Add new larger classes of ships for civilians

[Cristo (OP)]

I was really excited about this change in 2.2:
- After a shipping line has built ten ships, it will no longer build small ships. After a shipping line has built twenty ships, it will only build very large ships.

I thought this might improve the civilian lag situation, unfortunately while it might have somewhat it hasn't had a major impact in my experience. 95% of the calculation time on 5 day ticks is still caused entirely by civilian shipping lines (removing them makes the game run 20x faster)
They still have hundreds of ships

I feel like adding more sizes above "very large" (ingame called huge I believe) would help address this. My shipping lines frequently have hundreds of the largest class of ship.
Adding a massive, gargantuan, goliath etc class above huge and adding the same restrictions on count of smaller ships as above would I hope go a long way to fixing this.

Sorry to be negative, amazing game - thanks for continuing to share and improve it.

[Steve Walmsley]

Civilian lines are much smaller anyway in v2.6 due to the changes I made.

I'm 25 years into my campaign, with a 2b start. I have 3 shipping lines, with the 2 extra starting very early. There are now sixty two ships in all three lines combined, totaling 3m tons. My own fleet is much larger than the civilians.

They now seem to be as originally intended - adding background flavour, rather than the primary source of transport and colonization.

That is all without me taking any tax from them - if I taxed them the growth rate would be lower. In fact, if anything I have probably cut them back too much and might increase their income slightly before release.

[Cristo (OP)]

In my case it may be a problem partly because of my slow play-style. Conventional start with default settings except 20% research speed.
89 years in I have 63m tons of civilian shipping across 572 ships and 7 lines.

Awesome to hear this may be improved in 2.6

In terms of performance with civilians I can run 146 days in 60 seconds
Without them that number of days is 2,905
This is a pretty massive performance cost in my view - 20x slower! Especially if you want them to play more of a flavour element.

They trivially provide all instillation and colonist transportation with a small fraction of their available shipping.

I'm not aware of being able to alter taxes on that, if that would slow their growth that would be great I'd love to hear more about it.

To me the ideal cases would be (in order of preference)
1. Add more classes as mentioned to control ship count growth
2. Add ways to constrain their ship count (like a player set "have no more than 100 ships")
3. Improve ways to delete some but not all ships a line has. Right now I have auto-hotkey deleting them ship by ship to control the size but it's pretty cumbersome.

Looking forward to hearing more about and playing the 2.6 which might make all that redundant!

[alex_brunius]

I'm not aware of being able to alter taxes on that, if that would slow their growth that would be great I'd love to hear more about it.

Upcomming change in 2.6 much anticipated! 

https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13463.msg169793#msg169793

[Cristo (OP)]

I'm not aware of being able to alter taxes on that, if that would slow their growth that would be great I'd love to hear more about it.

Upcomming change in 2.6 much anticipated! 

https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13463.msg169793#msg169793

Absolutely fantastic, I'm sorry I missed those changes before posting!

Looks like 100% tax once they hit the size I want is perfect

[alex_brunius]

That is all without me taking any tax from them - if I taxed them the growth rate would be lower. In fact, if anything I have probably cut them back too much and might increase their income slightly before release.

Trade Good Changes
The base production of Trade Goods is halved. In addition, the production is multiplied by the manufacturing percentage of the colony, so smaller colonies will generally produce more trade goods per capita. For a homeworld, trade good production is likely to be about 1/8th of the existing level (halved and then multiplied by 25%).

Maybe scale back trade goods production to 1/4th of the 2.5 level (Just manufacturing percentage) and set Default Tax level twice as high to compensate and make the baseline shipping line income & growth the same (as in your test game)?
That will give all players more flexibility to experiment with tax vs growth in both directions + cater to players that don't mind the performance impact of having a bit larger shipping lines (with the downside of higher tax from shipping if balance is off).

That or expose a modifier for base production of Trade Goods to starting game setup.

[Platys51]

Its not hard to outtonnage civilian shipping.
Its just the fact they are relatively small, individual ship fleets that makes them laggy.
Convoys would be best solution for that, more ships traveling together.