Issues with PRIVATE ships

[Interesting]

Im having some hard times with the PRIVATE.

Stuff I dont like:
AI dont using all the freighters cargo. Waste of cargo components.
Not being able to tell the miners where to mine.
Not being able to tell them not to build miners.
Not being able to retrofit mining stations.
Not being able to retrofit private ships.
Not being able to tell the AI to start bringing people to my resorts.
Not being able to tell the AI to bring fuel where its needed. (research station near black hole had fuel, untill a ship refueled on it, and then the research got crippled, forever... and no freighter went there to refuel it, none of the over a hundred freighters.)
Not being able to change private ships combat strategy on the go. Its a pain to watch them do a bee line for the space creatures mouth.
Not being able to tell them to stop wasting money, or not being able to tell them to start wasting the money.
Not being able to tell passenger ships where to get people and where to take them.
Not being able to tell freighters wich luxuries, how much of each and where to take them.
Not being able to tell private to build more passanger ships.
Private ships entering enemy territory and getting annoying messages as if they were military.
Not being able to check easily what the Private ships are doing, why they are doing it, for how long will they do it, etc.


I started a new game days ago, with 1400 stars, teeming independent alien, starting galaxy, unstable ai agressio, very slow research, many space creatures, many pirates, home system harsh, size starting, tech level basic, human democracy and 19 aliens, one of each race, with harsh system, starting size and basic tech.

Just got to the point where I have more Colonies and revenue than I need (around 1000K GDP) and Private ships/bases are using just 30-40K GDP. I cant upgrade the existing ones, neither the stations. Neither can I destroy the olds ones. Neither can I tell what and how many should they build... I dont want to upgrade the design and still have old stuff running around with Maxos Blasters with 190 range.

[2ndACR]

Arming your private ships will get the "military" warning every time.

You can tell your miners where to mine, you will just have to manually do it. I build mines all the time manually. I always keep 2-3 construction ships under my control at all times.

Your base will be refueled, but it will take time. I have had research bases sucked dry, but they always reload some time.

I would love some more control over the civilian shipping per some of your above, but not nearly as much as you want. LOL
My resorts get visitors, slowly and usually after my colonies are at a certain level do I see them really getting used. Especially if the resort is near another empire.

[Malevolence]

I've found that private ships upgrade themselves very soon after upgrading their design.

From my point of view, not necessarily yours, I don't want to manage all those ships. Particularly on the largest maps. What I would like to do, however, is actually be able to give strategic and operational level guidance... at least when my government type clearly has a controlled economy. Things like directing the space lane flow, so that ships generally stay on specified routes. Also something like setting a priorities in space ports for fuel and other materials, etc. Also specifying spaceports for trade with other empires and their use for re-fueling.

My frustration, sometimes, is that while I am fine with taking out the micro-management, I'm looking for the needed macro-management and decision support.

[Xenoform21]

I would have to disagree with your philosophy of wanting control over the private sector of the game. The purpose of DW IMHO is not to inundate you with the complexities of moving cargo around and retrofitting every damned ship and base that you have ( Which could still be improved ).

DW is about the 4x gameplay, Exploration, Expansion, Exploitation, Extermination. I would contest that having the user directly control the aspects of the private sector would turn the game into an economic simulation for the 28th century, and the other elements which need work would be left at the wayside.

I would personally prefer to see more work done on making the Ai do these things intelligently, so I can let the Traders and Space cowboys deal with where that load of immigrant Securians are going, I'll make sure that there aren't any pirates to blow them up along the way.

[Fishman]

Personally, I am fine with the private sector doing its thing without any intervention from me, but occasionally, there are things I need done specifically, and it would be nice to be to perform some of these in an emergency, like pick up cargo on a ship with cargo bays and drop it someplace else in advance, when I am planning to do something unexpected and yesterday. I mean, obviously, it is unreasonable for the game to be able to anticipate the fact that you want a bajillion tons of whatzit delivered to a place that doesn't appear to need it, in advance, because you plan to start a major construction project, but it would be NICE to be able to transfer cargo manually, as construction ships and other such craft are often quite lazy about loading up with necessary supplies despite being given large cargo bays.

[Flaviusx]

I can't imagine anything more tedious than trying to manage the private sector in addition to everything else.

[korenzel]

I also wish for an optional limited control of freight transport. I don't want to manage all of it, especially when empires span hundreds of colonies, but being able to send supplies where its needed and compensate for any AI shortcoming (instead of trying to fix it) would be most welcome.

If not direct control of a freighter, at least give the player a way to influence the private sector's behavior, especially when it's being stupid, like with super rare resources allocation.

