set to could then also be part of the background calculations for civilian ship production. Relatively large amounts of Source and Destination planets makes companies favour constructing larger colonisation fleets with larger colony ships, while larger amounts of Stable colonies would skew production towards liners and freighters.

[Wolfius]

Depending on the government style you are role-playing having a greater control over the civilian sector is expected/normal/logical.

Well, atleast you always have the option of nationalising troublesome civilian colony ships, or involunteering them for a bit of live fire training. IIRC anyway, never tried it myself.