RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (Full Version)

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Bingeling -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/17/2012 5:07:30 PM)

Feelo should consider two actions in his game if his freighters are still looking abroad.

1: Disable foreign trades in empire settings.
2: Trade embargo the lot.

I guess which option depends a bit on what he wants to achieve, I guess they have different side effects.

Pipe: Happiness? Really?



feelotraveller -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/17/2012 5:17:47 PM)

Your homeworld quality is the biggest factor (that is the difficulty I was referring to).  It decides how much income you have at the start of the game.  This is inflected by luxuries of course.  More income means more explorers, more military, quicker expansion.  Harsher homeworlds limit your income, and also make resources be that bit further away. 

Which means that the private sector behaves more nicely for me.  [sm=sign0003.gif]

[I was playing on 480k research so you could make the game hugely easier by reducing that and with an excellent homeworld.  Irregulars tend to be a bit more difficult too, more spread out and less gas clouds.  I had teeming independents which make things easier.  So this was hardly an easy as pie sort of game and neither was it particularly hard.  Or at least that is what I was looking for.

Part of why I set this one up like this was that I had 50% targets, including population, as victory conditions with an 80% threshold.  I have a house rule of no homeworld invasions since that makes it far too easy.  (Exception is I will do it at end game to satisfy racial victory conditions if they exist.)  So the goal was to at least double the average population without grabbing homeworlds (to give me 10% pop) if I could get 100% of the other conditions.  Realistically I probably needed to get maybe 20-30% of galactic population so that I could drop a few points of racial vc's or perhaps of income.  Since a large part of income is population, with 50% of all colonies and all racial victory conditions fulfilled it could be done with say 25% population and 35% income (but remember those other 19 homeworlds...).  Also I wanted to play it nice, by and large, so the plan was to never declare war.  Hence I was going to need a lot of decent sized colonies.

The teeming independents were to allow me a decent shot at this and also so that I did not have to raise the colonisation range.  It can be quite nasty on an irregular map at times and researching your way to desert colonisation just so that you can grab your first colony is not something that I want to do on 480k.  Nor do I want to search through endless starts to find a game which is playable.  If it had been a normalish starting position (which wasn't the case) I think the population requirement could have made it interesting and I was looking forward to the possibility of some diplomatic wrangling in the end game to break up longer standing trade agreements and MDP's if I needed to.]



Bingeling -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/17/2012 5:37:19 PM)

I would think the teeming independents help a great deal in strangling the private economy. It is easy to get fast colonies that are large, and suddenly you are building 3 colony ships at a time in a game where you with a world with no independents would only build one at a time at your homeworld for a long time.

As for victory conditions? I don't believe in those :) I enable them to see progress, and play as long as I enjoy the game. I think my next game will be Boskara with much AI control (even if only through advisors), and no other insects in the galaxy. Not slow research so maybe I can see the rots story play out for the first time (I have only seen the baddies in a throw away game when the expansion was brand new). A goal? To follow the whim of the AI, and enslave the world. I figure the Boskara AI will have no issues getting into wars...



feelotraveller -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/17/2012 5:49:29 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

Feelo should consider two actions in his game if his freighters are still looking abroad.

1: Disable foreign trades in empire settings.
2: Trade embargo the lot.

I guess which option depends a bit on what he wants to achieve, I guess they have different side effects.

Pipe: Happiness? Really?



I'll have to start quoting as I keep falling behind the conversation. [:)]

Yes that would be worth considering. Still I wonder if it will make that much difference.

The fundamental problem in that game (I think I've abandoned it by the way) was that my freighters were not shipping the strategic resouces used for building. Yes there were a few starting to go off to foreign empires and that was not helping. But really if they had been going for steel, or other basics for spaceports, I would have been quite happy. Instead too many freighters were carrying insignificant amounts of the same luxury. Many which weren't doing that were carrying Osalia and Emeros, resources that I was not using at all. From experience there was a fair chance that if spaceports did end up being built at the colonies they were carting it away from that they would cart a proportion of it back again. And even with luxuries it was relatively 'strange' for want of a better word. No transport of Wiconium to my demanding homeworld and yet about half a dozen freighters at any one time moving Otandium back there even though it was a resource that was already mined in my home system at the start of the game and my homeworld was stocked in the thousands all game. What?

So would a freighter blocked from foreign trade get a mission to move some of the 4000+ steel from one of the mines in my home system to the spaceport with zero stock and thousand of reserved, or would it be the 21st moving Terralion, the 7th moving Otandium or yet another carting Osalia/Emeros? I suspect the latter, and most probably Terralion...

