Hi Steve,
Here's a possible tweak for how the "logistics" rating is handled. I'm not convinced it's worth the effort to put out there, but thought I'd mention it.
The basic idea is to eliminate (or devalue) the "logistics" staff position in task forces, in favor of a Port Admiral position assigned to each planet. This in turn spawns some other ideas, e.g. giving a load/unload time bonus at planets with spaceports, having freighter captains' logistics bonus affect the load/unload speed of their ships, and high-level "trade route" orders that make it easy to manage single freighters proceeding independently (rather than in task groups).
First, the Port Admiral idea. Since you put in Task Forces, what I've been doing is assigning all of my freighters and colony ships to a "Logistics Command" whose officers have the best logistics rating I can get and which is based on my homeworld. That way my freighters get a big bonus when loading/unloading at the homeworld. The downside is that they don't get any bonus at the far end. This doesn't make a lot of sense from a role-playing point of view, unless I think of the Logistics Command commander as a Port Admiral for the homeworld. The reason I do it this way is that I don't want to build a specialized freighter class with a flag bridge so the admiral and his staff can ride along. So the idea is to have a formal command slot for each colony - the "Port Admiral" - whose command bonus applies to load/unload times at that world. Hmmm - maybe this should just mean using the Governor's logistics rating for worlds without a spaceport.
Next idea: it occurred to my while starting this mail that a spaceport should have its own cargo handling facilities. So how about doing something like adding the level of the spaceport to the number of cargo handling systems on ships loading/unloading there. In other words, I could build a freighter without any cargo handling systems without receiving the 5x load/unload time penalty as long as the world had a spaceport. If it did have a single cargo handling system, then it would load/unload at 5x at worlds without a spaceport, 10x at worlds with a level 1 spaceport, 15x at level 2, and so on.
One reason for suggesting this is that I don't have a lot of incentive for building any more than 2 spaceports: one on the homeworld and one on my first high pop colony world (as somewhere for the convoys to go - my first high pop colony will probably be close and by definition have a big trade economy).
Next: Maybe the Port Admiral position should only be available on worlds with a spaceport. In other words, at worlds without a spaceport, you have to trade-off in your choice of Governor between logistics bonus and other bonuses like mining. If a spaceport is there, then it acts as a flag bridge for a Port Admiral and the Governor can delegate all of that boring logistics stuff to the poor slo...errr I mean fortunate individual on his way up the career ladder who's in charge of the port. You could also make the minimum rank of Port Admiral rise with the level of the spaceport.
Next: It also occurred to me that it would make sense for a Captain's logistics bonus to affect his ship's load/unload times. The problem with this idea from a game mechanics point of view is that freighters tend to run around in task groups, and so each task group's effective logistics bonus would be that of the worst Captain in the TG.
Next: It's a LOT easier to (non-micro-)manage freighters and colony ships on regular runs now than it was in the early days. Basically, you just make sure that there's either a jump gate or jump ship at every JP between the two worlds, then put the TG on a repeating order that refuels and does a maintainence check at one of the stops. Given the work you've been doing on civilian shipping and precursors, have you thought about revisting the "trade route" idea? It would be nice to be able to give a freighter a repeating order like "refuel/maint_check at Terra, load automated mines, drop automated mines at Hades (in a system 3 jumps out), load minerals at Hades, drop minerals at Terra" without specifying the jumps in between. What would be even cooler would be to have this order list saved as a template for a trade route, so if I want to put another freighter on the route I simply pull up a list of trade route templates and do a select to copy the appropriate orders. This would probably make it worth the (people) time to have TGs of single freighters on a trade routine, some of which would be a little bit faster than others due to logistics efficiency of their Captains.
I'm not tremendously passionate about any of these ideas, and I can see where some of the Port Admiral stuff is a little bit out of whack with the way the game is coded up. I just thought I'd put them out there in case any of them strike your fancy.
John
