If you are going to attempt this approach, you don’t have to load things into pods early. You can load them when you need to in order for them to be ready right when the tug arrives.
But it’s less micro to save time on the unload end, not the load end.
Tug arrives at destination with first cargo pod.
Tug releases first cargo pod and returns home unladen. Cargo pod unloads by itself and sits empty.
Tug arrives home and tractors the next pod (preloaded if you accept the extra micro on the load side for the additional time savings).
Tug arrives at destination with second cargo pod.
Tug releases second pod, tractors first pod, and returns home. Second pod unloads by itself.
Etc
What about having a tug station at the destination. It has a cycle orders to tractor from “arrival fleet”, unload, then release into an “unloaded fleet”.
You could also have the “unloaded fleet” chain back into the “arrival fleet” so that there is always at least 1 pod in both “arrival fleet” and “unloaded fleet” to keep the fleets open and the cycle orders. Sure you may pull the empty pod 50% of the time if there is only 1 full pod and the 1 empty pod in there, but that will not be much time lost if there is nothing to empty out of it before switching the pods around again.
A while back someone, I think it was skoormit, described the benefits and flexibility of using pods and tugs. Since then I’ve found tug life to be a very efficient and fun way of playing.
I’ve tried many different things to simplify and optimize fleet operations (with and without tugs), but it has never occurred to me to use a tug station as an unload-bot.
Brilliant.
I’m not sure the scheme you’ve outlined is workable yet, but it might be possible for something along these lines to get the job done.
Keep in mind, though, that we are doing all of this to shave a few days off of intercolonial hauling missions, which, in my experience, are multi-month journeys on average.
If I were going to move a massive amount of stuff between a planet and its moons, I might think about trying something like this.
Another caveat worth mentioning with any cycle order scheme: the hidden cost is the rows you are adding to the fleet history table. You absolutely must avoid creating a situation in which a fleet cycles through trivial orders at breakneck speed. That will run your game out of memory in a very short time.
And so what I’m getting from this idea is that there is a arrival fleet then the tug station waits a period of time to move it from arrival fleet to retrieval fleet ?
You can also just make placeholder stations instead to keep the orbiting fleet
Those last two orders could be dropped if you have a lot of arrivals happening to keep the fleets open. Otherwise you would need a lot of pods in the empty fleet to begin with. As the tug arriving with full pod would be taking an emptied pod from empty fleet for the return trip.
I did tugs in one of my run I did find the flexibility to be great. there was something that kept catching me out though and i just cant remember what it was but it made me stop doing it. As i haven’t done enough playthroughs or played recent enough i be interested to know would there be any feature suggestions you could think of that would improve Tuglife.
Maybe allowing trailers to connect to other trailers to create long chains or is the possible already i dont know?
One problem I have had is the tug and trailer loosing connection when you are combining fleets. Simple work around I use is having them all join as sub-fleets then I know which trailer to detach from the big fleet and re-tractor.
I think I finally realize what you mean by this…when a tug tractors the last ship out of a fleet, that fleet is deleted. Which means your existing orders targeting that fleet will fail when they are executed.
You can prevent the deletion of the fleet by targeting it with a shipyard task.
Just use SM mode to create a shipyard, tool it to some trivial design, reduce the shipyard size to 1, and add a slipway.
Start a build task targeting the arrival fleet, then pause that task.
Do the same thing with the empty fleet.
