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C# Mechanics / Re: Potential Changes to Shipping Lines
« Last post by pedter on Today at 08:05:36 PM »I would like to see some deviation from the 1:1 freighter:colonist transport. I like civilians moving around doing stuff but what normally happens is I start marking colonies as "stable" to keep the growing fleets from draining the population sources and then the colonist fleet sits largely idle somewhere while the freighters keep moving trade goods, but the shipping company keeps manufacturing colonist ships (just in case?). That just makes the problem worse later when I open up a destination and suddenly millions and millions of colonist capacity gets directed to a single location.
I would personally be content with just a different set ratio, such as 2:1 or 3:1, but there are probably better solutions that would make everybody happy. Maybe the company occasionally checks for idle vessels and scraps one, and then at the same time launches a vessel of the other type. Or when it's time to construct a new vessel the company checks how much money it made in the last year on colonist vs freight transport and builds whichever type made more money (with some chance to build the other type anyway, lest the system run away fully to one type or another).
Also I think colonist transport shouldn't generate tax money for the player. It doesn't make sense that I accidentally tell 50 million people to move to Mars, getting paid the whole time, and then when I realize my mistake and have them move back to Ganymede to work in the mines I get paid again.
To expand on some of your ideas:
Rather than simple source/destination/stable options and the heavy-handed colonist movement that occurs as a result of the massive colony fleets, allowing numeric configuration of a target would be useful, i.e. "source until x mil" and "destination until y mil" options.
Leveraging your idle vessel idea (I agree that nearly lockstep 1:1 should be deviated from):
- Idle vessels could also inform the company's decision of which hull to build as well as scrap so that they never over-build in the first place.
- In a relative sense, if colony ships have a lower percent utilization than freighters, the company could be more likely to build a freighter than a colony ship and more likely to scrap a colony ship than a freighter to balance the two utilizations. No sense building or maintaining ships in a market that's already saturated; better to expand where there's availability.
- In an absolute sense, a low percent utilization could lead to less construction and more scraping while a high percent utilization could lead to more construction and less scraping in an effort to more effectively use the existing tonnage. No need for the company to waste wealth building or maintaining vessels that aren't used.
On an entirely different note, while civilian gas harvesting can be disabled, there are no options to specifically disable civilian mining, civilian cargo, and civilian colony transport. Allowing a finer-grained disabling structure might eliminate some of the issues by removing the cause entirely.