Updates to Shipping Lines
There are two major issues with the new shipping lines changes in v2.6. The rate of growth for players is too slow and the rate of growth for NPRs is too high. The rate of growth for players is a relatively easy fix. I am increasing the current payouts for civilian activity by 50% and will monitor how that performs in v2.7.
0.00015 per colonist per billion kilometres travelled
0.006 per passenger per billion kilometres travelled
0.375 per trade good per billion kilometres travelled
0.00015 per cargo point per billion kilometres travelled
The issue with NPRs is different, because NPRs use shipping lines for all their cargo and colony requirements, rather than building ‘government owned’. This is to avoid replicating the AI logic for two essentially identical functions. plus it was intended to grow their commercial traffic organically, depending on need rather than adding a further layer of AI to assess and prioritise commercial needs.
In v2.6, NPRs receive one freighter, one colony ship and one harvester for every 100m population in their first shipping line (not subsequent ones). For v2.7, I have changed this to one freighter and colony ship for each 200m population. I’ve removed the harvesters as they build those normally and the civilian ones were a legacy function.
That still means they will grow much faster than human player races because they have an immediate income stream from their starting ships. I also found a line of old code that boosted NPR shipping line payments by 1.5x. I can remove the line of code, but the reduction is going to be offset by the 50% payment increase listed above. Therefore, I have changed that modifier to 0.5 (which is effectively 0.75 in real terms due to the 50% extra baseline income).
So in summary terms, NPRs will start with half as many ships in their shipping lines and their rate of growth from that lower base will be halved. That should result in a significant decrease in the number of NPR civilian ships. I may modify this further based on testing.