Potential Changes to Shipping Lines

[Nightstar]

I can't say I know the civilian mechanics in great detail. And I don't tend to play the long games that are necessary to reach these sorts of issues. But...

Changing the growth rate/profit alone seems like not a great fix. That just means it will take longer for civilians to get out of hand. Unless you make them grow slower than your empire, in which case they'll stay permanently irrelevant.

So civilian shipping lines need to be limited. This limit needs to be with reference to the size of your empire, else civilians will be too good for small empires and too weak for large empires. The problem, such as it is, is that civilians are an exponential snowball of something for nothing. They do stuff you want, give you money rather than cost anything, and grow based on how awesome they were for you already. I think that instead of capping the "something", you should cap the "for nothing".

I think you already have the tool you need. IIRC colonies produce a finite amount of trade goods, based on their size. With tweaking amounts + profits, this provides a natural cap on the profit that can be made by shipping trade goods.

Cap luxury transport desire the same way--a finite amount desired for a population of a given size.

Cap colonist transport the same way. Maybe some tiny fraction of a colony's population wants to move to a different world (badly enough to pay for it) in a given year. Optionally, let the empire pay to have civilian ships move colonists beyond this limit. A simple checkbox for "subsidize colonist transport" would seem to be good enough.

Finally, cap shipping line size based on the profit the line earned in the last time period. (or add maintenance costs, or retire civ ships every 20 years or whatever for a similar effect) (are dividends this mechanic already?)

This way civilians will naturally expand to a certain size relative to your empire. Freighters without any trade goods to move won't earn anything, and so won't expand the cap. Ditto colonist transports. They'll grow enough to move around whatever fraction of your population in a given year. Transport beyond that limit will expand to whatever level you're paying for. If that's a lot of colonist transport, that's fine; you're paying for it! Similarly freight capacity can be expanded beyond the natural level by paying them to move installations around, but that's not an actual problem either as long as it costs enough.

Maybe also keep civs from making new ships when they have unused idle ships, even if they have money.

Might want to separate out ship types into different lines, so that a line making lots of money on goods transport doesn't mean lots of colony ships popping up, or vice versa.

[nuclearslurpee]

I tend to agree with everyone else that just rescaling the profit/loss for shipping lines won't solve the problem, just push it down the road a bit. That being said, I do think some suggestions here are a bit broader than needed to accomplish the stated objective:

So I am considering changing how shipping lines work, so they don't become so overwhelming, while trying to retain the flavour.

emphasis mine.

In my view (and from reading comments here), CSLs become overwhelming when they have too many ships - this unbalances the economy (due to tax income), trivializes new colony growth, causes rapid (de)population of colonies which disincentivizes use of source/destination automation, and causes performance problems (although this was mitigated by the change to use only larger ships).

Why do CSLs build too many ships? Simply put, because they keep making money and have no other way to use that money - there are no other money sinks for CSLs. This brings us back to:

Another option is replacing dividends with a percentage maintenance payment, which is modified by an admin overhead that increases as the number of ships increases - effectively limiting the rate at which a shipping line can increase in size.

I think this is probably the best starting point - as the saying goes, the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy, so too goes the shipping company.

I would suggest implementing a civilian maintenance fee with superlinear scaling per ship. If N is the number of ships, something like N^(3/2) or maybe even N^2 (maybe this is too much) should work. If the rate of profits depends roughly on N but the rate of maintenance depends on N^(3/2), for instance, then there will eventually be a hard limit on the number of ships a CSL can buy and operate. This also means they will grow more slowly as they come closer to this point.

I would also suggest that CSL income is affected by the wealth generation tech level of their associated race (while the maintenance fee scaling remains the same throughout the game). This would mean the limit on number of ships is initially lower but increases with tech level, which is a rough analogue for the growth of the player empire.

I think this is the simplest and best approach as it is more or less completely under the hood (except for tying to research, which is only a positive change IMO). The essential flavor and interaction with CSLs otherwise remains the same, they just become more manageable. I don't like, for example, ideas about tying CSL growth to number and sizes of populations, I feel like this creates a danger of trying to micromanage populations to manipulate CSL growth (whether to speed up or slow down), which is not a style of gameplay I think fits Aurora.