As with the rest of the game, you could just leave it to the automation, but some of us actually like to get into the little details of supply lines, just as others like to set tax rates manually, design ships or control every single military unit.

[Fishman]

I don't think control of freight transport itself is needed, I just think it would be nice to be able to perform manual cargo loading on ships that have cargo bays. As it stands, cargo-loading on ships that consume cargo is not forward-thinking enough, and ships can end up with clogged cargo bays or empty cargo bays that fail to contain the supplies they need as a result, with the private sector not doing anything about it because it's mostly a state problem. For instance, if I want to build two stations, a constructor ship may fail to load sufficient supplies to actually accomplish this task, despite having plenty of space, simply because the computer has no way of forseeing that I wish to build a second station after the first one.

[Joram]

Like the rest, I have no desire to micromanage the private economy.  There are really only two things that I've noticed that bug me.  The inability to scrap my own private vessels.  I hate the constant whining when one gets damaged and keeps asking for repairs.  I just want to go and scrap it.  The other is not being able to declare systems out of bounds.  This is necessitated by the fact that the AI somehow quickly forgets that there are monsters or other hazards in an area and keeps sending ships to get gobbled up.  Annoying.
 
Regarding directing them to specific resources, I would think the price of the good should be influential enough but perhaps they don't take that into consideration?  I guess I haven't had any resource issues to notice.  But regardless, it would be interesting to be able to put a bonus on a resource to help influence where the private sector goes.

[Fishman]

ORIGINAL: Joram

Regarding directing them to specific resources, I would think the price of the good should be influential enough but perhaps they don't take that into consideration? I guess I haven't had any resource issues to notice. But regardless, it would be interesting to be able to put a bonus on a resource to help influence where the private sector goes.

Given that the price of a good is "Galactic" and therefore has nearly no relationship to your own actual needs, as gluts and shortages on the other side of the galaxy have no real relevance to anything YOU care about, and the fact that strategic concerns tend to run independently of any actual pricing schemes, resource prices don't really mean much. If anything, a picture that runs purely on resource price is counterproductive. Picture a critical commodity that has a single point of origin. You need this commodity everywhere, so naturally, you produce heavily. As a result of the large supply generated, the price plummets, and the good becomes cheap. No one thus moves the good and it piles up on the docks where it was made, which is entirely counterproductive.

The problem here is that the "price" of a commodity is "global", whereas in the real world, prices of commodities are localized, and places where they are short in supply have higher prices, causing goods to move there until the shortage is eliminated as the price settles back towards the "global" average, while places where they are glutted have the goods available cheap, and thus the free market causes goods to flow from localities in which they are plentiful to places where they are scarce. In DW, this does not happen because there is apparently only a single local price, and it is unclear when that price is ever actually paid by anyone unless you are building a ship out of it!

[Joram]

Well, good points but my main desire is some way to influence them without having to control them.  But I hear you, the price bonus wouldn't work under the current system.

[Fishman]

Well, for the MOST part, they do their jobs, but sometimes you just want something that no AI can ever anticipate or fulfill, and thus some means of doing it manually, outside of the Private system, is needed.

[Malevolence]

ORIGINAL: Fishman

Given that the price of a good is "Galactic" and therefore has nearly no relationship to your own actual needs, as gluts and shortages on the other side of the galaxy have no real relevance to anything YOU care about, and the fact that strategic concerns tend to run independently of any actual pricing schemes, resource prices don't really mean much. If anything, a picture that runs purely on resource price is counterproductive. Picture a critical commodity that has a single point of origin. You need this commodity everywhere, so naturally, you produce heavily. As a result of the large supply generated, the price plummets, and the good becomes cheap. No one thus moves the good and it piles up on the docks where it was made, which is entirely counterproductive.

The problem here is that the "price" of a commodity is "global", whereas in the real world, prices of commodities are localized, and places where they are short in supply have higher prices, causing goods to move there until the shortage is eliminated as the price settles back towards the "global" average, while places where they are glutted have the goods available cheap, and thus the free market causes goods to flow from localities in which they are plentiful to places where they are scarce. In DW, this does not happen because there is apparently only a single local price, and it is unclear when that price is ever actually paid by anyone unless you are building a ship out of it!

Indeed, well said. I doubt we want processor power devoted to this each tick, however, given everything else.

[Fishman]

Actually, that would probably involve less processor than you'd think. I mean, this is what determines the behavior of ships in Space Rangers. But there is something massively inefficient about how DW is handling things. Massive quantities of RAMs are consumed by the universe, which does not seem to make much sense given that there is simply not that much data in the game that we can see, especially given how simple a DW colony appears to be: Population, development level. I remember a small "MMO" game where there were literally THOUSANDS of colonies, that I, personally, owned myself, and yet that game did not implode in a gigantic memory-consuming explosion of doom when the galaxy went from unpopulated tracts of barren wasteland to a populated galaxy consisting of thousands of colonized worlds, each with 120 manually placed turrets defending them. We're talking thousands of colonies with far more detail than any DW colony, and millions of units, albeit very simple ones, and the game didn't choke like DW.

