Quote from: "mrwigggles"

I think I am having an issue with civvie shipping.

In the event log, it says

FT Alaska Humphrises 002 has failed to Load Installation at Earth. Please reschedule the orders this fleet.


I have a supply order on Earth for 150 infrastructure and a demand order on mars for 150 infrastructure. Their both down to 138, so something has been happening. Is this due to the fact that the supply is higher then what the civvie fleet can carry in one go?

Their both using my 25k freighter.

Ah, all the questions this brings up.... :-) ).
2)  Do the same as 1, except with 150 infrastructure.  This might or might not satisfy the "Load 150" (again, I suspect it won't).
3)  Instead of waiting for builds in 1 and 2, you can simply go to the SM mods screen (Open F2 in SM mode and hit the SM mods button at the bottom) and give Earth the appropriate infrastructure.
4)  Try selecting the civie freighter in question, and hitting the "cancel orders" button.  This will kill the Load 150 order, but will leave the freighter sitting there with 138 infrastructure that it has no orders for.  If you're lucky, it will notice that Mars needs infrastructure (not a contract -through the normal trade mechanism) and sell the infrastructure at Mars.  If you're unlucky, then the 138 infrastructure will just sit there in the hold, causing problems, with no way to get rid of it without Steve's help.

Don't forget to delete the infrastructure contracts so other ships don't get sucked into the same trap

John

Tried the Contracts:

I set up Supply (Earth) and Demand (Mars) for 3 Terraforming Installations. My only civilian shipping line has 3 small freighters (5k cargo) which would each transport 0.04 TIs a trip. So it should take them 75 trips.

Guess what, they only did one trip with three ships and the contract disappeared.

Love the feature, but the implementation needs work.

Interesting idea about creating a stored trade network. Would be a lot of work but might be worth it. One significant problem though is that a lot of the multi-system jump checks (especially for NPRs) are not just for civilian traffic. At the moment checks are made for geological and gravitational survey opportunities, friendly pops generally, pops with 25m+, suitable colonies for unloading (that do not already have inbound fleets), pops with fuel, specific ordnance, maint supplies or maint facilties, fleets with tankers or supply ships, unexplored jump points, JPs with no gate, mining populations, ship contacts, population contacts, fleets with specific ship types (such as escorts looking for capital ships), points of interest for NPRs, import requirements for trade goods, goods available for export, ruins, specific installations required (in v4., etc.. Any overall changes I make will affect all of the above. Although one option would be to prevent longer searches for certain search types, the temptation would be to use the code (especially for NPRs) if it was available. I couldn't build all of these into a node system as they change too often and I am reluctant to create different code for different types of searches. At the moment the specifics of what you are looking for are separated from the generic code that handles the searching, which means it is very easy to add new searches. You have given me some things to think about though.

Steve

1)  Allow the player to give Aurora "hints" specifying trade routines between specific planet pairs that are more than 4 jumps apart.  So, in the example, I could open a "trade route configuration" screen, pick system A as a starting system, give it a series of jump orders (same as for TG on the F12 screen) that wind up at system C, then hit a "store trade route".  A commercial ship in A would then add the systems at the other end of all trade routes either originating in or terminating at A to the list of systems to check for contracts.  Note that I said "system" rather than "planet" in case there's more than one population in either A or C - one trade route would get all NxM combinations if there were N in A and M in C.

2)  (independent of #1)  You could add a second phase to the analysis of trade routes between systems.  In the first phase, Aurora finds all trade routes of length 4 or less between populated systems (this is essentially whats coded up now).  These, plus any player-defined trade routes (if you implemented #1) are used to build a graph (in the graph theory sense).  The nodes of the graph are populated systems, and the links are trade routes between them, plus the links could have a weight that was the number of jumps.  The idea here is that the trade routes can be thought of as "super jumps", with a variable cost.  You can the use the code you've already got to look for super-trade-routines that are up to 4 super jumps long.  In the example, there'd be trade routines AB (cost 3) and BC (cost 3).  A ship at A wouldn't find any contracts using a simple trade route.  So it would then look at the super-jump network, and notice a 2 super-jump route between A and C.

While typing this I realized that #2 is an optimization that can be stored in the data base.  There shouldn't be that many populated systems in an Aurora game (no more than a few hundred), so N^2 won't get you, and the trade routes will only change rarely (when a new jump gate is added, a new system is colonized (or decolonized), a new trade route defined by the player, etc), so the calculation of the trade route network would only need to be done infrequently.  The trade routes could also be used in the F12 orders screen - in addition to listing populations to jump to at the top of the screen, you could list populated systems to jump to (possibly on a checkbox option similar to waypoints).