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C# Mechanics / Re: Potential Changes to Shipping Lines
« Last post by Nightstar on Today at 09:19:55 PM »I can't say I know the civilian mechanics in great detail. And I don't tend to play the long games that are necessary to reach these sorts of issues. But...
Changing the growth rate/profit alone seems like not a great fix. That just means it will take longer for civilians to get out of hand. Unless you make them grow slower than your empire, in which case they'll stay permanently irrelevant.
So civilian shipping lines need to be limited. This limit needs to be with reference to the size of your empire, else civilians will be too good for small empires and too weak for large empires. The problem, such as it is, is that civilians are an exponential snowball of something for nothing. They do stuff you want, give you money rather than cost anything, and grow based on how awesome they were for you already. I think that instead of capping the "something", you should cap the "for nothing".
I think you already have the tool you need. IIRC colonies produce a finite amount of trade goods, based on their size. With tweaking amounts + profits, this provides a natural cap on the profit that can be made by shipping trade goods.
Cap luxury transport desire the same way--a finite amount desired for a population of a given size.
Cap colonist transport the same way. Maybe some tiny fraction of a colony's population wants to move to a different world (badly enough to pay for it) in a given year. Optionally, let the empire pay to have civilian ships move colonists beyond this limit. A simple checkbox for "subsidize colonist transport" would seem to be good enough.
Finally, cap shipping line size based on the profit the line earned in the last time period. (or add maintenance costs, or retire civ ships every 20 years or whatever for a similar effect) (are dividends this mechanic already?)
This way civilians will naturally expand to a certain size relative to your empire. Freighters without any trade goods to move won't earn anything, and so won't expand the cap. Ditto colonist transports. They'll grow enough to move around whatever fraction of your population in a given year. Transport beyond that limit will expand to whatever level you're paying for. If that's a lot of colonist transport, that's fine; you're paying for it! Similarly freight capacity can be expanded beyond the natural level by paying them to move installations around, but that's not an actual problem either as long as it costs enough.
Maybe also keep civs from making new ships when they have unused idle ships, even if they have money.
Might want to separate out ship types into different lines, so that a line making lots of money on goods transport doesn't mean lots of colony ships popping up, or vice versa.
Changing the growth rate/profit alone seems like not a great fix. That just means it will take longer for civilians to get out of hand. Unless you make them grow slower than your empire, in which case they'll stay permanently irrelevant.
So civilian shipping lines need to be limited. This limit needs to be with reference to the size of your empire, else civilians will be too good for small empires and too weak for large empires. The problem, such as it is, is that civilians are an exponential snowball of something for nothing. They do stuff you want, give you money rather than cost anything, and grow based on how awesome they were for you already. I think that instead of capping the "something", you should cap the "for nothing".
I think you already have the tool you need. IIRC colonies produce a finite amount of trade goods, based on their size. With tweaking amounts + profits, this provides a natural cap on the profit that can be made by shipping trade goods.
Cap luxury transport desire the same way--a finite amount desired for a population of a given size.
Cap colonist transport the same way. Maybe some tiny fraction of a colony's population wants to move to a different world (badly enough to pay for it) in a given year. Optionally, let the empire pay to have civilian ships move colonists beyond this limit. A simple checkbox for "subsidize colonist transport" would seem to be good enough.
Finally, cap shipping line size based on the profit the line earned in the last time period. (or add maintenance costs, or retire civ ships every 20 years or whatever for a similar effect) (are dividends this mechanic already?)
This way civilians will naturally expand to a certain size relative to your empire. Freighters without any trade goods to move won't earn anything, and so won't expand the cap. Ditto colonist transports. They'll grow enough to move around whatever fraction of your population in a given year. Transport beyond that limit will expand to whatever level you're paying for. If that's a lot of colonist transport, that's fine; you're paying for it! Similarly freight capacity can be expanded beyond the natural level by paying them to move installations around, but that's not an actual problem either as long as it costs enough.
Maybe also keep civs from making new ships when they have unused idle ships, even if they have money.
Might want to separate out ship types into different lines, so that a line making lots of money on goods transport doesn't mean lots of colony ships popping up, or vice versa.
