If I already have regular freighters and other things is it worth it to change to mostly tugs?
Or would It just cause more micromanagement for me
I know that if I change my freighter fleets to space stations I can make them 1 million tons no problem and then just have to upgrade the tugs
I also know I have 4 types of station I can think of right now for being tugs
Colonist transport
Freight transport
Fuel harvester
Orbital mining station
What would be the advantage of tug life? Other than the armor weight saved for the space station the engine power and foul needed should stay the same. It’s nice that you can use industry to build them but i don’t know if the added tugs micro is worth it.
Also a 1 million ton ship with no armor is a really easy target for pirates.
I love tug life, it is hard to stop doing it.
ANY ship you make can become a station. Even military ones, just remember to have armoured military tugs for then lol.
Yes there can be a lot of micro involved (use sub-fleets to make life a lot easier in working out which ones break tractor connection), but you also dont have to upgrade the whole ship for better engines (with the old MSP free engines/tug still usable for tugging stuff, rescue ships in random systems and as sensor nets). AND should you find you can not outrun an enemy fleet you can always break the tractor connections to at least save the Tug and its expensive engines.
I find that the best part of tug life is the flexibility. You can build 10 colony pods and 10 troop transport pods and 10 cargo pods, all as engineless stations using planetary industry, and 10 tugs as ships. Now you can have 10 cargo, troop, or colony ships, or any mix in between, as your current logistics demand changes. This way you rarely have idle tugs, meaning you don’t have to over build logistics capacity. The pods never have to be upgraded since the components in them dont materially improve with tech.
And when you suddenly need to move a bunch of orbital miners or retaining stations, you just use the existing tugs instead of building them just for that purpose or putting engines on them that will only get used once or twice.
The micro isn’t that bad. You only need to resign tugs when you have a good reason to adjust your mix.
I really like the multi-purpose tug approach, even if I never commit to it fully.
Not needing to retool a yard when I need another scrapper/ stabilizer or troopship or whatever is very convenient and basically meant I don’t need as many commercial yards in the first place saving a lot of workforce.
I also like to retire my tugs by assigning them to freight or colony duty permanently, so only my newest tug usually do actual tugboating. I make sure that each generation of tugs + a cargo/colonypod line up at the same speed as one of my freighter types, so I can combine them into those fleets.
I also like putting a tractor beam on my tanker/supply ships so I always have a recovery vessel handy if I need one.
Oh yeah, @skoormit, that’s your theme, man. We call for your wisdom and experience.
@dotu already chimed in with the most often overlooked benefit of TugLife: shipyard simplicity.
I have one shipyard for each of my four tug sizes.
I have a couple non-tug designs that can co-build in a tug yard. (A 25ML tanker built in large numbers in the medium tug yard and used for ferrying fuel from the harvester fleets, and a 1kt troop transport built in very small numbers in the small tug yard and used mostly to send initial police forces to new colonies.)
I only have one other commercial non-station design that doesn’t co-build in a tug yard. (A 5kt troop transport that I build a lot of and is just an awkward size between the small and medium tugs.)
My only other commercial yards are the very big ones for my orbital stations, but that’s a different concern.
So, I’m minimizing the amount of workforce tied up in idle commercial yards. I’m almost always building more tugs of the three largest sizes, and the medium tug yard also spits out more tankers when those are needed. The small tug yard is the only one that is idle for long periods of time.
And @nakorkren talked about two of the other big benefits: flexibility of use, and improved usage efficiency. I have a big pile of cargo pods and a handful of colonist pods. I can move as many colonists as I need to, when I need to, but when I don’t need to move any colonists, I do something else with the tugs that moved the colonists. I’m not letting engines that I paid for sit and waste away. Almost all of my tugs are almost always moving.
Non-believers seem to think that TugLife requires a lot of micro, but I honestly don’t know what they mean. It takes a couple clicks to tell a new tug what to grab from the pile. After that, for the vast majority of tugs, you never reassign it until the tug is obsoleted, which requires a couple more clicks to put whatever pod back in the correct pile. That’s it. A couple extra clicks, then a couple decades of use requiring the same however many hundreds of clicks as a non-tug, then a couple more extra clicks.
The new CDE rating bothers me with regard to going all in on tugs because it used to be that you could build a cargo pod or whatever and that cargo pod would never change, a pod built at TL2 would be exactly the same as one at TL6.
Now they’re not identical anymore. Obviously the difference is tiny and not worth thinking about but I still can’t stop thinking about tooling up a shipyard to refit my cargo pods to the newest CDE standard.
There are things that are worth thinking about.
There are small things that are almost worth thinking about, but not really.
There are even smaller things that are definitely not worth thinking about.
Then, another factor of 10 smaller, is the difference in cargo pods due to CDE.
First gen pod:
Pod with CDE 50%:
I may be telling nonsense now, because I never actually got to that stage yet (so I don’t know whether it even exists).
When you are at a stage where you have regular cargo runs on defined routes, you can leave a full pod at your destination, grab the next one, that is waiting and move on.
This would eliminate the times a ship is laid up for loading and reduce or eliminate the need for cargo shuttles (except when setting up a spaceport for the first time), because the pod stays in place and can be handled at leisure - until it is filled and ideally the next tug comes calling right about then).
In the real world this works so well, that almost no non-container vessels remain in service (RORO and tankers aside), but Aurora is another beast entirely, so I would appreciate any input the more veteran players can give here.
You can definitely do this.
But it’s a lot of extra micro, to shave a couple percentage points off your round trip time.
Don’t forget that mine or factory or research lab could have been being productive while it’s sitting in a cargo pod waiting to get picked up, just so you can save a day or two on loading time.
I am almost convinced to try tug life. Quick question, can you place CIWS on space stations?
Yes they can be placed on space stations im pretty sure
I think this sort of thing comes down to how you like to play your game and how good you are at keeping track of where all your stuff is. In theory if you need your tug to do something else, you could drop the pod off at a colony and the tug itself will ZOOM back to pick up the required pod, but you then need to remember where you left those pods. It is also by far the most “efficient” solution in terms of shipyard usage time, hulls, etc, but it is a decent number of extra clicks depending on how often you need the tugs to switch jobs. That said, I can see the appeal of having at least some dynamic capacity, as I know I’ll need tugs, I know I’ll need Cargo ships that I use near constantly, but I don’t always use colony ships or troop transports etc. Heck, one usage that might have something going for it is using large tugs on smaller Commercial magazine pods or fuel pods so that their speed keeps up better with a fleet.
But yeah, I think the overall challenge is managing the pod stockpiles and remembering where you put your stuff.
Rename the tug fleet with the location of the pod it dropped off.
Tug life in my view is considerably more efficient not accounting for player time and enjoyment. In my view whether the added micro is considered a worthwhile trade off or even a plus or not is at least in part due to player taste. I for one use tugs some but not solely.
The only reason why I do not play this way is pure aesthetics - I just like the idea of traditional, non-moduled ships. It’s irrational, modular shipping is more efficient both in Aurora and in real life, yet I just don’t like the world in which skippers are divided on mobile ones (tug-skippers) and station officers.