----

There are a few other suggestions in this thread which I think merit consideration. They do not address the issue raised in the OP, at least IMO, but they are good ideas anyways:

Consider that civilians just use 50% power reduced engines and keep the higher speeds of those ships.

Agree as this makes the minimum engine power tech more attractive and will contribute to limiting CSL growth rates due to higher costs per ship.

--- Perhaps give them a sort of fluff base? Like CMCs, they'll spring up on eligible worlds, but would serve as mock "supply bases".

This would probably be too much work, but I would highly approve of CSLs having to build/expand their own shipyards for example. Being able to pop a 200,000-ton freighter into miraculous existence with no orbital infrastructure is a little silly.

At the very least can we get the oft requested reserve/target min/max settings for population, similar to whats already in place for minerals and installations, so that our source colonies aren't perpetually evacuated if left unattended.

It is oft-requested, but I would like to add my support here. In games with multiple player races, trying to keep track of all source/destination populations across multiple races is tedious at best and impossible at worst, for a single player race maybe it is "more immersive" not to have this automation option but for multiple player race games I think it is essential. As it is, I turn off civilian shipping in multiple player race games to avoid these problems. Implementation could be simple: have a trigger population value set for a source or destination colony, and when it is reached set that colony as stable - no or minimal changes to the civilian AI are needed.

This being said, these suggestions mean potentially significant mechanical changes and a lot more work on the coding side, so while I like them I wouldn't say they are necessary to solve the problem.

[Demetrious]

If I may, I'd like to make a different suggestion: the mechanical problem here is the result of a thematic oversight in that the ratio of colony ships to passenger liners is badly skewed from where it should be. I had to open up my last game and check the ship list to double-check - I'd been under the impression that passenger liners weren't being auto-built by civilians at all. Turns out they are... I have two shipping liners, and some 30+ civilian colony ships.

Now having lots of freighters isn't a big deal because, thematically, you should. That's the core of your economy. The majority of an empire's wealth coming from taxing the civilian economy is how you'd expect things to work. Moreover, if your government commandeers those ships you pay for it twice - first, paying them for the shipping contract, and second by missing out on the tax revenue they would've generated from their ordinary runs. Colony ships, on the other hand, don't have this trade-off. They spend their time happily shuttling colonists to and fro just as freighters move trade goods... and once the nascent colony is all filled up, they go idle.

It makes perfect sense for the government to invest in expensive slack capacity (for emergencies such as rapidly setting up a new colony to enforce a territorial claim or rapidly evacuating one due to hostile encroachment, etc.) but it certainly doesn't make sense for civilian companies to do so. The regular market for mass colonist transport just isn't big enough, in my games, to justify 30+ ships. Why this discrepancy?

Because the way colony ships operate - constantly shuttling people to and fro just as freighters shuttle goods to and fro to keep the interplanetary/interstellar economy humming - is a job that should mostly be done by passenger ships.

There will always be poor young whippersnappers looking to make their fortune in New America, and commercial colonist transport makes sense as the steerage-class passage option for them - from the shipping company's perspective as well, because while they can't pay much per cryogenic berth, if you've got 50,000 of them stacked like sardines you're making pretty good money on every trip. With that said, cryogenics are expensive and the government tends to play merry hell with immigration/emigration permissions to suit their own purposes, so the mass colonist transit industry is a bit boom-or-bust. This puts an upper limit on how many colony ships are economically viable for the economy as a whole to produce once you average out the feasts and famines.

Passenger liners, on the other hand, are ubiquitous. Just like air travel on old Earth, long-distance trips are still expensive, esp. when made on the regular, but they're still within reach of the average consumer and many, many people need to travel on the company dime for work on a regular basis. There's a constant flow of traffic between all the teeming worlds of humanity, as teleconferencing is pretty dodgy at ranges of light-seconds, and between star systems is right out (the government charges an awful lot for use of their warp point commo repeaters!) and most of those people are moving about on two-way tickets. And frankly, none of them are keen on being rendered unconscious and stuffed in a freezer every time they want to pop over to Mars from Luna to meet with new clients. Even if they were, putting someone in cryogenic stasis is no trivial matter and there could be grave medical repercussions for entering and exiting cryo repeatedly in a short timeframe - once every six to eight months is the optimistic assumption - a year or more according to pessimistic doctors.

