Hi Steve, a long term suggestion, instead of having hundreds of civilian ships (from the civilian sector) travelling alone in a single formation, would it be possible to have them travelling in a group (as it should be).
This:
Will make the map less cluttered and more clean in the late game when you have litterally hundreds of civilian ships everywhere, often undefended.
Will add interesting way to accompany the civilian task forces by military escorts, it currently makes no much sense to try to escort hundreds of civilian ships which can get ambushed at any point of the system, there will be some interesting tactical consequences and more strategic depth.
I imagine that the civilian company would need to try to create groups once they have enough ships, let’s say task forces of 4-5 ships or bigger late in the game, depending on the size.
I guess the coding problem relies on the fact that you need to modify the moment when it triggers the civilian ship departure to load and deliver infrastructures for example since now there will be more ships in the group and all of them should have a cargo to deliver.
You can actually group civilian ships into fleets as long as they’re at the same location, which I regularly do - though I’m not sure what would happen if you grouped together different ship classes. These civil fleets follow regular civilian orders and deliver shipments as you would expect.
I’m against it. Civilians don’t like convoys even at wartime, it doesn’t look natural, and the very existance of civilian shipments is to make your empire look more natural, as a living population’s civilization and not just robots doing what you command them. Just filter them out to decrease clutter.
I do not want to command them, I am just suggesting the civilian sector to work in convoys which are natural since they can eventually defend themseves better, small and big convoys rather than in single ships, transport and cargo ships have always been travelling together in the human history and with some escorts rather than isolated and I would image we would do the same if We had colonies in the space and there would be some dangerous species ready to ambush cargos.
Anyway now that I think it, this has been suggested several times in the past and I think it is simply hard to implement, but let’s wait for Steve.
Some civillians actually do flock together in Aurora - just because of the pulsed mechanics, yet it looks natural enough.
Some do travel alone - as it always was, chaos and cosmos together.
Interesting.
Have you checked to see if this results in sometimes ships running empty?
I suspect that the code is creating orders with the assumption of one ship per fleet.
Yes, they carry their full cargo amounts for each ship in the fleet, and re: Kaiser, yes, I mean dragging a civilian fleet (at the same location as another) onto another civilian fleet. They basically act as if every ship works the same order - so, 50 infrastructure per haul for five ships vs. 10 for one.
A single-ship civ fleet waits for a full load to be available before taking an order.
Does a multi-ship fleet wait for an order for a full load for all the ships in the fleet? Or does it only wait for an order that will fill at least one ship?
In WW2, the Allies “lost” more tonnage to routing and scheduling mistakes & problems than they did to German U-boats. And that was with hundreds of professionals working the problem. Arranging convoys that are efficient and effective is a massive problem and while I agree that it would be cool to escort civilian convoys, I agree with Serger that civvies flocking everywhere is both a good simulation of a real economy and feels right.
Again, in my experience, a fleet of civilian ships will wait for and use their entire collective cargo capacity on each run - same goes for civilian cryo ships. I imagine much of the logic under the hood already works for larger fleets, since it’s what NPRs use to move everything, and because of the upcoming change wherein you can order your own fleets to fill civilian orders. If I had to guess, they probably just use the fleet’s total capacity in every case, where the fleet of one ship just has the one hold to fill. That’s a guess, though.
A middle way as always would be better, I am not suggesting having ALL civilian cargo in groups, others could be going alone, definitely this will improve the tactical and strategic aspect and maybe also the performance? The system would need to calculate and check the route for a single TF rather then for 4 ships, I do not know, for sure remains the problem to how make it work in a reasonable way.
A good start would be as previous screenshot, 4 civilian ships going by themselves at the same destination and all of them carrying goods, would be more logic if they would merge and create a convoy, then separate at destination.
Or, civilian could create a convoy whenever they receive a contract from the human player, let’s say they need to move a spaceport, does not make sense having them scattered all along the universe, but a single TF.
But this is one of the actual reasons for convoy inefficiency so would not stop convoying. Convoys make sense in a situation like WW2 as the Americans demonstrated by not using convoys in early 1942 and sufferring truly impressive merchant ship losses. Otherwise convoys are protective against light raiders like U-Boats and armed merchant raiders. So possibly useful against raiders in Aurora as they do not have massive force. However convoys attacked by a superior heavy force are a death trap and most warfare in Aurora is more like a convoy being attacked by a battle squadron not a u-boat, Besides the complexity of implementing it , convoys don’t do much in Aurora except against raiders
In a game that is very, very, very detailed, this is a new level of detail that would not interest me personally. To make the map less cluttered, I just do not display civilian ships. I don’t really care where they go or what they do. If they sometimes deliver infrastructure and people to my colonies, I’m happy. I have more than enough to do just to manage and keep track of my own ships.
Just my opinion. Others probably feel differently.
I have also fought about convoy implementation within this game.
Its also a problem I’ve fought about in my own hobby game design.
All of the below is conceptual btw
From a “Lived In Universe” you might want two transit modes.
Safe & Convoy.
Safe being individual movement and convoy grouped movement.
This does also open up a interesting idea of shipping lanes designing or the player donating maybe old ships to aid in convoy protection.
This also gives an interesting scenario when convoy raiding for both the player and when raiders appear, as you are observing from an Admiralty POV and hoping your QRF (If you have one) arrives.
Having convoys possibly doesnt require any major rework of the current system beyond adding some logic to merge fleets of individual ships together.
I currently do this manually and create convoys for the shipping lines.
This is however from a game performance POV.
For anyone who is interested, I was pushing +40s per 5 day tick (I know, numbers we dreamed of back in the VB days)
And after deleting all my shipping lines, this went to <1s, so a huge difference and shows a very real need for optimization.
So I removed 4x shipping lines who’s names I didnt like (what a monster I am, firing millions of people over brand recognition), this dropped me down the <20s.
Merging civilian fleets was a pain, very tedious operation but I am now back to <10s on the 5 day. There is no change to their operation other than they ship more goods/buildings in one go.
Now if you really wanted to get radical with the performance (Its also what I plan to do in my game), is only dispatch civilian ships from a planet when there is an order to complete.
Otherwise, they return to their home port, get removed as a fleet/ship, thus removing any fleet computation and then added to a “docked” array / tonnage counter for that planet.
They can then be deployed when needed.
Also means you can destroyed docked ships with orbital bombardment if they are on the ground, used to evac the planet maybe or you capture civilian shipping when taking the planet.
I’ve looked at convoys in the past, with the broad concept that ships, either civilian or player-owned commercial vessels, heading from one system to another would wait at a starting point in each system until enough ships were gathered, then all would move together to the finish point in another system, from where they would then either move to their destination in that system, or move to the starting point for their next system move. Any warships assigned to convoy duty would also move to the starting point and then accompany the ships to their destination finishing point.
There are three reasons I didn’t implement it.
It’s a lot of extra code to do this and the logic involved is not straightforward. I have to balance that against other potential features I could add with the same effort.
It would add more processing and slow the game down if there are a lot of civilian ships
I don’t think it is economically beneficial anyway. The economic cost of the ships lost to raiders is probably less than the economic penalty of holding up civilian traffic and the extra cost of providing escorts. This isn’t the North Atlantic in 1941 where every convoy is running a gauntlet. The vast majority of trips won’t encounter raiders.
