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C# Mechanics / Re: Potential Changes to Shipping Lines
« Last post by KriegsMeister on Today at 06:29:09 PM »The number of huge colony ships means that the civs will build up a new colony very quickly and also eat into source populations fairly quickly too.
At the very least can we get the oft requested reserve/target min/max settings for population, similar to whats already in place for minerals and installations, so that our source colonies aren't perpetually evacuated if left unattended.
Quote from: Steve Walmsley
A more dramatic change would be altering transport for all ships, not just civilians, so less can be transported. That means fewer cargo points and less colonist capacity per ton.This would only delay the problem but as the game continues and the shipping lines continue to grow they will inevitably reach a point were they are too good at their jobs again.
I do like the idea of a cap on the number of lines and their ships, but I disagree slightly than what others have suggested on what the cap should be based on. Id like to see it based on # of colonies and their population. Every colony with a minimum of 10mil population can generate a single shipping line company per 1Bil population. So if a line had 50mil it would have have 1 shipping line, 999mil would also have 1 line, but 1,000,000,001 population would get a second and so on. Each Line would get a fixed size and number of ships based on overlapping population increments as well. Some example numbers could be as such: 1 small ship per 10mil pop, 1 medium per 50mil pop, 1 large per 100mil pop, and 1 huge per 200mil pop. Each line would therefor have a maximum cap of 5 huge, 10 large, 20 medium, and 100 small ships, so if an example colony has 567mil pop, it would have 2 huge, 5 large, 11 medium, and 56 small ships. Again, just example numbers and would need to be adjusted based on play testing in determining what # of ships are needed to make the game function, but the neat part is that it continues to grow in direct proportion to your empire so it "shouldn't" lead to an underwhelming civilian sector in the early game nor overbearing civilian sector needing DB culling. There could also be an additional factor taken into account how much the player actually uses its civilian sector. If there's an X number of contracts ordered by the player than the individual lines of the source and destination colonies may increase their number of ships, conversely if the player has few to no contracts than the lines reduce in size.
Decommissioning and replacements could be based on tech levels or probably easier to do strictly age. If I ship reaches X number of years it WILL complete its current shipment, then scrap itself, prompting the line to begin construction of a new one. As well if a population shrinks then so does its shipping line, scrapping the oldest ship at each population increment (which would also help negate source colony exodus).
As a fun additional change, if we were to have a game setting to remove mass drivers, CMC's could also produce shipping lines restricted to small ships in order to export their minerals. It's a fairly common house rule people use, and it would tie in greatly with raiders giving them even more targets of opportunity.
