Just out of curiosity, why do construction ships cut and run?

[Von Roon]

When I assign a construction ship to work on something, even when that something is right next to the construction ship, it vanishes and travels to a spaceport before returning and doing the work. Why is that? Can I stop it? Or is it built into the game?

[Bingeling]

Because building stuff requires resources, and the construction ship heads for a spaceport to pick them up.

If you intercept a construction ship returning from the spaceport, you can view its cargo, and verify that it is the materials for whatever it is to build plus some extras for retrofit.

If you stop such a construction ship with the materials in it, and order it to build somewhere else, it should head off to build without returning to the spaceport.

[NephilimNexus]

1) They cut & run from combat because the default setting is "flee when attacked" and "evade" - you can change that. In fact you should change that as soon as you get your ships armed. You do arm them, right?

2) They bail from construction jobs because they didn't bring enough stuff to finish them. This results in them getting stuck waiting for a freighter to get off their lazy butts and bring them fresh supplies, or in the case when you stop work and restart as a "repair" order on your incomplete fabrication, the ship goes back to the nearest spaceport to try to load up whatever it forgot the first time.

There are two ways to alleviate this problem. The first is to add more cargo space onto your construction ship. A small ship, or rather a ship with a small hold, simply can't carry enough material to finish large projects in one trip. Naturally you will also have to make sure that the space port that they're picking up from has plenty of supply as well.

The other way (the one that I prefer) is to make sure that your construction ship designs have both a mineral and gas mining tool attached to them. That way when you run out of, say, steel or lead you can (more often than not) just hop over to the next planet (sometimes the same planet) and extract the missing materials yourself.

When in doubt it's a good idea to make sure that between construction jobs you order your construction ship back to your home planet, or at least a star port that you know won't have any resource shortages. That way they'll be more likely to try to pick up their supplies at a well stocked station instead of some bare-bones port out in the boonies.

[Von Roon]

Thanks. Designed my first ship due to these tips -- CST-25 Mark 2. Exploring the power of this game is as much fun as playing it.