condensing civilian fleets

[jtgasv (OP)]

so after finding i could rearrange civilian ships I did a few tests and they still seem to mostly work.   but freighters don't always use every freighter in their fleet.

. . .    just curious if im breaking anything by doing this. 

and is there a way to change civilian ship designs so they use bigger/fewer ships?

[jtgasv (OP)]

Might have discovered an issue with combining freighters as I've had supply/demand orders overfilled beyond what was requested.    so had to delete the combined freighter fleets.   

random thing as well.    if detach a civilian ship from its fleet, it removes it from the shipping line and gives you the ship.   

is this something that is supposed to be possible?

[Droll]

how bad was the overfilling

[Garfunkel]

You are breaking something because the code for civilian shipping lines does not expect them to be in groups. It's not an intended function and you will cause problems.

[Azuraal]

Might have discovered an issue with combining freighters as I've had supply/demand orders overfilled beyond what was requested.

That can happen even without combining civilians, but larger cargo spaces of a single fleet make the bug a lot more prominent.
As far as I understand it's caused by the unload order not respecting maximum amount.  In current version if you order a fleet to pick up 1000 infrastructure and offload 500 at one colony and then 500 at another, it will offload all at the first colony.

[Gram123]

I've tried this before and it is creating issues. I'm actually not sure if I tried this in VB or C#, but the result was that the fleets will load just fine, but eventually they will not unload everything, and once they didn't unload everything they will never get rid of the cargo they didn't unload and basically they will only use the capacity of the first freighter in the group as this is the only one that will actually unload to make room for new goods. The rest of the fleet will carry the same goods forever.

[DEEPenergy]

It would be nice if you could collapse civilian shipping like you do groups of other contacts, the list of civilian ships always stretches above my screen

[Malorn]

It would be nice if you could collapse civilian shipping like you do groups of other contacts, the list of civilian ships always stretches above my screen

Yep...

[Kylemmie]

Possibly noob confusion here - but is 'collapse' different than just unchecking the civ box on the display tab? I don't play with them on screen ever.  Is there a point to having them onscreen except RP'ing something?

[TheTalkingMeowth]

If you don't know where your civilians are, how can you protect them from evil aliens/foreigners/extradimensional monsters?

In all seriousness, usually there is no reason to see the civilians. But if a system is contested, knowing where they are can matter. It's also occasionally useful to see what they are doing in terms of moving infrastructure and colonists.

[Kylemmie]

Yeah - okay.  Should have clarified as 'normally' I 'never' lol    Sure - I might turn it on if I notice Civvies getting blown up in a system I thought I was safe, or had banned so I can curse their captains by name. 

My main point/question  was seeking clarification on the term 'collapse'.   Poster and a replier both seemed to indicate that you cannot collapse civvies like other contacts.  Not at my home PC, so curious if that is different from the check box to remove them completely from the display. 

I play just assuming there are civvies where I have colonies. 

[TheTalkingMeowth]

There is a checkbox that combines multiple instances of the same ship into a single line. So instead of 4 instances of XX Alphanumeric Soup, you get 1 line that says 4 x XX Alphanumeric Soup.

Apparently this doesn't work for your civilian ships, which I confess I had never noticed myself.

[jtgasv (OP)]

I guess I'm going to be deleting all the civilian shipping lines and starting over with them lol.   If it's going to be causing issues.  That's disappointing.  Thought I was being a genius lol. 

[Froggiest1982]

I guess I'm going to be deleting all the civilian shipping lines and starting over with them lol.   If it's going to be causing issues.  That's disappointing.  Thought I was being a genius lol.

I think if hou delete them all, new ones will not spawn. I seem to remember it happened to me so I learnt the hard way.

It was on an older version though.

[jtgasv (OP)]

I haven't had any issues deleting them before, and have deleted entire shipping lines before to clear out a bunch of civilians and they just kept making more.  I had just hoped that when I discovered this, it would alleviate the issue of too many civilians without having to delete all of the ships that were transporting colonists.