Naturally, the government makes a good chunk of change off taxing the passenger liner business. And just as naturally, when events prompt the government to either authorize mass immigration to a new colony, or mandate mass evacuation of same, passenger lines are quick to jump at the government contracts.

tl;dr Replace a large percentage of Colony Ships generated with Passenger Liners. As companies make more money and build more ships... they tend to build more passenger liners because, economically, there's just not room for nearly as many colonist transports as there is regular passenger service.

[vorpal+5]

Please charge per distance!

[Kaiser]

Being honest, I like the way the civilian lines work now and like the experience you are describing Steve because it makes the growth of the empire feel organic to me.

That said, could we add some kind of mechanic where if a civilian ship sits idle for too long the line decommissions the ship? In game it can be explained as a company doesn't want to pay for maintenance of a ship that isn't doing anything. So if you want to decrease the number of ships you just mark a bunch of colonies as stable and wait for the ships to disappear.

I was about to suggest exactly this one.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

A very interesting discussion so far. I think the consensus is we meed some type of limitation on growth, although there are different ideas for how to achieve that. I think we need something organic though, rather than an artifical limitation such as x ships per colony.

So far, based on the points made, I am considering the following changes.

1) Payment based on distance in km, not transits
2) Fewer colony ships as a percentage of total ships, although perhaps not until 6+ ships built. I might also make the choice of new ship dependent on which ones are being used.
3) Dividends replaced by an admin overhead that increases in percentage terms based on the number of ships.
4) Payments affected by racial wealth multiplier
5) Have a simple retirement limit, such as 20 years, so that new ships are cycled in.

The above should limit lines without appearing to be too artificial, yet still allow some growth and modernization over time

I am tempted to have something like civilian shipyards, or 'build capacity', or some other 'on-map' capability, but it might turn out to be a lot of work without any major gameplay impact. As we will be travelling for the foreseeable future, which means limited programming time, that probably isn't a good time investment.

I won't be implementing anything for a few days though, so happy to listen to the debate.

[AlStar]

1) Payment based on distance in km, not transits

If you go through with this change, make sure that you make it so that transports will be weighted towards picking routes that make them a decent amount of income, instead of doing Earth <-> Moon runs for pennies on the dollar.

[KriegsMeister]

5) Have a simple retirement limit, such as 20 years, so that new ships are cycled in.

Should probably tie this to racial research modifier, or possibly even tech level. So that lines aren't being overly "wasteful" by scrapping and replacing ships with (near) identical copies if the player hasn't made any significant tech progression. 20 Years would probably be a good baseline but if you are playing with limited administration and a 20% research rate, a ship would have a much longer useful service life and could hang around for another couple decades before reaching true obsolescence

[nuclearslurpee]

5) Have a simple retirement limit, such as 20 years, so that new ships are cycled in.

Should probably tie this to racial research modifier, or possibly even tech level. So that lines aren't being overly "wasteful" by scrapping and replacing ships with (near) identical copies if the player hasn't made any significant tech progression. 20 Years would probably be a good baseline but if you are playing with limited administration and a 20% research rate, a ship would have a much longer useful service life and could hang around for another couple decades before reaching true obsolescence

I would be very hesitant about any hard cap on years in service from a roleplay perspective, admittedly it is a minor point but in a WH40K setting for example where ships serve for hundreds or thousands of years, it would be odd to have a 20-year limit for civilian ships. Again, very minor and probably not very noticeable but all the same.

Tying the length of time to game settings, tech level, etc. is at least a better solution, therefore. I don't think such a limit is needed in practice, though, if the civilians have an effective cap on ship numbers due to "maintenance" fees then it hardly matters if they scrap ships or keep using the ones they have. Once tech advances then they can scrap the older ships for newer, better models of course, as they do now.

The other ideas in Steve's reply seem good to me.

[paolot]

I am tempted to have something like civilian shipyards, or 'build capacity', or some other 'on-map' capability, but it might turn out to be a lot of work without any major gameplay impact.

