Quasar4x - An Aurora4x VB6 clone q4x

[TMaekler]

Do you mean the civilian Fuel Harvesters in the System Locations Available list on the Fleet Orders window?  (You can't join those fleets).  They are annoying me too, but it's the only way in the UI to buy fuel from civilians and I do occasionally buy from them.  The problem is I have no more room in the Display Options panel for checkboxes.   I never use the "Survey Locations" and "Exclude Surveyed" checkboxes and they take up two spaces I could use for better purposes such as this one, but.. but... the nostalgia!  the VB6 parity!  The one time 3 months from now I'll need to select a survey location!  For now I'm just putting up with it.

How about this?

[TMaekler]

I might be wrong but I think in C# Aurora when upgrading a ship old components are put into storage. I don't think that has been so in VB6. Probably an option for a mod?!?

[Kyle (OP)]

Do you mean the civilian Fuel Harvesters in the System Locations Available list on the Fleet Orders window?  (You can't join those fleets).  They are annoying me too, but it's the only way in the UI to buy fuel from civilians and I do occasionally buy from them.  The problem is I have no more room in the Display Options panel for checkboxes.   I never use the "Survey Locations" and "Exclude Surveyed" checkboxes and they take up two spaces I could use for better purposes such as this one, but.. but... the nostalgia!  the VB6 parity!  The one time 3 months from now I'll need to select a survey location!  For now I'm just putting up with it.

How about this?

I'd rather reserve that space for some other QoL feature.  A 'Civ Harvesters' checkbox really belongs in the Display Options panel. Don't worry, eventually the harvesters will bother me enough to do something about it. 

I might be wrong but I think in C# Aurora when upgrading a ship old components are put into storage. I don't think that has been so in VB6. Probably an option for a mod?!?

I had the same thought the other day (didn't know C# did it that way).  It does seem wrong to me that scrapping ships recovers components which can then be scrapped for materials but refitting just deletes them.  I'll wait to see if anyone has any objections to preserving scrappable components on refits, then eventually add the feature probably.

[Droll]

I had the same thought the other day (didn't know C# did it that way).  It does seem wrong to me that scrapping ships recovers components which can then be scrapped for materials but refitting just deletes them.  I'll wait to see if anyone has any objections to preserving scrappable components on refits, then eventually add the feature probably.

I'm pretty sure the whole scrapped components can be scrapped thing was reported as a bug on C# and fixed as it allowed people to receive more minerals than the initial cost of the ship.

[Kyle (OP)]

I had the same thought the other day (didn't know C# did it that way).  It does seem wrong to me that scrapping ships recovers components which can then be scrapped for materials but refitting just deletes them.  I'll wait to see if anyone has any objections to preserving scrappable components on refits, then eventually add the feature probably.

I'm pretty sure the whole scrapped components can be scrapped thing was reported as a bug on C# and fixed as it allowed people to receive more minerals than the initial cost of the ship.

I just had a situation where I upgraded a PDC design from a 2044 model to a 2062 model, and the cost to refit was about 90%.  It's an expensive PDC, so the clear choice is to build a new PDC, and save the old one for use on colonies I don't care as much about.  I didn't like how clear the choice was.  I'd rather be given an opportunity to decide whether I want to keep obsolete and more dangerous PDCs (dangerous due to higher magazine explosion chances) or refit and be given a chance to recover some of the mineral cost by scrapping the older unused components that were removed from the design.  Getting some minerals back makes it a more economically viable option.  There is still a high cost in work and wealth to represent the effort it takes to uninstall and store unused components.

I eyeballed the numbers and I'm not seeing any unfair advantage in minerals recovered.  You pay full price in minerals for components added, and get the full price in minerals of components removed -- the same mineral price you paid to have those old components built originally.  Note that no minerals are recovered from scrapping ships or PDCs, you have to scrap the recovered components to get any minerals back.  Maybe that is the difference from the C# version?