On the more general level I think the problem is that the freight network prioritises luxuries from the mistaken belief that money/development is the prime goal. Sure when you are starting out, particularly on more difficult starts money/development is needed. But we all know how past a certain point the money situation becomes ridiculously easy. The freight algorithm doesn't.

This in fact interferes with the strategic meta-game if you like. Instead of having a choice between an immediate gain (luxuries now [sm=cool0013.gif]) and deferring that gain for potentially bigger rewards later (go forth and prosper [sm=love0059.gif]) the freighter routine forces the first.




feelotraveller -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/17/2012 6:05:11 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: Bingeling

I would think the teeming independents help a great deal in strangling the private economy. It is easy to get fast colonies that are large, and suddenly you are building 3 colony ships at a time in a game where you with a world with no independents would only build one at a time at your homeworld for a long time.

As for victory conditions? I don't believe in those :) I enable them to see progress, and play as long as I enjoy the game. I think my next game will be Boskara with much AI control (even if only through advisors), and no other insects in the galaxy. Not slow research so maybe I can see the rots story play out for the first time (I have only seen the baddies in a throw away game when the expansion was brand new). A goal? To follow the whim of the AI, and enslave the world. I figure the Boskara AI will have no issues getting into wars...



Hee, hee. Maybe. But just think what would have happened to the freighter network in my game if I ever got to that point? None of the independents ever got delivered the resources to build a colony ship... they are the same ones as to build a spaceport after all.

I like the multi-racial empires you end up with given independents. It makes things interesting when different worlds get different bonuses and every time a war starts you have to deal with a different set of home conditions. Almost invariably it means the colonies near your enemy will have quite some dissent.

I like the racial victory conditions because it will force some things I would never otherwise do, and can balance the races a fair bit. How easy are the Ackdarians if they don't need to control the largest 3 ocean colonies? (Assuming 19 empires/races it means you have to invade both the Quameno and the Wekkarus, now that's a game changer - otherwise they are amazingly simple to play.)

I'm quite happy to quit when I'm ahead too. As far as I'm concerned I won my last game. And I would have after that start, no doubt, regardless of how bad the freighters got. [;)]



Bingeling -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/17/2012 7:10:53 PM)

I think the main problem of your game, was the challenge being in an area where you have little to no influence.

When it comes to the game, I can not help that two legends features I think I would like to play without are wonders and characters. I think they come in as pure bonuses without being properly balanced around.

And you had that shipyard ;-)



feelotraveller -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/18/2012 12:21:35 AM)

There were probably many things wrong with that game and how I played it.  [:)]

What I am concerned about though are the transport orders which were happening/not happening.  They are not specific to that game.  Sure the distances may have been greater than you usually get in the early game but the problems just showed more because of that.  There may have been more colonies earlier than in many games but their abundance just shows up some features/weaknesses of the freighter logic.  I can see nothing special about that game with regard to the reservations of Zentabia fluid disappearing, causing at least one double booking.  I can see nothing special about the respective priority given to luxuries over strategic resources, just as there was nothing special about how newly colonised or invaded independents have most if not all of their fuel reserved immediately they join your empire.  I have commonly seen similar proportions of freighters bringing in dribs an drabs of a single luxury in other games.  I have seen a similar focus on transporting strategic resources which are not demanded at all (in fact I clearly remember from my last game the same problem occuring with Osalia and Emeros being focused on by freighters at a time in the game when there was nothing utilising them... there could be something specific to those resources, or perhaps it was just coincidence).

I'm a bit too tired to do it clearly now (and positively [8D]) but I will try to post tomorrow some points which would improve the system.  Bear in mind that I have little idea of the mechanics of how it is actually set up at the moment.  Certainly less so that some of the other posters.  I just have my experiences of how it pans out in practice in my games - and I am sure that I play quite differently to some.



feelotraveller -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/21/2012 11:40:01 AM)

Just updating on Pipewrench's speculation.  Appears not to hold.

Start of new game.  Find independent which has Ilosian and Megalos.  Ilosian is 4th on list, Megalos 7th.  Caguar is 8th.  Freighter books what turns out to be 580 Ilosian, fine.  Dubious feelotraveller invades independent (now has source of Carbon, Chrome and 2 needed luxuries [8D]).  A 2nd freighter books the entirety of the 1700+ Ilosian, the earlier booking is not showing.  Some time later the reservation has disappeared and a 3rd freighter books for 1700+ Ilosian.  First freighter picks up it cargo.  As 2nd freighter is docking a 4th freighter reserves 1300+ Ilosian (the hotel clerk makes a triple booking without concern [:(]).  2nd freighter cleans out all Ilosian depriving the natives of their racial happiness bonus.  The 3rd and 4th freighters will get virtually nothing.  Megalos not being transported at all.  About the time of the 4th freighter booking another independent is discovered with Caguar and a freighter immediately makes a reservation and jumps.  So it is not simply a working down the list.  I'm sure Megalos will eventually get transported but the question is how many more freighters go after Ilosian first?  Still with the starting freighters, 15 in this game, so 4 is not insignificant.  Not grinding my teeth but rather [sm=nono.gif].  Not a big thing (this time around) but if this is working as designed I am not happy with the design.  [;)]



