Are Colony Resources Broken?

[LoBlo]

I think we've all seen this scenario. We're in the late mid game and we have a lot of freighters sitting ideal around the home-world or other large hubs like Kazim. However, we also have colonies which are starved for resources and have very few freighters transporting them. The freighters have the necessary range.

What's the cause of this issue? Just bad programming?

It's also common to see a resource deficit on the minerals tab, but then there are large deposits of stored minerals in the mining stations untouched. It's easy to find a station with 90000 of Caslon sitting idle, but the game estimates a production deficit. What's the estimate need based on? Anyone know?

Any plans for further refinements in the economy from the devs? Or should be just chalk it up to the inefficient of large governments?

lb

[Schatten]

i think its mostly bad programming. for example a world/station needs 200 caslon..it send a large freighter that can pick lets say 10k caslon to a mine and pick exactly 200....while 1 second later after the start its alredy needs 250 or 300 caslon.
So it sends next freighter to pick 50 more.

Thats from my observation.

Would be better if ships would check the needs on destination at the moment they arrived at the mine and pick up the material or if the worlds would generally try to have stocks 1/3 above the needs and always fill up to this levels either from own mines or from other empires/independend worlds.
If we stay with the freighter system

[hurkle]

Simple answer, something is broken. It is either the freighters or it is the missing message telling you what they are trying but failing to do.

Usually it seems to happen at some sort of mass ship upgrade where the player has far too few locations with resources to upgrade ships combined with a blockage at the station docking. Too many ships waiting to upgrade and they just cannot get it done so they wait their turn at a station and are very very very slowly processed back into service.

I put some when it happens fixes below but you need to get more production sites with resources before this happens and if you have done this you will not see this issue which is why I am not 100% sure this is a programming error.

Some ships can be clogged at dock/undock at stations, manually clear this as much as you can by moving player controllable ships away from that station and get them to refit elsewhere. Look at station queue and if there are any player controlled ships refitting in queue then move them somewhere else too.

There is also the out of fuel issue that slows down the dock/undock process even more. Use a tanker to fuel up any of the ships that are doing nothing and fuel up the docking/undocking ships manually too to speed their dock/undock up.

There are some techs you want to research to help with station docking and station refits and station cargo transfers so look into those. Building bigger space stations helps too.

This could also simply be playing too big a game on low ram or low cpu.

There is one possible bug that it could be. When you get the message about 'build a new space station yes/no/show' and you go look you far too often see that the ai has decided to instead build private sector ships with the resources that were saved for building the space station and this could be a similar issue with the resources that were kept to upgrade freighters instead being spent on building new ships in the queue which is somehow breaking the freighters.

[Schatten]

i would also strongly suggest to allow refueling systems (like on Tankers) on Spaceports so ships that want only fuel dont need to dock and undock all the time but can be refilled in space around the station. Would greatly help reduce the Docking Traffic.

Mit allow i mean that they work. You can already build them on Spaceports but they dont work and ships still dock for refuel.

[maggiecow]

i would also strongly suggest to allow refueling systems (like on Tankers) on Spaceports so ships that want only fuel dont need to dock and undock all the time but can be refilled in space around the station. Would greatly help reduce the Docking Traffic.

Mit allow i mean that they work. You can already build them on Spaceports but they dont work and ships still dock for refuel.

Allowing all ships to pull fuel from a Spaceport without docking OR a special component (only requiring a time expenditure) would be one of the tweaks they could make that would remove a lot of pain and just a smidge of realism.

[Ax]

So much wrong information. The external fuel supply works very well on stations, but the first one or two ships will prefer to dock fully until the docking bays are filled up.

The resources transport also works fine. There is already a ship on the way to fulfill the order you only think isn't being handled.

[hurkle]

The resources transport also works fine. There is already a ship on the way to fulfill the order you only think isn't being handled.

I think we are talking about different things here.

Your empire can be using 99%+ of freighters, say 8 not doing anything out of 2000, then all of a sudden you notice lots of freighters sitting at the space station of your homeworld; then you check further and see that 1600 freighters of your 2000 are now idle, meaning they have no orders and are not marked as refitting, and this number of idle freighters very very very slowly starts reducing.

I have not seen the above in for a while now which is why I think this is either a missing refit message or bad player logistics breaking refitting.

[btd64]

I think we've all seen this scenario. We're in the late mid game and we have a lot of freighters sitting ideal around the home-world or other large hubs like Kazim. However, we also have colonies which are starved for resources and have very few freighters transporting them. The freighters have the necessary range.

What's the cause of this issue? Just bad programming?

It's also common to see a resource deficit on the minerals tab, but then there are large deposits of stored minerals in the mining stations untouched. It's easy to find a station with 90000 of Caslon sitting idle, but the game estimates a production deficit. What's the estimate need based on? Anyone know?

Any plans for further refinements in the economy from the devs? Or should be just chalk it up to the inefficient of large governments?

lb

It's not "bad programming". Report as a bug in the tech forum in this game and provide a save....GP