Aeson
Posts: 784
Joined: 8/30/2013 Status: offline
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quote:
Planetary resources do not deplete over time. The only way this happens is if a random event hits that planet. And as far as I'm aware the event can only target colonies, and there's another event that 'discovers' new resources on a colony. Plus, if you disable 'Disasters and Other Events' during game setup, both the depletion event and the 'new resources found' event are disabled, if you don't want to worry about the potential loss of resources. quote:
Not enough freighters or maybe not enough ports to ferry the resources. Do you guys ever upgrade the cargo capacity of ports and freighters? If you're running into resource shortages, you're more likely to have too many spaceports than too few. The freighter algorithms are supposed to try to keep resource stockpiles at each spaceport relatively balanced; more spaceports thus means smaller stockpiles at each location, and more required trips to increase the size of the stockpiles. As far as increasing the cargo capacity of spaceports goes, it's unnecessary unless you're playing a pirate empire (and even then, unless you have very few cargo bays on the design, it's likely unnecessary there, too) as spaceports share the cargo capacity of the colony over which they are built, and colonies have virtually unlimited cargo capacity. It may be reasonable to build up a bit of cargo capacity at a mining station, but I wouldn't go overboard with it; if freighters aren't coming by the station regularly and you aren't running into resource shortages, chances are your empire just doesn't need that much of the resources from the station anyways. I find the computer's mining station designs to be generally adequate for my purposes; I might tweak the armament and docking bays, but the cargo capacities and mining rates are generally acceptable even if they're not maximized. As far as freighter cargo capacities go, I can't say I recall ever seeing a freighter carrying more than about 10000 units of resources even when they had the capacity for more, and much more commonly they're carrying loads of only several hundred to perhaps several thousand units of resources (and 'several' thousand is a fair way into the high side of what I expect, based on what I recall seeing in my infrequent checks on what my freighters are doing). I wouldn't bother putting enormous cargo capacities on freighters if I were you. I would, in fact, suggest that no private sector vessel needs to be larger than maybe size-300 at any stage in the game, and you could probably do well keeping the ships smaller. Keeping the private sector ships small makes it easier for the private sector to have more of them, replace losses, upgrade outdated vessels, etc, places less demand per ship on your fuel supply, and requires less total resources per ship built. Keeping the freighters relatively small (well, size-300 might not be exactly 'small' early on) is simply for the best in my experience. I would also suggest that equipping your private sector vessels with the fastest hyperdrive you have is not necessarily for the best. A ship with a static energy requirement of around 12 will require approximately 10% more fuel per jump if equipped with an Equinox Jumpdrive than it will if equipped with a Calista-Dal hyperdrive, and equipping an Equinox Jumpdrive is more likely to result in the ship requiring two fusion reactors or at least one quantum reactor whereas a Calista-Dal will frequently fit into the power budget with just one fusion reactor on a civilian vessel. Fewer reactors means a smaller ship and possibly lower static energy requirements as well as lower resource requirements for construction, or more room for other components. Whether or not the reduced fuel required per jump and potentially reduced resource demand during construction is worth the longer travel times is, of course, up to you. quote:
considering if my mines should have more extractors. As far as I know, there is never a situation where it is beneficial to have more than 4 mining engines or luxury extractors or more than two gas extractors on a single ship or station, unless you're concerned about battle damage disabling one or more of them and want a bit of redundancy. You can see the most recent information I'm aware of on this subject here: http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3649225 but what it comes down to is that extraction rate has a cap of 10 non-gas and 40 gas per tick (multiplied by resource quality and handled separately per resource) per ship or station. The very basic mining engines and luxury extractors give 3 extraction rate apiece, so you can have 3 of each and get the full benefits from each, or 4 of each at an efficiency penalty (as you get an actual extraction rate of 10 rather than 12).
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