Whipping civ's into obedience

[Vermilingua (OP)]

Hi all,
I'm probably about 24 hours into my first game now, with a couple of auto mine colonies and a human colony starting to (finally) flourish on Mars.  From about when I started the Mars colony, I noticed civilians, and that they were moving colonists for me; from there I found contracts, and started my first huge productivity boom.  Here's my question: after pouring about 100k wealth into civilians, with about 250-400k tonnage last time I checked, is it worth continuing down this path, using civs as my slave labour? I've noticed that while they are ruthlessly effeciant, and involve much less micromanagement, they can be somewhat unpredictable, and if I overlook a contract, they drag my increments down to 6 hours.  Is it worth building a fleet of freighters to move my terraforming complexes/mines/etc. , or should I stick with (and expand on) the civs?
Thanks guys,
Vermilingua

Also, once Mars' atmosphere gets close to Earth's (about 7 years by my reckoning), how will that effect the colony? Will they no longer require infrastructure, or less of it? Will their productivity increase? Will I still need to resequence their genome to cope with the reduced gravity, and if so, how?

[Black]

I try to limit the civilian shipping as it will slow down the game quite significantly in later game. Civilians are unable to operate more than 5 jumps from starting system, so you will need your own colony ships and freighters for your distant colonies.

When the atmosphere of Mars becomes breathable it will lower colony cost, so your colonists will need less infrastructure. It is possible to terraform Mars to colony cost zero so there will be no need for infrastructure. You don't need to modify your colonist as gravity of Mars is within human limits.

[Garfunkel]

Nowadays civ's replace old ships with new ones, so the number of their ships doesn't go into truly insane numbers - though obviously they can slow down the game. When Mars gets to colony cost 0, only thing that changes is that it doesn't need Infrastructure and grow freely. All that infra can then be transport to Titan or Luna or Io or Europa or outside of Sol.

[MarcAFK]

Nowadays civ's replace old ships with new ones, so the number of their ships doesn't go into truly insane numbers - t.

Civilian Shipping Gone Wild!

So, the Sol system is up to around 7 unique civilian shipping companies and it is wrecking havoc with game advancement. Every 5 days there is scrapping and new ship launch causing interrupts. The last time I searched for info on this topic, the only "solution" was to steal their ships via tractor beams, etc.

My question is: Is there any other way to deal with this? Designer mode? Database access? Anything?

I would argue that if you can't get past a 5 day increment then the numbers must be insane.

[Bryan Swartz]

FWIW, I have 9-10 firms, and nothing approaching that level of interrupt.  Makes me wonder what's going on in his game. 

[MarcAFK]

If it gets insane you could always try what i suggested in that other thread, namely;

You could try the suggestion I gave someone earlier this year, minefield your shipping lanes untill those civs go bankrupt, or blast them apart with lasers[], I think someone mentioned it was possible to directly target your civilians.
Maybe even missiles if that's possible.
1) Design a long range very fast missile with a huge thermal sensor
2) space master in a PDC with 100 tubes and a large magazine, also fire control and active sensor if that kind of thing floats your boat
3) under individual ship window use the "Missile launch button"
4) profit (design some salvagers and put them to work, if you don't think it's right to use the extra resources just dump them on a rock somewhere)

I think i'll go do this in my test game.
Observations
 1) given enough subsidy a shipping line will launch a new ship every 5 days.
 2) despite having 100,000 in the bank the company will still build small ships, perhaps it wishes to diversify it's investments?
 3) Turns take a while to process with 10 lines launching new ships every 5 days, even with only 25 ships actually in space
 4) random error 6 overflow (error in return date)  happens whenever i open the economics window or specifically click on earth there.
 5) Wealth is only at -100k despite spending a million on the lines, Wealth/trade does show that I spent a million on subsudy in the last year.

[Bandus]

Civilian Shipping Gone Wild!
I would argue that if you can't get past a 5 day increment then the numbers must be insane.

To add more detail from my previous topic, at this point I have managed (with help from Designer mode and database access) to cull it down to 4 shipping lines in my game. One has 91 ships, another 38, another 16, and another new one has just 1. It is much better then it was, but 146 ships still leaves a high probability of upgrades/scraps, etc.  Before I culled them it was closer to 200 ships.