I'm about 7 years into my v4.22 conventional start (single race) game and just wanted to comment on how the civilian sector is working so far - I LOVE IT!!!! The progression of ship types and capabilities in the civilian and military sectors seems much more realistic than in previous versions.
A few background points/observations:
1) I upped my race's gravitational tolerance to +/- 0.7G, so that Mars would be habitable. A side note - it occured to me that it would be REALLY interesting to allow 0 - 2x gravitational range, e.g. +/- 1.0G for humans; this would allow lunar and asteriod (or even deep space) colonies. The exciting thing about this is that it would allow standard mines (and supporting populations) on small bodies, which in turn could drive a lot of civie traffic. Especially if the civies could drop mines on worlds with high mineral concentrations, i.e. generate a market for TN minerals in the civilian sector (the government could compete for civie minerals by buying them with wealth). Note that this would take some tweaks to the Aurora code, mainly with respect to terraforming (you shouldn't be able to put an atmosphere on a tiny rock) and low-temp habitability cost (radiating heat is the hard part in space, so low temp probably shouldn't raise colony cost above 2.0 or so).
2)The luck of survey gave Mars 0 minerals, so it's going to be purely an economic colony which will later specialize in research (once I'm able to move labs).
3) I've come up with three flavors of commerical class designs so far:
A 10,750 ton design with 4 engines and either 1 cargo hold or 2 cryo holds (speed 1153 km/s). The reason for this design is that the initial size of a commercial SY is 10,000 tons, so this class was buildable within a month of the SY being built (conventional start doesn't have any SY). The purpose of the freighter version is to be able to carry infrastructure to Mars, without having to wait until the build capacity for bigger freighters (able to carry factories). So good observation number 1 is that the game led me to make a "tramp" freighter design.
A 29,050 ton standard colony ship with 5 cryo holds and 1280 km/s speed.
A 36,700 ton standard freighter with 5 holds and 675 km/s speed. Purpose is to be able to carry factories etc.
4) Starting the commercial SY out at 10Kton capacity was great - it meant that I couldn't build my standard freighter right away (actually, I still can't, but I'm almost there).
5) I wanted to tie the maximum size of civie ships to commercial SY capacity, so I didn't actually create the classes until I'd built and grown my commercial SY to the corresponding size. This led the commercial sector to build three tramp freighters and two tramp colony ships to start colonizing Mars. Observations:
(Good) Mars is already up to ~2.7 million population.
(Good) There still aren't any non-tramp freighters around, so the
only thing on Mars is population. In other words, at this time it's a frontier world without any heavy industry, and which doesn't produce useful commercial goods, i.e. a money sink like the early Virginia colonies.
(So-so) I haven't researched troop transports yet, so I have no way to get troops to Mars. This means that I have no way of controlling unrest there, which adds to the wild-west/frontier flavor. On the other hand, this brings me back to the observation up-thread that you might want to allow ground units to be transported as personnel and equipment in commerical shipping - it seems like oine should be able to put a battalion into cryo and ship their equipment in cargo holds.
(Neutral) Two of my lines carry colonists, two carry cargo. The two colonist lines are very profitable; the cargo line with two ships is barely scraping by, while the one with one ship is losing money due to dividends.
(Pain) I'm doing 5-day updates because the only interesting thing happening in the game right now is economic development. This is hurting the civie lines, however, because a civie ship will only look for new orders at the beginning of a turn. So when Earth and Mars are close to each other (~1 day travel time one way), the civie ships are 5 times less efficient than they could be. I just did 1-day updates for the latest closest approach, and the unprofitable line became much closer to break-even. It would
really help if there were a mechanism for civie ships to look for new orders at the end of an increment if they've run out, not just at the beginning (or maybe it's end) of a turn. Note that the same issue exists for default orders, especially surveying - if you run out of survey targets 20 seconds into a 5 day update, your ship just sits there until the next turn.
(Pain) I had a bit of trouble getting colonization going on Mars. As you suggested, I tried putting a small amount of infrastructure (1 unit
) on Mars, but the civies ignored it. I then added enough population to be supported by the infrastructure, and they still ignored it. I then experimented with more combinations, and ended up with 100 infrastructure (which would support 0.5 million pop) and 0.2 million population and they finally noticed Mars and got to work. It would be a lot easier if there were just a flag on populations which said "open for colonization" and would create a demand for colonists and/or infrastructure.
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6) I still don't have any warships at all, and the only "military" ships I built were four geo-survey for surveying the system, but there are a bunch of civie designs running around the system. I think this is good - navies should arise after commercial shipping. Once you get pirates in, there will be an internal driver to build naval ships for commerce protection.
7) My standard passenger ship design is smaller and faster than my standard freighter, which makes a lot of sense. In other words, I think it was good to make the cryo holds 1/2 as big as the cargo holds.
8 ) My standard commercial vessels have 4 cargo handling systems (load time of ~0.5 days), and adding more would have probably been even more efficient. This is because they're VERY small compared to the size of a hold. I would recommend bumping the size/ and cost of this system up some.
9) I can't tell for sure because there aren't a lot of ships out there right now, but all the performance work does seem to have payed off - the game feels quicker. Thanks!!!!
10) Even with Mars' population less than 0.2% of humanity, the Mars colonization effort is generating 10% of the government's revenue. Again a good thing, since this means that the civie sector is going to be important enough to wealth production to need protecting.
In summary, so far it feels like you got the civie sector right - Mars is being colonized by a thriving, self-running civie sector, while the government has been focused on economic and technological development. In addition, the early colonization efforts are a struggle, with no way to get industry there on ships that are very primative and small (a good thing).
John
