Freighter Network

[Magnum357]

I'm working on a personal mode of mine and I was wondering if anyone out there has made a robust Freighter Network for any modes for SE4? Ya, I know you can easily just place a ship over a planet and its bloakaded, but I was hoping to make some sort of feature that would allow you to make a Fleet of Cargo/Transport ships for your empire and have to move them from plnet to planet in order to create resources for your empire. If this can be done, it would keep your Empire size somewhat limited to the size of your Freighter Network and would give more incentive for small Police ships to guard against other empires rading them or if you have Priates in your mode. Granted, this would probably be impossible for the AI to use correctly, but would be a neat feature for multiplayer.

Any ideas on how this could be done?

[Urendi Maleldil]

You could mod-in remote resource generation into the freighter hulls. That way they'll generate resources for every uninhabited planet they orbit. Or you can add resource point generation to each hull. That would make them generate resources all the time.

It's not exactly what you describe, but I think it gets a similar idea across. As far as I know, there's no way to make ships gather a fixed number of resources while in orbit around an inhabited planet.

[Suicide Junkie]

The main problem is that they don't have to be moving, and can just sit in a 1000-ship stack over your homeworld.

You could make some satellites with the fixed resource generation abilities.
Then if you limit satellites to just 1 per sector, you'd have to spread them around nicely to get the income.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

That's an idea.

[Magnum357]

I'm a little confused. Would these Satilites harvest/mine resources out of a planet or would they just spit out resources wherever they are placed? Also, how would the Freighters be used in all this? How would they get the resouces from these "Satilites" or whatever you want to call them so that the Empire could use it? One of the points I wanted to use about making a Freighter Network was that you have to send Freighters to places to get the Resources and able to have them get attacked by someone.

Or maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way. Is SJ saying the Satilites ARE the freighters and they are placed over certain sectors to produce resources?

[Magnum357]

How about this idea. Create a component that is able to harvest resources from a planet or astroid cluster, but is destroyed after use. Only Freighters would be allowed to use the component and would have to return to the ship yard to get the component repaired so that it can go harvest again. Now the question is can your script in a way to get the component after one turn to destroy itself after it pulled the resources you wanted. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

"Destroyed After Use" only works with components with abilities that can be activated (eg Stellar Manipulation, Emergency Movement and such). It won't work on remote resource generators.

Satellites are a hull type; small immobile pods that you can deploy in space. You can fit weapons onto them and use them as defense, or sensors or remote resource generators and use them for civilian purposes.

There is no way in hell you'll ever going to get a freighter network to work without having to use more workarounds than is really warranted.

(Oh, and btw, you can edit your posts so you don't have to post again if you want to say something after you've posted)

[geoschmo]

You could make the freigter hull generate resources as was posted earlier, and then just make it a rule for your players that they must make the friegthers actually move around. There is no way to force them to move them in the game mechanics, But it would be fairly easy to verify. If you warp into an opponents system and he's got hundreds of freighters sitting around he's basically busted. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Get a group of players to buy into the idea and it could be quite cool actually.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

"Yarr! Life as a pirate be good these days, now that thar-them freighters actually carry resources! Yarr!" http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[Puke]

this would be a pretty heavy game change (and its not a totally original idea), but how about this:

planets generate a minimal ammount of resources. to get more resources for your empire, you have to recycle ships. recycling will give you more resources than the original construction cost.

Freighters could be of three types - an all organic hull, an all mineral hull, or an all radioactive hull. It would have to have built in movement, and such. colony worlds could have "freighter construction" spaceyards that are good for constructing nothing but freighters.

The reason you recycle them at your homeworld instead of where they were built, is that your homeworld starts with a recycling faciltiy that gives a significant bonus to recycling income. It may not be proffitable to recycle the ships without this bonus.