So I'm going to make the change and see how it works out. 

Also, when refitting to a design with higher fuel capacity, VB6 doesn't automatically top off the fuel tanks.  There could be a reason for this, but if there is I haven't thought of it yet.  So unless I come up with a reason not to, I'm going to add auto-refilling to refits as well. 

[Kyle (OP)]

Do you mean the civilian Fuel Harvesters in the System Locations Available list on the Fleet Orders window?  (You can't join those fleets).  They are annoying me too, but it's the only way in the UI to buy fuel from civilians and I do occasionally buy from them.  The problem is I have no more room in the Display Options panel for checkboxes.   I never use the "Survey Locations" and "Exclude Surveyed" checkboxes and they take up two spaces I could use for better purposes such as this one, but.. but... the nostalgia!  the VB6 parity!  The one time 3 months from now I'll need to select a survey location!  For now I'm just putting up with it.

How about this?

I'd rather reserve that space for some other QoL feature.  A 'Civ Harvesters' checkbox really belongs in the Display Options panel. Don't worry, eventually the harvesters will bother me enough to do something about it. 

A solution finally occurred to me.  In the next version, civilian harvesters in the same location with the same max speed will merge into a single fleet.  This reduced the number of civ harvester fleets listed in my orders window from 20 to 5.  There's still no way to completely hide them from the list, but it *does* have the added benefit of the improved performance of fewer fleets, and if you want to buy a really large amount of fuel at once, you can get it all from one civ fleet rather than having to order a refuel from a dozen single-ship fleets.

[TMaekler]

Solutions present themselves after a night of sleeping over the "problem" 

[Kyle (OP)]

Solutions present themselves after a night of sleeping over the "problem" 

Indeed!  I use this method as often as I can.

Could you do the coloring of events also on the system view?

This will be added in v171

[trabber Shir]

Will the default order "Load Fuel at Harvester" buy fuel from civilian harvesters?

I have the same question for the conditional order to refuel from tankers now that I think about it. My civilian lines are beating me to deploying harvesters in my outlying systems.

[TMaekler]

The joining of the civilian harvesters - could you add some kind of information on how much fuel each fleet contains? Would make it easier to see how many fleets I have to refuel from.

[Kyle (OP)]

Will the default order "Load Fuel at Harvester" buy fuel from civilian harvesters?

No, but I will probably add a "Purchase Fuel from Civilian Harvester" default order at some point.

I have the same question for the conditional order to refuel from tankers now that I think about it. My civilian lines are beating me to deploying harvesters in my outlying systems.

Conditional orders won't buy fuel from civ harvesters either.

The joining of the civilian harvesters - could you add some kind of information on how much fuel each fleet contains? Would make it easier to see how many fleets I have to refuel from.

I needed this just a little while ago   In the v172 the civ harvesters will be listed in the Fleet Order targets list like so:

FH Lucas H4 083 (190k Fuel, 17% full)
FH Lucas H6 088 (890k Fuel, 14% full)
FH Lucas H6 129 (120k Fuel, 10% full)
FH Miah H3 054 (90k Fuel, 16% full)
FH Miah H6 114 (420k Fuel, 6% full)
FH Ward H6 001 (70k Fuel, 8% full)

I'm also moving them all below the player fleets so they aren't right in the middle of them any more.

[trabber Shir]

Is there a way to remove the first order from a queue of orders?

My use case is a tanker that buys fuel from all the civilian harvesters in a system and then delivers that fuel to the capital on a loop. Whenever a civilian fleet is disbanded it pauses and spamms me with "Destination task group not found ..." messages until I remove all orders and start over.

[Kyle (OP)]

Is there a way to remove the first order from a queue of orders?

Unfortunately not.  It would be messy to implement and likely to introduce new problems.

