Destroying Civilian Ships

[rebelde01]

Hello, I'm one of the many people who discovered the game thanks to quill18 and I'm trying to learn the how to play the game.  My main issue however is that after the game spawns around 100 civilian ships it slows to a crawl.  I've been trying to search for information and I'm aware this will be fixed in the next version since we'll be able to stop civilian ship construction, but there's no ETA on the patch and I don't really want to wait.

I've found 2 main suggestions in old topics on the forum regarding this issue:

The first one is to use a Tug ship to tow civilian ships and delete them.  This does not work for me, even if there are dozens of civilian ships at Earth, only my own ship appear in the tractor link menu (I go in the F6 tab > Tug Ship > Miscellaneous > Tractor link).  I'm not sure If I' doing something wrong or if this was patched.  I've had limited success with this method on civilian fuel harvesters since they show up as targets in the task group orders list, but now I just ban any gas giant with Sorium on the system view so civilians don't build any harvester to begin with.

The second suggestion was to make missiles with thermal sensors that will be able to target the closest ship no matter if friendly or foe.  I've been trying to do this as well and I'm not sure if this was patched or if I'm doing it wrong.  I've designed a ship with missile launchers and missile fire control.  I've designed a missile with a warhead, some fuel, some agility, an engine and a thermal sensor and loaded it on the ship.  At this point I wasn't sure how to launch the missile (so far I had used the F8 tab to target hostile ships and fire but couldn't do that on friendly targets), so I tried a couple of different ways.  I've tried from the task group orders to launch missile directly at Luna where there are always some civilians loading/unloading trading goods but that didn't work: the task force moved to Luna, launched the missiles but the missiles just self-destroyed themselves after running out of fuel.  So I've tried setting up a few waypoints between Earth and Luna, where civilian ships constantly travel and fire missiles form the F8 tab with the waypoints as targets but once again the missiles just sat at the waypoint and self-destroyed after running out of fuel.  I get the message in the log about the missile not finding its target and using the onboard sensors to search for a new one but they never lock on to anything.  Now I'd like to know if I'm designing the missile wrong, if I'm launching it wrong or if this method to get rid of civilian ships doesn't work anymore.

Hope you can help me out with this because every time the game reaches this point where it's so slow it makes me just want to give up.   

[83athom]

The next update includes a "Don't spawn new ships" for the civilians that you can check and un-check when you want. The only other option for now is to spawn a SM pirate race and make them go on a pillaging spree through your civilians' ships. Make sure to give them a little lower tech than your own so when your forces engage them, you wont be getting a bonus to research by salvaging their wrecks (or just delete them from existence, but my way is more fun ). I should mention that the "pirates" are player controlled.

And to your Missile problem. Remove the waypoint after you fire the missiles and make sure you fire from close enough (but not too close).

That would be a cool feature though to have AI pirates spawn from your/nearby systems with inefficient/old tech/designs that will hunt civilian/commercial ships and run from your military designs. That would make it more worth while/practical to patrol your systems and guard your shipping convoys. But I wouldn't know how that would be balanced or implemented.

[Bryan Swartz]

Hope you can help me out with this because every time the game reaches this point where it's so slow it makes me just want to give up.   

I'm a proponent of the 'SM pirate race' option.  Having said that, I think I should point out here that you will reach a slowdown point anyway -- getting rid of civilians will make it take longer, but eventually your own empire(NPRs if they are out there will contribute) will become large and complex enough that the game will slow down more and more also.   I view it as an inevitable part of this kind of game, you can control it to a degree but can't eliminate it.  I hope you enjoy the game enough to stick through this element. 

[Rebelde]

I finally got my forum account activated.

Thanks for your suggestion.  I have tested the Pirate faction option on a test save, spawning a new race and some military ships with SM mode and I was able to successfully attack the civilian ships so I will use this method from now on, at least until the new version comes out.

I'm aware at some point the game will slow down no matter what due to NPRs and my own ships, but I'd rather have it happen after I have things going and have actually met the aliens than when I've barely settled in a couple sectors 1 jump outside of Sol and all I've fought is a few Precursor ships.