Limiting Number of Civilian Ships

[Sheltem (OP)]

With no way to profile turn times it is hard to tell, but I think the hundreds upon hundreds of civilian ships (646 to be exact) operating in my still rather small empire (two colonised systems, seven colonised plants, 3~. 5b people total) are grinding my turn times to a halt even in C#.  Especially since there seems to be a history of what every single one of them did in their lifetime.

Right now we have only two options affecting civilian shipping:
 - Turn off entirely
 - Turn off fuel harvesters

Since they are very useful I would be loathe to turn of civs entirely and have to micromanage all of the transports myself.

So I would like to suggest a less absolute setting that simply lets you limit how many civilian ships can be operated at a time.  If this limit is reached, no new ones will be built and instead the shipping lines will have to modernise or size up.

[Energyz]

You can delete civilian ships. Not saying this is perfect or anything, but if you feel the game is slowing down because of them you can reduce their numbers this way

[Sheltem (OP)]

You can delete civilian ships.  Not saying this is perfect or anything, but if you feel the game is slowing down because of them you can reduce their numbers this way

There are 646 of them, each one their own fleet.  Deleting 300 of them one at a time is. . .  suboptimal at best. 

[Froggiest1982]

You can delete civilian ships.  Not saying this is perfect or anything, but if you feel the game is slowing down because of them you can reduce their numbers this way

There are 646 of them, each one their own fleet.  Deleting 300 of them one at a time is. . .  suboptimal at best. 

How did you get more than 600 in first place? just curious.

How long is the game been running for?

[Jorgen_CAB]

I think it would make sense for civilian ships to start coalesce into groups after a while. Each company should try to maintain a max number of groups at any one time. Fuel Harvesters should obviously not be part of that feature as they don't move around anyway.

This would make the civilians stay at much lower amount of units roaming around the galaxy and keep performance sane even during a mature game and long into the future.

[Froggiest1982]

I agree.

In meantime I've found this: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg106954#msg106954
so cannot stop wonder if may be another reason for the slowdown.

[johiah]

I noticed a similar issue; 60 years in, 300+ civvies. They actually drained Earth of most of its trade goods and I've started getting notifications that pickup failed.

[Steve Walmsley]

You can turn off civilian construction in game details.

[Sheltem (OP)]

You can turn off civilian construction in game details.

So it would be possible to start with civilian construction active, then turn it off once the civilian sector has reached a satisfactory size? Wouldn't that also deactivate modernisation of the civilian fleet though?

[Steve Walmsley]

You can turn off civilian construction in game details.

So it would be possible to start with civilian construction active, then turn it off once the civilian sector has reached a satisfactory size? Wouldn't that also deactivate modernisation of the civilian fleet though?

Yes and yes.

[Cocyte]

I think it would make sense for civilian ships to start coalesce into groups after a while. Each company should try to maintain a max number of groups at any one time. Fuel Harvesters should obviously not be part of that feature as they don't move around anyway.

This would make the civilians stay at much lower amount of units roaming around the galaxy and keep performance sane even during a mature game and long into the future.

I probably should report it in the "bug" section instead but...
The player is able to merge civilian fleets by dragging & dropping the ships in another civ fleet. Quite difficult to achieve as it requires the two fleets to be on the same spot, and it can break the whole fleet : Merging two fleets with different cargo, or puting a full ship in a fleet with an empty hold will lead to failure, as civilians are not designed to cope with such situation.
Furthermore, large freighter fleets may have issues finding decent trade opportunities.

[Ri0Rdian]

Setting max ships (maybe even per class) would probably be satisfactory solution to most people I guess? If it was made available ofc, dunno how much work it would be (I dread potential bugs from AI not made to have such limits).

[Father Tim]

I think it would make sense for civilian ships to start coalesce into groups after a while. Each company should try to maintain a max number of groups at any one time. Fuel Harvesters should obviously not be part of that feature as they don't move around anyway.

This would make the civilians stay at much lower amount of units roaming around the galaxy and keep performance sane even during a mature game and long into the future.

I think that would be a terrible idea.  Almost the only thing more annoying than having shipping lines in the first place is having their ships glomp up in huge bunches.  Get rid of the extra ships.

- - - - -

I want a robust, uncontrolled civilian economy that functions as targets for commerce rainding and objects of protection, not a huge moving company that encourages players to neglect government shipping.

[Black]

A small sugestion related to civilian shipping. In Shipping Line tab there is a list of past jobs of all the ships. In my case there are jobs that go back for over 40 year and it takes quite some time to load the list, when I click on the shipping line. Would it be possible to limit this a bit so there is less data here (maybe last 10 years)?

And a second thing, my oldest shipping line has currently over 60 ships (I got rid of some small ones already) and only 19 of them are large variants, this line operates for more than 50 years. It seems strange that there are so few big ships, And I have no idea if they can made the huge variant, I saw none so far in my games.

[JuergenSchT]

A small sugestion related to civilian shipping.  In Shipping Line tab there is a list of past jobs of all the ships.  In my case there are jobs that go back for over 40 year and it takes quite some time to load the list, when I click on the shipping line.  Would it be possible to limit this a bit so there is less data here (maybe last 10 years)?

Past jobs for shipping lines would get pruned in VB6 after they reached a certain number.  This sounds like a bug.