Changing the growth rate/profit alone seems like not a great fix. That just means it will take longer for civilians to get out of hand. Unless you make them grow slower than your empire, in which case they'll stay permanently irrelevant.

So civilian shipping lines need to be limited. This limit needs to be with reference to the size of your empire, else civilians will be too good for small empires and too weak for large empires. The problem, such as it is, is that civilians are an exponential snowball of something for nothing. They do stuff you want, give you money rather than cost anything, and grow based on how awesome they were for you already. I think that instead of capping the "something", you should cap the "for nothing".

I think you already have the tool you need. IIRC colonies produce a finite amount of trade goods, based on their size. With tweaking amounts + profits, this provides a natural cap on the profit that can be made by shipping trade goods.

Cap luxury transport desire the same way--a finite amount desired for a population of a given size.

Cap colonist transport the same way. Maybe some tiny fraction of a colony's population wants to move to a different world (badly enough to pay for it) in a given year. Optionally, let the empire pay to have civilian ships move colonists beyond this limit. A simple checkbox for "subsidize colonist transport" would seem to be good enough.

After reading through the thread I really like the core of this elegant suggestion the most. Almost all other suggestions are in one way or another artificial, hardcapped or manual ways to try to balance civilian shipping which I don't think have the potential to be either as elegant, dynamic or as effective in the long run. This also removes any need of limiting number of shipping lines as when colony demand is the limiting factor 200 lines with 1 ship or 1 line with 200 ships both will provide the same service and the limitation automatically targets total tonnage/time that can be shipped, and if people are exploiting a planet-moon connection then the demand will simply be met very quickly with a very low number of ships.

This suggestion should also require very little changes to code, but mostly theoretical calculations and balance testing.


By scaling the income potential of tradegoods, colonist travel demand and luxury/passenger transports to the size of the colonies there is a built in "cap" to the system of how profitable shipping lines can become. Essentially when they reach the number of ships needed to fill 100% of the demand any addition ships will contribute no more profit (unless you as a player want to pay for additional tasks beyond this).

Another REALLY positive bonus to this is that it ensures that after enough time has come to have your shipping lines be in balance with demand they should be spread out and cover the shipping needs of the empire meaning you have all types of shipping available (and in need of protection from threats) wherever you have colonies, and not just on a few routes with the current "near infinite" demand.


If the issue is that people want to play with multi billion sized population colonies that still could see shipping lines with thousands of ships ofcourse to cover such a large demand, then it could be fairly easy to lower the demand past certain pop levels through diminishing returns (similar to pop growth) to make the shipping line numbers more manageable. There would still be hundreds of ships, but it would make sense to have a large civilian shipping sector  for such massive empires.

Another option is replacing dividends with a percentage maintenance payment, which is modified by an admin overhead that increases as the number of ships increases - effectively limiting the rate at which a shipping line can increase in size.

I vote this

I'm going for the radical idea now, so please just consider it as such. It popped into my mind when Steve started talking about the shipyards.

What if there were a sort of "installation" that determines how much civilian tonnage a race could have? It could be linked to a new planetary installation or an existing one, such as Spaceports.

This could be player-built or "organically" expanded by the colonies, similar to how it's currently done with installations.

I understand it would be hard to code, but it would also imply using population to maintain the civilian sector, as well as resources and building capacity.

That would limit your growth based on:

Available Population
Available Resources
Build Capacity of the Colony

Eventually, a new tech line, similar to wealth expansion for financial centres, could be created to expand the maintenance capacity of the civilian sector, or again, it could tap into the existing tech for military maintenance.

I can foresee all the potential issues, mainly with multiple shipping lines wanting to build a ship as soon as there is room in the maintenance pool, and civilians consuming all our population. However, a similar limitation to the one for colony immigration/emigration might suffice. You could have the civilian sector stabilized or expanded, ensuring that populations are reserved and no new ships or infrastructure are being built.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13558.msg169730#msg169730
Not unlike my suggestion here.

I am tempted to have something like civilian shipyards, or 'build capacity', or some other 'on-map' capability, but it might turn out to be a lot of work without any major gameplay impact.

If Raiders and NPRs attach and destroy these SYs, these infrastructures do have big impact on a player development/expansion, IMO.
A player could give money, upon request or voluntarily, to commercial lines to help them and rebuid their own yards and ports. Or commercial lines could lend a player (even NPR) civilian yards to rebuild their fleets, until their own infrastructures are out of work.
Maybe software implementation of this can be tricky, but I think gameplay could gain some interesting twist.

About your 5 points:
1. Agree; but you can also consider a fee for moved tonnage/people and/or for moved volume: 1 kilogram is much less than 100 kilograms, and requires less fuel to move it, but 1 kilogram of feathers, straw or cotton wool can be more voluminous than 100 kilos of metal, so requiring a larger ship (in principle)
2. I think of different incremental building costs for the different ship types: e.g. (purely cosmetic, to illustrate the concept!) colony/passengers at N^(3/2) (thanks Nuclear!), freighter/cargo at N*log(N), defence/security/armed ships at N^2 or more, costs that increase even more with the ship tonnage. About these defence ships, I can think about a security branch of a company, with its own defence infrastructures and ships to protect line sites, acting like a sort of a minor NPR
3. Together with the number of ships, also travelled distance can be included (from the start of the shipping line or in the last X months)
4. OK
5. OK (to keep its management simple)

Thank you Steve for your dedication!

Quote from: Steve Walmsley on Yesterday at 11:59:18 AM

5) Have a simple retirement limit, such as 20 years, so that new ships are cycled in.

Should probably tie this to racial research modifier, or possibly even tech level. So that lines aren't being overly "wasteful" by scrapping and replacing ships with (near) identical copies if the player hasn't made any significant tech progression. 20 Years would probably be a good baseline but if you are playing with limited administration and a 20% research rate, a ship would have a much longer useful service life and could hang around for another couple decades before reaching true obsolescence

I would be very hesitant about any hard cap on years in service from a roleplay perspective, admittedly it is a minor point but in a WH40K setting for example where ships serve for hundreds or thousands of years, it would be odd to have a 20-year limit for civilian ships. Again, very minor and probably not very noticeable but all the same.

Tying the length of time to game settings, tech level, etc. is at least a better solution, therefore. I don't think such a limit is needed in practice, though, if the civilians have an effective cap on ship numbers due to "maintenance" fees then it hardly matters if they scrap ships or keep using the ones they have. Once tech advances then they can scrap the older ships for newer, better models of course, as they do now.

The other ideas in Steve's reply seem good to me.