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Aeson -> RE: Private sector not building ships (4/6/2016 4:51:33 PM)
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Check and see how much money the private sector has. If you've been issuing a lot of smuggling missions, have very high taxes, have built many very expensive mining stations or other private stations, have allowed the pirates to kill many freighters which the private sector has had to replace, or have otherwise drained money from the private sector, then it's possible that the private sector cannot currently afford to build more freighters. If the private sector is out of money, then you will need to do something to correct the private sector's balance sheet (cut taxes, reduce upkeep costs for private sector ships and stations, cancel smuggling missions) and wait for the private sector to get to the point where it can build additional freighters.
A short-term solution to the issue of having insufficient freighters is to capture them from independents, pirate factions, or your neighbors, though be warned that attacking freighters belonging to the independents or to an empire with which you are not at war will damage your empire's reputation, harming your relations with all other empires in the game; if the freighter belonged to another empire, then your relations with that empire will suffer due to both the attack you made against that empire when stealing their freighter and the damage that that attack did to your empire's reputation. Also be aware that the ships that you capture are relatively likely to be damaged, sometimes to the point of uselessness (e.g. destroyed hyperdrive or command center), especially if you use a lot of ships or powerful ships to try to capture the freighters.
Some other things you should do:
- Cut back on construction projects (don't start new projects unless you really need the new ships or stations; possibly cancel unfinished projects, preferably ones which are unnecessary, like that fifth defensive base at the homeworld or a second spaceport within a system, far from completion, or unlikely to survive to be completed).
- Check on what the freighters you have are actually doing and where they're going. If there's a consistent pattern, you might have an indication that there's a problem (e.g. all the freighters went to a neighbor's space to get steel; maybe you need to build more steel mines closer to home). Be aware, however, that as automated ships will not normally cancel their missions except if the ship or the mission target is destroyed, so if all your freighters went off on long-distance jumps to get fuel, they're stuck on those long distance jumps even though you now have more fuel mines with more available fuel than you can use close to where those freighters that need fuel are.
- Check on your fuel situation. If only a few points in your empire actually have available fuel and all the ships in your fleet are crowding around those places waiting to get fuel or if most of your fuel sources are clustered in a single area, maybe it's time to build more fuel mines.
- Check on the freighter design and make sure that it has a reasonable range for the size of your empire and for how far the freighters typically have to go in a single jump. Remember that the computer assigns missions to currently-available ships when the computer decides that the mission is needed, and that a freighter will jump from wherever it is to wherever it needs to go to get the resources to be shipped and then jump to the ultimate destination, and will not stop along the way for fuel. It is therefore not a bad idea to provide freighters with a notional range of at least twice the length of the longest jump you expect them to make, or you will have freighters stuck at a third the standard hyperspeed for a considerable period of time. An empire that spans ~5 sectors might want its freighters to have a range of 10 or 15 sectors to avoid having freighters run out of fuel part way through a mission.
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