My use case is a tanker that buys fuel from all the civilian harvesters in a system and then delivers that fuel to the capital on a loop. Whenever a civilian fleet is disbanded it pauses and spamms me with "Destination task group not found ..." messages until I remove all orders and start over.

I can add a default order to buy fuel from harvesters in the next version or so.

For v173 I've changed it so that when fleets merge, they will always merge into the fleet with the lowest ID.  That will greatly reduce the chances that your target will disappear.

Meanwhile, can you try this?  Set up the loop of orders with the last order being to purchase from the harvester.  Then remove the last order and save as an Order Template.  When the errors start happening, remove all orders, reload the template, and add a new last order to buy from a different harvester.  (Or harvesters)

[trabber Shir]

Ah, order templates is a feature I had not noticed before. I used them in C# last time I played that (about a year ago I think) but forgot about them since starting Quazar and had not noticed them to remind me.

But, my orders are actually pretty simple aside from the buying. There are 10 civilian harvester fleets around that planet and the annoying part is going through to click each one (less annoying since they merged into 10 fleets, but still enough to be annoying) and my tanker is big enough that I just have it buying everything they have then unloading at Earth on repeat.

Thank you much for the reminder about templates, some other workflows just got simpler.

[Kyle (OP)]

I was quite happy with the civilian shipping. It really seems to work - so I began to use it more and more. Now it seems to got stuck. Are there any rules I have to be aware of so I don't mess up the civilian shipping?

The only 'gotcha' I can think of is if the amount of trade goods you need to transfer is too small, civilians wont bother picking them up.  They only do pickups that will completely fill their cargo/colonist space.  This includes trade-generated infrastructure and colonists as well. 

If you don't think that's the issue, post the save file in the bug thread and I'll take a look when I can.

I have attached the DB. It contains the SP Game with the civilian transport issue - though it only contains one transfer job. I had deleted all the others to see if that one gets done - but it doesn't. The Source planet is Snowden, target planet is Krügener.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T38uRG6iwWrGgB98wdfSFMlGnIjt6Mfz/view?usp=sharing

For better or worse, it's working similar to VB6.  All your civs frieghters are busy with short-distance trades. Civilians freighters prioritize moving civilian-produced trade goods in the system they are in over government supply contracts that are in different systems.  There's more profit to be made in lots of short deliveries than a few long-distance deliveries.  More profit means more freighters built, which eventually leads to a surplus of freighters that *can* start fulfilling long distance orders.  You can speed up the process with subsidies.  I saw your bug report about the Subsidize button not working; it works on my pre-release build of version 168 with your save file, so if it still doesn't work maybe try again when in v168

Yeah in my yearly budged review I saw "subsidise" - so somehow some money got to them - or at least it went into the statistics. Is there a way that you can show something like "free civilian capacity" or list them as busy with civilian contracts? If I knew they were busy I might have guesses what is going on... . Also nice would be some kind of priority option for my transports which I could optionally add if I see a contract isn't done by them. What that option could do is increase the payment I offer them until they say: yeah, worth it ;-)

Ok so I'm getting annoyed by this myself now. I'm currently testing a few changes I made for the next version:

- Civilian freighters will no longer transport infrastructure between different empires.  It was creating a black hole of my civs endlessly delivering infrastructure to my NPR trading parters, grinding all other trade to a halt.

- a slight re-ordering of priorities so that long distance contracts tend to be prioritized over other long distance trades

- And a potential game changer:  I added a new default order simply called "Fulfil a contract."  You can assign this default order to your freighters and they will start fulfilling your supply and demand civilian contracts.  The list of contracts at a colony will show your freighters en route to pick up and drop off, just like it does for civilian ships. 

I expanded the quasar-only 'auto-refuel ships that resupply here' policy checkbox to include fleets that drop off or pick up cargo, so your "Fulfil a contract" freighters wont run out of fuel as long as you keep your supply or demand populations stocked with fuel.

If all goes well with testing I should have version 175 with these changes ready soon.