Limiting Number of Civilian Ships

[Gabethebaldandbold]

You can disable civilian harvesters during game setup and CMCs can be deleted when you catch them.

Question to those reporting too many civilians:  Are all of those ships working or do you have groups sitting idle?  If it is the former, I would way WAI, but if it is the latter then limiting construction when ships are idle would solve the problem.

we were talking about civilians using up minerals from your stockpile, not mining things in the solar sistem.

[Froggiest1982]

Now,civilians eating minerals is dangerous, they could end up burning your stock when you are not looking, and then when you need your galicite, all of it is engines for freighters about to blow up, and your duranium is just now fancy spoons. If we want that to be a thing, we can always just not buy the minerals from civilian colonies. Fuel .ight be a diferent story if they get it from their own harvesters, or we can somehow limit it so they dont grab it all. Certainly would make everyone rush for fuel efficient engines before anything else.

I agree; that would turn me into a space pirate blowing civs up in the attempt of salvaging some of my minerals back :-)

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

You can disable civilian harvesters during game setup and CMCs can be deleted when you catch them.

Question to those reporting too many civilians:  Are all of those ships working or do you have groups sitting idle?  If it is the former, I would way WAI, but if it is the latter then limiting construction when ships are idle would solve the problem.

we were talking about civilians using up minerals from your stockpile, not mining things in the solar sistem.

I missed that somehow.  Sorry.  As someone who has broken out the nukes for lesser crimes, the Sol system would burn if the civvies touched my precious bodily fluids stockpile.

[Gabethebaldandbold]

I missed that somehow.  Sorry.  As someone who has broken out the nukes for lesser crimes, the Sol system would burn if the civvies touched my precious bodily fluids stockpile.

its only a war crime after you make the war laws

[Graymane]

Why not just have settings similar to other aspects of the game?  Allow us to set a cap on the number of civilian companies and/or ships (or history length or whatever other pertinent parameter there is).  That gives a little more flexibility that the either/or choice we now have.

[Shadow]

Why not just have settings similar to other aspects of the game?  Allow us to set a cap on the number of civilian companies and/or ships (or history length or whatever other pertinent parameter there is).  That gives a little more flexibility that the either/or choice we now have.

I agree. Either a customizable general civilian ship cap, or something more dynamic, like max N civilian vessels per colony. Or perhaps even better, a cap tied to empire population.

[Malorn]

Empire population would be good.  Or just a total limit that can be adjusted.

[Ri0Rdian]

I'd love both a limit on the number of ships AND ability to influence what they build. So if they want a freighter I get a window where I can say Yes you can build it or No you cannot. Might be too much work, but I could tailor the civilians to do what is most needed instead of doing their own thing.

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

Why not just have settings similar to other aspects of the game?  Allow us to set a cap on the number of civilian companies and/or ships (or history length or whatever other pertinent parameter there is).  That gives a little more flexibility that the either/or choice we now have.

If an automatic 'just right' solution exists then there is no need for manual fine tuning.  Limiting production of classes that already have idlers has the benefits of being relatively simple, scalable, and fully automatic.

I'd love both a limit on the number of ships AND ability to influence what they build. So if they want a freighter I get a window where I can say Yes you can build it or No you cannot. Might be too much work, but I could tailor the civilians to do what is most needed instead of doing their own thing.

That would be giving the player too much control, and the popup spam would quickly become intolerable.  Civvies are supposed to act independently, for good and ill.

[Graymane]

I don't think you will have a "just right" solution given the vast amount of different kinds of hardware people are playing this on.  If so, great.  On the other hand, my only concern is performance really.  Just being able to delete fleets is working for me for now I guess.

[Ri0Rdian]

Why not just have settings similar to other aspects of the game?  Allow us to set a cap on the number of civilian companies and/or ships (or history length or whatever other pertinent parameter there is).  That gives a little more flexibility that the either/or choice we now have.

If an automatic 'just right' solution exists then there is no need for manual fine tuning.  Limiting production of classes that already have idlers has the benefits of being relatively simple, scalable, and fully automatic.

I'd love both a limit on the number of ships AND ability to influence what they build. So if they want a freighter I get a window where I can say Yes you can build it or No you cannot. Might be too much work, but I could tailor the civilians to do what is most needed instead of doing their own thing.

That would be giving the player too much control, and the popup spam would quickly become intolerable.  Civvies are supposed to act independently, for good and ill.

Too much controler does not exist as long as we have SM mode. And I would not do it as a popup, a new window with all the waiting tasks would be better. You would just click yes or not there and if you do not do anything they do not build anything nor does it bother you in any way.

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

Why not just have settings similar to other aspects of the game?  Allow us to set a cap on the number of civilian companies and/or ships (or history length or whatever other pertinent parameter there is).  That gives a little more flexibility that the either/or choice we now have.

If an automatic 'just right' solution exists then there is no need for manual fine tuning.  Limiting production of classes that already have idlers has the benefits of being relatively simple, scalable, and fully automatic.

I'd love both a limit on the number of ships AND ability to influence what they build. So if they want a freighter I get a window where I can say Yes you can build it or No you cannot. Might be too much work, but I could tailor the civilians to do what is most needed instead of doing their own thing.

That would be giving the player too much control, and the popup spam would quickly become intolerable.  Civvies are supposed to act independently, for good and ill.

Too much controler does not exist as long as we have SM mode. And I would not do it as a popup, a new window with all the waiting tasks would be better. You would just click yes or not there and if you do not do anything they do not build anything nor does it bother you in any way.

Having to repeatedly check a list and click 'ok' to get them to build when I need them to isn't an improvement.  The 'civilians on/off' checkbox we currently have is better than that on all counts.

[Zincat]

I don't think Steve would code a system where you can actually choose what get built anyway. He said again and again that to him civilians are there also to inject some "chaos" in the game. Letting the player choose which ship to build, I don't think he would be interested to code that, given his previous posts.

I do think that building ships only if they are actually being used would be a reasonable thing though, and he might code that 

[Ri0Rdian]

Yeah, the only reason why I would want the player able to influence that is precisely that, they often build a lot of bad stuff that only slows the game down. They should probably both have less but bigger ships and better ships for what is needed.