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C# Mechanics / Re: Potential Changes to Shipping Lines
« Last post by Froggiest1982 on Today at 04:56:28 PM »In my current campaign, I am 32 years into a conventional start and I have four shipping lines for the player race. The largest has forty-eight huge colony ships and forty-nine huge freighters, plus numerous smaller ones, and seems to be building a new huge ship every few weeks. The other three shipping lines are considerably smaller.
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.
So I am considering changing how shipping lines work, so they don't become so overwhelming, while trying to retain the flavour. I have a few ideas, such as halving the money received by civilian shipping, changing civilian designs so they are slower, significantly reducing the money for in-system transport, or maybe paying by distance travelled in km rather than transits made or limiting how often new ships can be built.
Another option is replacing dividends with a percentage maintenance payment, which is modified by an admin overhead that increases as the number of ships increases - effectively limiting the rate at which a shipping line can increase in size.
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.
However, I would like to hear other opinions and ideas before deciding how to tackle it.
The problem with all of the above is the snowball effect. At some point, system breaks.
Instead of reducing the growth rate of shipping lines, I'd impose a cap on their size and number. Be it a soft or hard cap. I've made the experience in long games that civilian shipping can grow to massive proportions and obsolete the player economy with the wealth generated via taxes.
Suggestion: Lines pay a minimal amount of dividends/maintenance until they make up 10% of yearly income, and then the maintenance increases exponentially. Say they give up half their income in maintenance and only pay half their taxes if shipping line income makes up 30% of your yearly income, halving again if it reaches 50% etc.
In this scheme all lines would have the same maintenance rate. I don't really see much point in multiple lines (besides flavor), and have also observed that there ends up being a few massive lines and a lot of tiny ones. So I'd just impose a hard cap on the number of lines per race.
That doesn't solve the issue that planet-moon shipping lines are obscenely profitable. Tying the income to distance traveled sounds good. Perhaps with a small fixed component, say 10% of current income, so that these kinds of lines also don't become worthless. Maybe tie it to travel time instead, including loading and unloading?
I'm in agreement with Zap0 on this matter, and have been for a long time. Both he and I engage in lengthy campaigns with multiple factions, and civilian fleets tend to grow excessively, leading to culling as the only solution. However, dealing with 20 or 30 new ships popping up each year adds unwanted micromanagement.
As Zap0 mentioned, I believe there must be a way to limit civilian fleets to a set number of ships, which could even be customizable. I admire the system used to manage population and immigration in Songs of Syx; perhaps you could take a quick look at it.
Regarding the number of shipping lines, once again, I side with Zap0. However, instead of being customizable, I agree that there should be a hard cap. In my opinion, anything between 3 and 5 should suffice.
If the above measures are implemented, wealth becomes irrelevant except for balancing purposes. It will then be necessary to conduct test games to determine the sweet spot for a dividend cap, tax, or any other required balance adjustments.
In conclusion, I believe the proposed solution won't affect players who are content with the current state of civilian management, as they can leave it at 0 (the standard setting for Aurora) and continue enjoying the game as it is. Meanwhile, players engaged in larger campaigns or less interested in civilian aspects can decide how effective they want their civilian navy to be.
