Civilian Fuel Harvesting automation.

[telegraph (OP)]

I decide to purchase all or most of civilian fuel. For this purpose I created a slow, but fuel-efficient tanker and tried to automate the process. I added following chain of commands:

Code: [Select]

Civ Harvester1 : Refuel from taget fleet;
Civ Harvester2 : Refuel from taget fleet;
...
Civ Harvester6 : Refuel from taget fleet;
Civ Harvester7 : Refuel from taget fleet;
Cycle orders.

Condition: Fuel tanks full;
Conditional order: Unload 90% fuel at colony.
It went fine once or twice: tanker collected fuel from harvesters at Jupiter and dumped it on Io. As planned.

After that fuel depleeted at harvesters, orders were auto-deleted and my database is now pretty currupted because I have a cycling orders with no orders. I cannot open the fleet window to fix it 

1. How do you guys automate civilian fuel harvesting?
2. Any ideas how to fix my fleet orders?

[Nightstar]

Huh. Um. The big problem is that the tanker task group is the default task group when you try to open f12, yes? Try using right click on the system map to select a different task group. From there you can name a new TG to be higher than your tanker. You'll still have a badly corrupted TG, but you might be able to play again? Or are you getting errors when you try to advance time? You tried deleting the ships in the TG?

If none of that works, mucking with the database might be able to fix it. You'd need the password though.

[Paul M]

I can't help with point 2 but with point 1 I don't automate it.  I don't see the point really.  I just look at their levels when I have a need for fuel and then order a tanker there.  It takes a reasonable amount of time to generate the fuel in the first place so there isn't much point to the automation to me.  They can't generate the fuel fast to make automation of the purchase worthwhile basically.

[davidb86]

1. How do you guys automate civilian fuel harvesting?
2. Any ideas how to fix my fleet orders?

To automate the fuel harvesting you need to allow enough time for the Civilians to harvest some fuel, fuel harvesting is only updated every 5 day production period (unless you have tinkered with the default settings).  The trip from Io to Jupiter is too short, even a very slow tanker can make it in a few minutes / hours.  Set the tanker to go from Jupiter to Earth and adjust the speed setting on the tanker TG to balance out the amount of fuel being produced per year with the capacity of the tanker. If the civilian harvesters are producing 1,400,000 liters per year and you have a tanker with 500,000 liter capacity you need to make approximately 3 trips a year.  I use a 50 HS commercial engine with the lowest power multiplier to get the best fuel economy for this.  I use fast tankers to accompany my fleets.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

rather than using a conditional order, use refuel from civvies -> unload fuel at earth, and lower the tankers speed so it doesn't outpace the civvies too much.

if you'd really prefer to use Io as your fuel dump, you can use the Order Delay box to slow down your tanker.  the delay is in seconds. 1 day = 86400 seconds.

[davidb86]

if you'd really prefer to use Io as your fuel dump, you can use the Order Delay box to slow down your tanker.  the delay is in seconds. 1 day = 86400 seconds.

I have found the order delay only works on the first order in the list.  I tried to do this to allow for shore leave on automated freight runs.  I ended up taking the cargo handling off my freighters used for automated runs, so it takes them so long to load and offload that they meet the shore leave restriction.

[Nathan_]

If civ fuel harvesters would all join the same taskgroup that would facilitate buying fuel from them, but for now they are just revenue generators. Also they tend to skimp on fuel storage compared to harvesters so you really can't get much out of them.

[Zatsuza]

Indeed, it does sound like you're trying to refuel from them when they haven't harvested anything. remember they probably only have a few sorium harvesters, so they can't harvest much at all-- my fuel harvesters have about 10-20 each and they still only harvest a pittance per year-- and a large slow tanker would probably have at least a million's worth of fuel capacity, which will drain the entire harvester in moments. Also having a colony on Io for a fuel base is a bit too close. I remember one of my first errors-- making a colony on luna and setting my colony ship to cycle dropping colonists off. Luna is so close to earth I had 5mil+ colonists on it dying of starvation before I could import some infrastructure because they could make the round trip so fast.

If you just get errors popping up when you try to select your tankers just keep clicking em away, but for 7-8 tankers it's gonna be quite a lot of errors unless they're in the same TG. :3