[Malevolence]

Did they make an English version? Sounds interesting.

[Ranbir]

Of Space Rangers? Yes they did. You can get Space Rangers 2+Reboot expansion from Impulse or Steam or some other store I'm not aware of yet. I got it from Impulse. Great game, it could possibly ruin rpgs for you with their static worlds that have a narratives on war (because all of a sudden you'll notice the gameworld is still so the story loses any urgency of emotional investment) Some guy did a review here.


Back on the subject of private ships, I disagree with a lot on that list, mostly in particular:
Not being able to tell the miners where to mine.
Not being able to tell them not to build miners.
Not being able to tell them to stop wasting money, or not being able to tell them to start wasting the money.
Not being able to tell passenger ships where to get people and where to take them.
Not being able to tell freighters wich luxuries, how much of each and where to take them.
Not being able to tell private to build more passanger ships.

They're the private sector and government intervention is unwanted!


What I DO agree with is that the State controllers of the AI empires should not acknowledge the private sector as state property (like they do if they see an armed private ship, or other private sector behaviour)

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: FishmanBut there is something massively inefficient about how DW is handling things. Massive quantities of RAMs are consumed by the universe, which does not seem to make much sense given that there is simply not that much data in the game that we can see, especially given how simple a DW colony appears to be: Population, development level.

I think you are significantly underestimating what DW is actually having to track and save at any given time in a large galaxy.

[Fishman]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

I think you are significantly underestimating what DW is actually having to track and save at any given time in a large galaxy.

So what all is it tracking? You've got a galaxy maybe only 10x the size of SEV's, but runs comfortably and never at any point threatens to blow out your RAM, even if you multiply by a factor of 10. A SEV save writes nearly instantly and spits out about 3 MBs of data. SEV planets and systems have a level of complexity comparable to that of DW's, if not more so: SEV planets can contain individual ground units and turrets that are hand-designed whereas a DW ground unit is simply a few numbers, probably ints, 4 bytes apieces. DW planets are just a population, a planetary type, and an broad environmental classification. It is safe to say that by any reasonable standard, a DW planet and colony is uncomplicated and far simpler than what you might encounter in any other game. A DW ship is not more complex than a SEV ship: Both are essentially lists of predefined components with damage values. In fact, SEV ships have far more attributes than any DW ship...but all these are just numerical values, small change. A thousand 1 KB ship attribute structures is a mere meg.

So, the question is: What is the heck is DW storing that SEV is not? We can reasonably consider DW and SEV to be games of comparable complexity. Heck, they share most of the same audience. I have seen these faces before. If you multiply SEV by a factor of 10, your computer does not dissolve into a fireball of flames. Why is that?

[Malevolence]

ORIGINAL: Fishman
So what all is it tracking? You've got a galaxy maybe only 10x the size of SEV's, but runs comfortably and never at any point threatens to blow out your RAM, even if you multiply by a factor of 10. A SEV save writes nearly instantly and spits out about 3 MBs of data. SEV planets and systems have a level of complexity comparable to that of DW's, if not more so: SEV planets can contain individual ground units and turrets that are hand-designed whereas a DW ground unit is simply a few numbers, probably ints, 4 bytes apieces. DW planets are just a population, a planetary type, and an broad environmental classification. It is safe to say that by any reasonable standard, a DW planet and colony is uncomplicated and far simpler than what you might encounter in any other game. A DW ship is not more complex than a SEV ship: Both are essentially lists of predefined components with damage values. In fact, SEV ships have far more attributes than any DW ship...but all these are just numerical values, small change. A thousand 1 KB ship attribute structures is a mere meg.

So, the question is: What is the heck is DW storing that SEV is not? We can reasonably consider DW and SEV to be games of comparable complexity. Heck, they share most of the same audience. I have seen these faces before. If you multiply SEV by a factor of 10, your computer does not dissolve into a fireball of flames. Why is that?

Well, SEV (of which I am a fan as well) does not track nearly as many commodities. I think for SEV it's three? Remind me about empire-to-empire trade in SEV. I really don't remember anymore, are they comparable? Maybe they are.

Also keep in mind that ships, ground units, and buildings in SEV are basically the same objects -- they have a common inheritance parent in their class tree. Whether you choose to put that base on top of a planet in DW or a building on a planet in SEV is an arbitrary design decision.

[Ranbir]

That's a lot of conjecture thrown there. [&:]