I know this’ll obviously vary some based on if you just want something to get there eventually, or if you want something there right away, but what sort of engine boost do you use on your cargo ships? I tend to just go with the lowest engine boost to conserve on fuel but I’ve been finding myself feeling that slow at times and so I wonder, what do others do? Do you use the fastest commercial cargo ships possible? Do you use the slowest you can? Do you go middle of the pack persay? What sort of engine boost do you use?
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Always 50% (commercial max).
Never failed to have enough fuel for Auxiliary Fleet, my combatants need much more anyway.
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50% power. I never research lower power settings.
I’m not sure how to precisely calculate the cost of high latency in the supply chain, but I know how to calculate the cost of fuel, and it’s not much. So I use 50% engine power and about 30% engine fraction on cargo and colonist ships.
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I typically like to research at least a couple of levels down in fuel efficiency, but that’s because I tend to use a large colonization fleet instead of letting civilians do everything, so I have a higher fuel draw for colonization than I think most players do.
I usually find the benefits of 40% to be worthwhile, 30% and lower become harder to justify.
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Low engine boost for the gallicite savings.
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50%. Ships that get work done faster = I need to build fewer ships = I spend less of my finite resources on ships.
And if you’re already effectively building at capacity then faster ships mean faster expansion and response times. Speed also becomes increasingly important as time goes by, because your frontiers tend to push out faster than your tech advances.
There’s also a couple crucial breakpoints to consider where your commercial ships start becoming faster than several common threats. The sooner they can outrun those threats the better.
The one exception I make is for dedicated delivery cycle ships that only exist to periodically ferry loads of minerals or fuel from a dropoff/harvesting point to a colony, since those usually sit around waiting for months anyways.
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I tend to use 30 or 40% reduction. That gives a decent reduction in fuel without sacrificing too much speed.
Except for recurring fuel or mineral ferries, which use the most engine power reduction available to save fuel and make the ships cheap
Exactly this. Line tankers get reduced as much as possible, everything else is 50. Very occasionally, everything is 40 except for tugs which are 50.
To be fair it depends on the systems/distance you roll in your game.
Sometimes i get unlucky and i roll such abusurd distance between anything worth a shit that its honest to god better to do like 10% commercial engines to get the range.
Also depends what kind of cargo ship its supposed to be - rich, full of traffic systems can often benefit more from faster ships that need not as much range.