Civilian shipping lines sizes?

[Arwyn (OP)]

So, I did something a bit different this playthrough and really pushed the civilian lines with a ton of requests. As a result I have 11 civilian lines, the largest of which has 25 ships, most are 10 to 15. Total of 173 merchant ships, which dwarfs my current warship fleet!

This is all fairly early, as I am just barely into Ion tech, with 12 populated colonies. Largest is Mars with 538 mill, but most are much smaller. Next larges is 14.3 mill, most are in the 4 million range.

So far, I am pretty happy with the way this is working out. I can slap down a colony pretty quickly with the civvie freighters, and most importantly, I dont have to micromanage freighters!

How does this line up with the rest of yalls playthroughs?

[skoormit]

Apologies for the necro, but I saw this sitting out here without a reply.

I love the way the civvies work in Aurora. They make my empire seem alive, in a very organic way.
And I'm very excited about the bug fix for overdelivery of civ shipping contracts.

Some stats from my most recent game (year 2062):

Race population: 1.4B
Populated colonies: 23 (across 16 systems)
Largest colony: 900M
Civilian lines: 9
Ships in largest line: 88
Total civ ships: 208
Total civ tonnage: 7.7Mt
My commercial tonnage: 24.9Mt
My naval tonnage: 0.2Mt

[gpt3]

Me too! I have many times decompressed after a tough day at work by clicking the 1-day increment button and watching the civilians fly around my empire.

That said, I do wish that the civilian lines built more freighters/spaceliners and fewer colony ships (e.g. a 4:1 ratio instead of the current 1:1 ratio). Right now, state-owned colony ships don't have much work to do unless you're trying to set up colonies on the far side of an unstabilized jump point.

[skoormit]

Me too! I have many times decompressed after a tough day at work by clicking the 1-day increment button and watching the civilians fly around my empire.

That said, I do wish that the civilian lines built more freighters/spaceliners and fewer colony ships (e.g. a 4:1 ratio instead of the current 1:1 ratio). Right now, state-owned colony ships don't have much work to do unless you're trying to set up colonies on the far side of an unstabilized jump point.

In my experience, the civvies will build whatever is needed to meet demand.

I suppose colonizer demand growth can be bursty, whereas freight demand grows fairly consistently over time as your population grows. Maybe that's why civ colony ships sit around idle more often than civ freighters.

[Arwyn (OP)]

I have noticed that the civvie colony ships respond to the size of source of colonists as well. I actually had them strip earths population down VERY quickly to stuff colonists onto Mars and one of the other colonies after terraforming took the caps off both planets. I had to switch earth to "neither source or destination" to stabilize the population.

On the plus side, they can move populations very quickly. The down side is the can move populations very quickly!

I have found its pretty handy to move pop around to staff things like terraformers or mines as needed. At this point in my game, I am up to 13 civilian lines, and the largest line has 76 ships. The smallest has 10 ships. The biggest issue I am running into is just making sure they lines have enough goods to ship around!

[Rich.h]

Thought I would weigh in with my own stuff. Bear in mind that my current game is just under 300 years in length.

Race population: 18B
Populated colonies: 15 (44 non population colonies, a total off 11 systems)
Largest colony: 6.8b
Civilian lines: 16
Ships in largest line: 211
Total civ ships: 951
Total civ tonnage: 66.8mt
My commercial tonnage: 177.2mt
My naval tonnage: 8.3mt

My civillian numbers should be far higher than this, however I have conducted several culls of lines. Every 50 years or so I will have a look at the lines and cull anything with more than around 80 ships. Just because of the natural game slow down that takes place. Their ability to move population though is highly useful. When you get this far into a game population becomes your limiting factor in growth, the faster you can ship out numbers to new colonies the quicker they can get the small colony growth bonus. In this game the four Galliean moons are devoted to nothing other than population growth for the outer colonies.