The reason that you would want to build a limited freighter spaceyard instead of a general purpose spaceyard, is that freighters would take a year to build at a regular yard - but a freighter yard would have 10x the build rate. due to the high cost, freighters would have to have no maintenance.

also, the high cost (and relative short build time) of a freighter is a reason that you build and recycle them, instead of just building and recycling regualar ships (which would also be good for combat, or whatever).

cheers

[geoschmo]

Puke, great minds think alike. SJ and I were having a conversation about this very a little while ago. Your idea is almost exactly what we came up with. I was thinking you wouldn't need to have the freighters be more expensive though. Say the freigthers are cheap enough to build at a colony in one turn. Then you build a stream of them and send them back to your homeworld to be scrapped. There is nothing to stop you from building them at your homeworld too, but if you do the percentages right, say 120% scrap return, then you aren't exactly going to get rich by just building and scrapping merchant ships at the homeworld. You'd need lots of colonies sending streams of them home to expand your empire. Plus if you are building merchants at home you aren't building war ships or colony ships. And that's a bad thing. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

For it to work though you'd need to remove the orbital yards from the mod. Otherwise you could get around having to travel by building a bunch of space stations to crank out merchants.

[Puke]

or at least remove the orbitals ability to build freighters. in stock, very few things use organics. you could remove orgs from ships entirely, and use it as a pre-req to build freighters.

orbitals would have a 0 organic rate.

[douglas]

Better change that organic rate to 1. 0 would mean that the organics cost is completely ignored in construction, both in time to complete and in resources actually paid.

[geoschmo]

So you are saying a yard with organic rate of zero can still build with organics? I don't remember hearing of that before.

[Captain Kwok]

Yes. It will build with an unlimited number of organics and won't count against your stockpile.

[douglas]

It works the same with two build rates at 0 - both resources will be completely ignored for construction at that location. All three 0's will cause no construction to occur at all, however.

[geoschmo]

That's interesting. I'll have to remember that. Might be a way to take advantage of that in a mod.

[Will]

If that's the case, then you can have something like the following:

-No resource production facilities
-Homeworld type spaceyard (call it a "Spaceport") constructs at a rate something like 2000/100/2000
-Spaceport produces 2000 organics/turn, and can store 2000 organics
-Spaceport has scrap efficiency of 110%
-Spaceport takes an extremely long time to construct, basically limiting it to Homeworld-only until expansion reaches the point that you can afford to spend time on building another one.
-Colony type spaceyard (call it "Launch Pad") constructs at a rate of 0/2000/0
-Launch Pad also produces 2000 organics/turn, and stores 2000 organics
-Freighter hulls cost 2000 organics
-All other hull types cost some amount of organics; say a Frigate could be 50 organics, a Heavy Carrier could be 500 organics
-Remove organic cost from almost all other components; "rare" components could have an organic component
-Add in freighter components, which "cost" some amount of minerals and/or radioactives; colonies with Launch Pads produce these at no mineral or radioactive cost. Colonies with Spaceports produce these at cost, but value is gained from "trade".
-Remove Resupply Depots, and replace with Carrier Battles-style supply ships/bases. These hulls will have some maintainence cost, all other hulls will have 100% maintainence reduction. The idea here is "maintainence" = "supply".
-You can keep orbital yards, but only at extremely low organic production, say 2000/25/2000; organics becomes a metaphor for manpower, so an orbital yard depends on the manpower from the Spaceport it orbits to construct.

So that's a very, very rough outline of what could be done. I would have to think some more about what to do with "extra" facility space on colonies, the base construction rate for colonies (without Launch Pad) and a bunch of other stuff I probably can't imagine right now. But that's the start of an idea.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

And if you only have the ability tag for one or two resources? Will that work to prevent construction with the other resource(s)?

[douglas]

The absence of a space yard ability is treated exactly the same as 0 for that ability as far as build rate is concerned. The only difference is that a 0-rate space yard will enable scrapping, mothballing, retrofitting, etc., but a component with no space yard abilities at all will not.

[Magnum357]

Wow! I like that system a lot and I'm going to try too implement it somehow. Question for will though, why do you suggest implementing removoing resupply depots? I understand what you mean by making your military forces use supply as its maintance, but if you just are concerned about building a Freighter Network, you don't have to add that feature, right?

Also, I would imagine it would be too difficult for the AI to use this effectively?

[Puke]

yeah, this would have to be multiplayer-only. theres no way the AI could be scripted to send freighters to the right place for scrapping, or even to scrap them at all.

of course, if you gave the AI enough bonuses or special traits, they wouldnt NEED to have freighters at all. then it would be a human player with a freighter network, vs normal AI.