If Raiders and NPRs attach and destroy these SYs, these infrastructures do have big impact on a player development/expansion, IMO.
A player could give money, upon request or voluntarily, to commercial lines to help them and rebuid their own yards and ports. Or commercial lines could lend a player (even NPR) civilian yards to rebuild their fleets, until their own infrastructures are out of work.
Maybe software implementation of this can be tricky, but I think gameplay could gain some interesting twist.

About your 5 points:
1. Agree; but you can also consider a fee for moved tonnage/people and/or for moved volume: 1 kilogram is much less than 100 kilograms, and requires less fuel to move it, but 1 kilogram of feathers, straw or cotton wool can be more voluminous than 100 kilos of metal, so requiring a larger ship (in principle)
2. I think of different incremental building costs for the different ship types: e.g. (purely cosmetic, to illustrate the concept!) colony/passengers at N^(3/2) (thanks Nuclear!), freighter/cargo at N*log(N), defence/security/armed ships at N^2 or more, costs that increase even more with the ship tonnage. About these defence ships, I can think about a security branch of a company, with its own defence infrastructures and ships to protect line sites, acting like a sort of a minor NPR
3. Together with the number of ships, also travelled distance can be included (from the start of the shipping line or in the last X months)
4. OK
5. OK (to keep its management simple)

Thank you Steve for your dedication!

[Froggiest1982]

I'm going for the radical idea now, so please just consider it as such. It popped into my mind when Steve started talking about the shipyards.

What if there were a sort of "installation" that determines how much civilian tonnage a race could have? It could be linked to a new planetary installation or an existing one, such as Spaceports.

This could be player-built or "organically" expanded by the colonies, similar to how it's currently done with installations.

I understand it would be hard to code, but it would also imply using population to maintain the civilian sector, as well as resources and building capacity.

That would limit your growth based on:

Available Population
Available Resources
Build Capacity of the Colony

Eventually, a new tech line, similar to wealth expansion for financial centres, could be created to expand the maintenance capacity of the civilian sector, or again, it could tap into the existing tech for military maintenance.

I can foresee all the potential issues, mainly with multiple shipping lines wanting to build a ship as soon as there is room in the maintenance pool, and civilians consuming all our population. However, a similar limitation to the one for colony immigration/emigration might suffice. You could have the civilian sector stabilized or expanded, ensuring that populations are reserved and no new ships or infrastructure are being built.

[xenoscepter]

I'm going for the radical idea now, so please just consider it as such. It popped into my mind when Steve started talking about the shipyards.

What if there were a sort of "installation" that determines how much civilian tonnage a race could have? It could be linked to a new planetary installation or an existing one, such as Spaceports.

This could be player-built or "organically" expanded by the colonies, similar to how it's currently done with installations.

I understand it would be hard to code, but it would also imply using population to maintain the civilian sector, as well as resources and building capacity.

That would limit your growth based on:

Available Population
Available Resources
Build Capacity of the Colony

Eventually, a new tech line, similar to wealth expansion for financial centres, could be created to expand the maintenance capacity of the civilian sector, or again, it could tap into the existing tech for military maintenance.

I can foresee all the potential issues, mainly with multiple shipping lines wanting to build a ship as soon as there is room in the maintenance pool, and civilians consuming all our population. However, a similar limitation to the one for colony immigration/emigration might suffice. You could have the civilian sector stabilized or expanded, ensuring that populations are reserved and no new ships or infrastructure are being built.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13558.msg169730#msg169730
Not unlike my suggestion here.

[Froggiest1982]

I'm going for the radical idea now, so please just consider it as such. It popped into my mind when Steve started talking about the shipyards.

What if there were a sort of "installation" that determines how much civilian tonnage a race could have? It could be linked to a new planetary installation or an existing one, such as Spaceports.

This could be player-built or "organically" expanded by the colonies, similar to how it's currently done with installations.

I understand it would be hard to code, but it would also imply using population to maintain the civilian sector, as well as resources and building capacity.

That would limit your growth based on:

Available Population
Available Resources
Build Capacity of the Colony

Eventually, a new tech line, similar to wealth expansion for financial centres, could be created to expand the maintenance capacity of the civilian sector, or again, it could tap into the existing tech for military maintenance.