Bingeling -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/21/2012 12:03:43 PM)

I am guilty of playing the game, rather than observing freighters [:-]

My theory has been "grab territory", expand outside influence circles. Spaceports can be built later (within reason). "Get those colony ships moving", "have troop transport capability in stand by for those pesky independents".

Apart from the few space ports built in remote areas taking time to build (as usual), I have not noticed any issues in ship building.

You know that you lag a bit in colony management when you finally get positive cashflow and the AI suggest "build medium space port at..." and you don't recognize the colony name. Ah, 2000M inhabitants about one sector away from the capital. Never heard of it.



Pipewrench -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/21/2012 3:57:09 PM)

Thanks for sharing this fellotraveller,

So to summarize,

You found a new source of material your empire needed

It then set up a query to dispatch freighters to collect Ilosian jade needed for the empire's supply system. It only concentrated on one luxury and left Megalos alone. You now found another luxury, Caguar Fur which has forced freighters to begin runs to that new resource and bring it back into the supply network. Mengllos nut is now on the back burner.

Speculation.

Is Megallos nut's demand lower than Caguar Fur or is the Caguor price higher?

In my game their weight is

Megallos is rare
Caguar is very rare
Illusian is very rare.

Could this explain the change is priority? Just specuguessing.....

when all colonies has atleast some Ilosion and Caguar do now the freighters go back for the Megalos? If it does then if you find another very rare or rare resource (strategic/luxury) that is weighed higher again the Megalos will be ignored.[:(]

and how fast was the system in bringing luxuries to that planet and were they weighted as well. It might be that at first without the spaceport it is treated as a sort of sudo mine until a spaceport is built. ?[&:]






feelotraveller -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/21/2012 4:35:36 PM)

My speculation would be that price is the determinant.  Megallos was only 2.5, whereas Ilosian 4.4. and Caguar 7.5.  The demand for each is the same, they all started the game as demanded.  The Caguar is further away.  I have subsequently got Vodkol coming in too (@ 2.5), but still no Megallos.  The rarities you state are the same as those provided in the Galactopedia.  Not enough of the map uncovered to tell in my game.  Presently only one source of each known to me.

You have the outline of the requests right.   [My complaint is that it sent multiple freighters for Ilosian, each 'reserving' (which doesn't mean reserving at all...) more than needed by my homeworld.  The first freighter went for 580 when the homeworld needed 550, that's fine.  The second went to clean out the planet (even though a spaceport was on order, but that's a minor point) 1700 it reserved but the amount to be collected by the first freighter was included in what it thought it would get so it only collected 1300, well okay... I guess.  On the bright side it meant that I got more transaction fees than I should.  Third freighter again reserved everything the planet had, even though the 1st and 2nd freighters would clean all this out before it got there.  Again I got paid the tariff on the total amount reserved (so for 580 of the Ilosian I got paid the tariff three times over [8|], and when the fourth freighter again rebooked I got tariff for 1300, so for some of the Ilosian I actually got 4 lots of transaction fees).]

The former independent has not been supplied with any luxuries yet and has been provided with all the basics plus some so its spaceport will build pretty quickly.  It only just acquired a demand for Yarras the only luxury my homeworld mines.  There is a reservation for Jakanta (from same mine as Vodkol) which I think is for it but no freighter is yet assigned to collect it.  Past experience suggests that an independent could have got the job and be some distance away, either that or I have to wait for one of mine to get free.  It is bouncing back and forth between getting a bonus for the Ilosian (they are Haakonish) and losing it as 2nd, 3rd and 4th freighters take all the colony has got.

I conquered another independent towards the end of the year (just started year two in game) and although all three of my colonies have polymer sources (6000+ at homeworld, 2000+ at Ilosian colony) a freighter has been assigned to collect polymer (1500) from it.  Seems that this is higher priority than transporting Megallos to the homeworld.  [8|]  Time will tell if this is the start of things grinding to a halt. 



twinkypillow -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/21/2012 5:23:15 PM)

Just throwin it out there.. (it may not apply at all to the current conversation about the direction of freighters) but, I started a new game with the "trade with empires" unchecked and I wanted to know if any of you guys have played any games with this unchecked and for what reason would anyone even uncheck to trade with other empires.. I'm only doing it now for testing purposes.. and have found no reason, so far, to not trade.. perhaps to save my resources from being bought by the "other empires" so i have them to build more?? other than that, I see 0 income in my empire summary from trade.. so thats all it has done....