[Will]

Well, I was originally thinking maintainence-free freighters only, but since all hulls are going to cost some amount of organics, eventually you will hit a point where the maintainence on those ships would cause problems. You could make it all maintainence-free, though. Come to think of it, just strategizing for the production and delivery of the freighters would be enough of a hassle without having to think about maintainence and/or supply issues.

Modification then: three kinds of spaceyard facilities.
1. Spaceport, same as before; constructs at 3000/100/3000 (might want to tweak those values to account for population bonuses). Produces 2000 organics/turn, stores 2000 organics. Scraps at 110% efficiency, and can resupply. Costs 100k organics to build.
2. Launch Pad, same as before; constructs at 0/2000/0, produces 2000 organics/turn, stores 2000 organics. Costs almost nothing to build (1 organic?), it's assumed that the colony ship already has the materials, and it only requires a bit of work to set it up. Upgrades to Spaceport.
3. Military Base; constructs at 1500/50/1500, produces 50 organics/turn, stores 250. Can resupply ships, and provides extra unit spaces. Maybe higher tech gives ship/fleet training. Costs 20k organics to build, maybe more at higher tech. Possibly would also upgrade to Spaceport (or a derivative, Military Spaceport, with the training, unit spaces, etc included).

[douglas]

There's one major problem with that setup, Will. The Launch Pad is vastly superior to the other two space yard types for any kind of construction. If that's really what you want, fine, but if the Launch Pad is intended solely as a freighter-building place, you need to change it. Maybe make one version for mineral freighters (0/2000/1) and one for radioactives freighters (1/2000/0) and require both resources for non-freighter ships?

[Will]

AH! See, I knew I was missing something important. The mineral-only Launch Pad and the radioactive-only Launch Pad sounds right. And change non-freighter hulls to require some minerals and rads, to ensure that all ships cost at least some in both resources.

[Parasite]

Will said:
...eventually you will hit a point where the maintainence on those ships would cause problems.



I would not think Maintenance would be a problem. More Maintenance for more frieghters means automaticly more resources coming in to pay for them. It can all be balanced out. The thing then that matters is the time (distance) it takes to get back to a scrap yard.

More distance -> more turns of maintenance -> less profit -> Stretched supply lines.

This sounds like it is as it should be.

[Will]

Yes, but it becomes a micromanagement headache if maintainence is included for Freighters. You would need to find the nearest Spaceport, figure out how long it would take a Freighter to make it to that Spaceport, figure out how much resources would be returned from scrapping the Freighter, and compare that to the cost of building and transporting the Freighter. This is supposed to be fun, right?

The whole point to this mod (in my view) is: to focus on developing and protecting trade routes within an empire; to introduce real blockading, where you need some firepower to enforce it, not a little scout sitting over a planet; to show the flow of resources, instead of having them magically appear each turn; to add another layer of strategy in economic sabatoge; etc.

[Suicide Junkie]

Dude, you are way overcomplicating it.

It is a simple scrap profit give 20 turns worth of maintenance, so don't build any freighters more than 20 turns away from the scrap facility.

Where 20 is an arbitrary number depending on how you set it up.

[Will]

Yes, you could set it so there is a large number of turns that you have to still turn a profit. It would still be micromanagement I think. For one, part of the strategy of playing a mod like this would be organizing convoys with armed escort, which would take some time, which would need to be accounted for in the distance. Also, when you think about it, you would be paying maintainence for what is essentially a big cargo hold of a resource. Say each Freighter has a 15000 mineral "cargo" component. Then you're paying maintainence on that -- paying resources you already have, for resources that you "have" but can't use yet -- until it gets back to the scrap facility. Essentially, the longer a Freighter would travel, the more resources that would "magically" disappear from the hold.

[Magnum357]

I think I sort of agree with Will, I look at these Freighters as "Civilan" Freighters which would not require your Empire/Military to maintain them as there repective Corperation/Organization would do that for you.

I'm a little confused though why you would need both a Organice type Spaceyard and an Radioactive type space yard to make this work. Could someone please explain why you need to do this to make the Freighter network work right?