I can foresee all the potential issues, mainly with multiple shipping lines wanting to build a ship as soon as there is room in the maintenance pool, and civilians consuming all our population. However, a similar limitation to the one for colony immigration/emigration might suffice. You could have the civilian sector stabilized or expanded, ensuring that populations are reserved and no new ships or infrastructure are being built.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=13558.msg169730#msg169730
Not unlike my suggestion here.

Oh, okay. So, now that I have elaborated on that and merged it with your thoughts, you were recommending having a sort of Civilian HQ to pop up in suitable colonies with a given Admin level, which is expanded by the Civvies themselves, similar to how they would expand the mining complexes, right?

I can see the similarities now. However, I think if we go down this path, we will have to cap the number of companies that can be formed on any given colony, which I thought wasn't something many wanted to pursue. There will also be a problem related to the snowball effect, since even CMC can virtually expand endlessly.

I would say though, that it's intriguing and I can see the value in that, both in flavour and actual implementation, since the CMC already exist and might require only tuning the spawn rules.

Perhaps Civvies Admin could not exceed the Admin level of the Colony? That would keep it in check and in line with actual colony potential?

[Marski]

Another option is replacing dividends with a percentage maintenance payment, which is modified by an admin overhead that increases as the number of ships increases - effectively limiting the rate at which a shipping line can increase in size.

I vote this

[alex_brunius]

Changing the growth rate/profit alone seems like not a great fix. That just means it will take longer for civilians to get out of hand. Unless you make them grow slower than your empire, in which case they'll stay permanently irrelevant.

So civilian shipping lines need to be limited. This limit needs to be with reference to the size of your empire, else civilians will be too good for small empires and too weak for large empires. The problem, such as it is, is that civilians are an exponential snowball of something for nothing. They do stuff you want, give you money rather than cost anything, and grow based on how awesome they were for you already. I think that instead of capping the "something", you should cap the "for nothing".

I think you already have the tool you need. IIRC colonies produce a finite amount of trade goods, based on their size. With tweaking amounts + profits, this provides a natural cap on the profit that can be made by shipping trade goods.

Cap luxury transport desire the same way--a finite amount desired for a population of a given size.

Cap colonist transport the same way. Maybe some tiny fraction of a colony's population wants to move to a different world (badly enough to pay for it) in a given year. Optionally, let the empire pay to have civilian ships move colonists beyond this limit. A simple checkbox for "subsidize colonist transport" would seem to be good enough.

After reading through the thread I really like the core of this elegant suggestion the most. Almost all other suggestions are in one way or another artificial, hardcapped or manual ways to try to balance civilian shipping which I don't think have the potential to be either as elegant, dynamic or as effective in the long run. This also removes any need of limiting number of shipping lines as when colony demand is the limiting factor 200 lines with 1 ship or 1 line with 200 ships both will provide the same service and the limitation automatically targets total tonnage/time that can be shipped, and if people are exploiting a planet-moon connection then the demand will simply be met very quickly with a very low number of ships.

This suggestion should also require very little changes to code, but mostly theoretical calculations and balance testing.


By scaling the income potential of tradegoods, colonist travel demand and luxury/passenger transports to the size of the colonies there is a built in "cap" to the system of how profitable shipping lines can become. Essentially when they reach the number of ships needed to fill 100% of the demand any addition ships will contribute no more profit (unless you as a player want to pay for additional tasks beyond this).

Another REALLY positive bonus to this is that it ensures that after enough time has come to have your shipping lines be in balance with demand they should be spread out and cover the shipping needs of the empire meaning you have all types of shipping available (and in need of protection from threats) wherever you have colonies, and not just on a few routes with the current "near infinite" demand.


If the issue is that people want to play with multi billion sized population colonies that still could see shipping lines with thousands of ships ofcourse to cover such a large demand, then it could be fairly easy to lower the demand past certain pop levels through diminishing returns (similar to pop growth) to make the shipping line numbers more manageable. There would still be hundreds of ships, but it would make sense to have a large civilian shipping sector  for such massive empires.

Together with a bit better logic to ensure shipping lines deploy the correct size of ships (Small, Regular, Huge) both when building new and when deciding what demand to fill I feel confident this solution would be great.