(ok continue on about how the AI controls freighters.. sorry for interrupting.)




Pipewrench -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/21/2012 5:27:14 PM)

fellotraveller,

should just set up skype on day and this would be solved in a second, or a massive bug report filed..[;)]

Your observations are sound and I am in total agreement as to your frustration.

From what you have said reserved does not necessary mean that the a freighter will soon be dispatched but that a query has been placed. Maybe this is like the constructors and the closest ship is booked if none are available. The AI sometimes does not consider that the freighter already has 2 transport missions in its query?

I'll see if I have time to run a couple of tests. I will hold off on building a port and raising taxes on the home world. This might create a draw for any missing luxury resources to increase the happiness factor. I will then drop taxes and build a port on the new colony and see if freighter shipments that are booked are cancelled with the change in priorities.

I have seen many resources technically strip mined due to demand with little consideration to what is actually already being picked up and what is already being delivered. This leads to strange shipments that are far from full.

Interesting.. thanks for sharing.[sm=character0267.gif]

pumkinfacer22,


yes 3 times,
on certain settings (harsh world) you need every penny early so trading with other empires could not only create a cash flow problem but divert a lot of your freighter network away from your own building program and into a long trade route. Your freighter network is buying from another empire and you are directly paying another empire for those resources.

to try this
spy on the guardians to get their territory map
now watch your freighters as your network knows of new resources that are available. Trade begins.





Bingeling -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/21/2012 5:56:29 PM)

From my little watching of a gas mine in the starting system, it seemed clear that reservations happen the moment the freighter get the task (and starts on it).

That they did not forget the orders in a tiny empire is maybe not so strange. Not a lot of time to get distracted.



feelotraveller -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/22/2012 1:27:15 AM)

I have not seen freighter reservations disappear from strategic resouces.  It seems something specific to luxuries.  And it does not always happen with luxuries either - I've only seen it at colonies mining resources and not mining stations.  But I have not run specific tests, just made close observations over a couple of games to sate my curiousity about about freighter missions.


(There is also the case of disappearing fuel reservations but that seems specific to bookings by refueling -state?- ships and I have not seen any freighter reservations disappear.  Actually observed almost the opposite in a few games where freighters 'overbook' - meaning they book more for immediate pickup than they can hold.  You see this typically at gas giants with 4 resources and the freighter will only clear the first 2 reservations and part of the third, the giveaway is that they are listed as carrying 0 for the fourth resource, and sometimes the third.  These 'overbookings' remain for a long, long time.  Potentially they never go.  Got a case in my current game in first few months; will watch to see if the remainder is ever picked up.)




feelotraveller -> RE: Understanding Cargo/Your resources (9/22/2012 6:07:28 AM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: pipewrench

From what you have said reserved does not necessary mean that the a freighter will soon be dispatched but that a query has been placed. Maybe this is like the constructors and the closest ship is booked if none are available. The AI sometimes does not consider that the freighter already has 2 transport missions in its query?



Sorry I forgot to answer this bit early.

As far as I can tell (but I am pretty sure) whenever a reservation is made an idle freighter is immediately assigned to collect the cargo. Whenever I have seen a reservation appear that one of my freighters is not concurrently assigned to it has turned out that an independent freighter has taken the transport mission. These can take a long time to be completed particularly in the early game when the independent freighters tend to be oiff in the voids of space between the empires. Later in the game it is possible that a freighter from another empire will take the mission too.

With the disappearing reservation phenomenon the freighters still think that they have their reservation. The pick up location will let them have cargo (if they have it) but has cleared the reserved amount meaning that other freighters can get assigned to collect it. I haven't done it but this may be trackable in the expansion planner through the demand reappearing when the reservation disappears.

The problem is that the lower priority missions then never get a freighter assigned. An example from my previous game supports this. Homeworld has 0 steel and thousands reserved (for building freighters...). Nearby there are mulitple steel mines with 4000+ steel and none reserved. If freighters were queuing ahead I would expect these mines to have reservations somewhere in that list.

Most of my observation has been in the (very) early game. Once you have hundreds of freighters and multiple sources of everything it becomes hard (read, impossible for any mere mortal without severe OCD) to untangle the question of who is going where for what.



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