Civilian Grants

[Cavgunner (OP)]

So... is there a way to award grants to civilian shipping lines in C#? If there is please help, because that option appears to be well hidden.

[db48x]

Nope.

[Dutchling]

You sadly cannot do this.

What you can do however, is give a freighter fleet standing orders to take automated mines from a populated colony and move them to automated mining colonies.

[db48x]

I don't know that it's really needed. In my current game the civilians have hundreds of ships. There's always a few dozen sitting idle in one place or another.

[Dutchling]

I think it depends on how you play. Civilians certainly never expand enough for me.

[Cavgunner (OP)]

Yes, they do expand to hundreds... eventually.

I need those hundreds right now.

[kenlon]

Building a civilian shipping industry is the reason I put colonists on every rock in the solar system that can even vaguely support it - and in other systems once I have jump tech. (I play conventional starts on between 10 and 20% research, so. . . ) How far into the campaign are you?

[Rich.h]

I can confirm in my current game that civillians do definitley expand and quite fast, I now check every few years my navy screen to see how many ships they have. Any company with more than 60 ships gets disolved just to help reduce lag, even at that I tend to have 10+ companies at all times.

The thing I think has helped them most of all is how I setup my colonies, I tend to only colonise moons or larger, and then only if they have massive amounts of minerals. If a comment or asteroid has anything up to 300k of minerals I leave it for the civllians to have. Combined with buying the mineral outputs of these places I find the shipping lines are making plenty of profit to grow.

[skoormit]

So... is there a way to award grants to civilian shipping lines in C#? If there is please help, because that option appears to be well hidden.

There is no ability to directly subsidize civvies like we had in VB.
They will grow organically whenever there is a current unmet shipping need and they have the wealth to build a new ship.

To give them more wealth, you can give them contracts to haul installations back and forth between two colonies.
The closer the colonies, the better.
In a Sol start, Earth-Luna is the obvious choice.
In a non-Sol start, if you don't have a close pair of natural colonies, it is probably worth creating such a pair if you are going to use this tactic with the civvies.

In fact, depending on your play style, you might want to do this to spend wealth that you are otherwise wasting due to the wealth cap (2x annual racial wealth).