Out of Gas!!!

[Arwyn (OP)]

Ok, so the changes in 6.0 for fuel consumption are definitely attention getting!

Running a 6.10 campaign, my Battlefleet just ran off to swat some annoying bugs (Swarm) who splashed a grav survey ship. Tanker topped off and the Battlefleet set out to exterminate the alien scum. All is good.

Next thing I see in the event log;
"Marco Polo is unable to complete order to refuel on Earth"
"Antonio Abetti is unable to complete order to refuel on Earth"

What? That cant be right!

Hit F2, and scan down to the fuel and maintenance entries;

Fuel Available    0 

Holy crap! The entire Terran Imperium is OUT OF GAS!!!

Despite my fuel efficiency research, despite having three fuel harvesters going on Jupiter, despite having multiple planets being automined and mass driver delivering the loot to Earth...

I am out of gas....

THAT was a first for me!

Contemplating changing the administrator of Earths name to "Jimmy Carter".....

[o_O]

Yea Sorium is now Space Oil.  Those fuel harvesters can be important unless you can find a regular planet with oceans of the stuff.

[Nathan_]

Likewise your ships are M1A3s that only have enough gas for 4 hours.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Fuel has become a serious concern now so I design my ships to take this into account. I now invest in additional research facilities so I can design more and larger engines. I also make sure that ships don't get more power than they really need so I can conserve the usage of fuel that way. The larger the ship the more I drop the power level of the engines. This means I can invest more into other aspects of my empire rather than producing fuel for my fleets.

[Jikor]

Larger engines are more fuel efficient so more power to them isn't as bad as having more power on smaller engines.

[HaliRyan]

First thing I did in my new 6.0 game was build about some harvesters with about 250 total modules between them and ship them off to a gas giant. Turned out to be a good investment as I've built some real fuel guzzlers but have continued to build up a sizable reserve stockpile.

[Hazard]

I've got some 1 600 fuel harvesting modules split between a .9 and a .6 Sorium gas giants getting me fuel. If I have one complaint it's that you can't send fuel with mass drivers, as I've got a group of small tankers running themselves ragged bringing that fuel around.

Fuel shortages? Me? Even without fuel refineries running and active missile production? I'm not having any.

[Jorgen_CAB]

If you have some good gas giants around Earth you can probably get away with a fuel hungry fleet for a while. The problem will start when you need to haul fuel around a large empire with ships that need several millions liters of fuel just to get from one system to the next.

I don't think it is impossible but it will certainly be one additional logistic that you need to overcome and in 6.0 fuel is a serious concern, one that I like to have.It gives me more options when designing ships and ordnance and one more logistical problem to deal with.

[niflheimr]

It also made forward bases a lot more important. Before 6.0 I used to base all my fleets out of Earth/Mars . Now I really need a couple of forward bases - and that makes my Babylon 5 game a lot more interesting.

Let's just say I've been doing a lot of swings around Epsilon Eridani for fuel and ordinance .

I had no problems with my survey ships but since I'm using Explorer class ships ( 40 kt with high eff engines) which have a 5 years deployment time it was to be expected.

[ollobrains]

i found another useful use for the new construction brigades given u can drop em off on planets with no colonies.  Drop a couple of automated mines off with em.  Build more automated mines and then also build some mass drivers, simply make sure the planet has the mineral types to build what u need and also a large supply of sorium and then fling it towards a colony planet with fuel refineries.  Its another new strategic option.  Still fuel use does seem a bit high some tweaking not to make it uber easy but to balnace it out would be a good move for 6.2