[Will]

The problem, as was noted by douglas and originally overlooked by me, is that if you have a facility that has SY abilities of 0/2000/0, it will construct anything (including warships) with zero cost for minerals and radioactives. Having a Mineral Launch Pad (0/2000/1 construction rate) will ensure that it can only effectively build Mineral Freighters. Same for Radioactive Launch Pad (1/2000/0) building only Radioactive Freighters.

[Magnum357]

Ok, I think I understand what you mean. You have to give each "Lauch Pad" shipyard at least 1 point of either Mineral or Radioactive Construction capability otherwise it will construct at no cost. But why do you need BOTH a Mineral Lauch Pad (constuction cost 0/2000/1) and a Radioactive Constuction Pad (Constuction cost 1/2000/0)? Can't you just get by with a Lauch Pad that has a Constuction capability of 1/2000/1?

[douglas]

The Launch Pad needs to build at least one resource at no cost or there's no point to its existence. The whole reason to build freighters is that they will yield lots of non-organics when scrapped, and they have to cost a correspondingly large amount to build to make that work.

[Magnum357]

Yes, I understand that. The Organics are basically used to built the Freighters and are metephorically your workforce you might say. But what I want to know is why do you need two types of Lauch pads? Can't you just make one launch pad build with 1/2000/1 capability?

[Will]

You're still missing the point. Having a spaceyard with one or two of the resources at 0, means the spaceyard can construct UNLIMITED amounts of that resource. You get money from scrapping a "Mineral Cargo Hold" component that costs, say, 10k minerals. If the Launch Pads constructed at 1/2000/1, then it would take 10,000 turns to build a Mineral Freighter. If the Launch Pads constructed at 0/2000/1, then it would take one turn to build a Mineral Freighter.

[douglas]

A freighter must yield a large amount of (non-organic) resources when scrapped. This requires either an insanely high scrap return at the spaceport (not desirable) or a high (non-organic) construction cost, so freighters cost a lot to build. Freighters are also supposed to be built quickly at a Launch Pad, so the Launch Pad must either have a high (non-organic) construction rate or build at no cost in the appropriate resource. A construction rate of 1/2000/1 satisfies neither of those two requirements.

[Magnum357]

Ah, ok. I think I get what you mean. So you need that "0" value in order for the Freighters to get produced fast. Now can someone tell me how to get the Scraping of ships to that 110% value in the game? I don't know where in the Data files too look.

[douglas]

Yes, the 0 rate is needed to allow fast (and free) construction of freighters. The 1 in the other resource is required to prevent fast construction of anything else.

The ability for high-return scrapping is Resource Reclamation, and it's used in stock by the Ultra - Recycler facility.

[Magnum357]

Got another question. Is it good to keep the Scrap percent cost at 110%? I was thinking of going higher, but not sure if that is wise for this to work. Also, I decreased the resource storage values considerably because I want to make the Frieghter network to be more valuable, at least that is my theory. I might be wrong with that.

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

If you want to make the freighter network work, set the scrap percent to something like 150% or so. If you keep it at 110%, the revenue is just simply too small and you're going to struggle economically, and the few battles that will be fought will be fought with small, cheap, outdated ships.

[douglas]

110% is sufficient. The freighters will be built at no cost in the scrap resource thank to the 0 construction rate of the Launch Pad, so you don't need a really high scrap return to get a decent profit from them. Meanwhile, you probably don't want repeatedly building and scrapping ships at the spaceport to be a viable source of income except as a last resort, so the scrap return shouldn't be much higher than 100%.

[Magnum357]

Are you sure? I did give my Frieghters in my mode 0% Maintance and set scraping at 110%, but I'm a little concern about the 110 figure. Doesn't seem like much. Would haveing many launch pads sending Frieghters increase this amount considerably?

[Strategia_In_Ultima]

In a word: Yes.

[douglas]

Say you have mineral freighters that cost 10000/2000/0 to build and 10 colonies with 0/2000/1 mineral Launch Pads building them. Each colony will produce one such freighter per turn at no minerals cost. Each turn, assuming safe routes and after the first freighters from each world have had time to reach the spaceport, you will gain 10000 * 10 * 1.1 = 110000 minerals from scrapping freighters. Assuming resource costs in general are on about the same scale as stock, that's quite a substantial income, especially coming from just 10 planets.

The overall rate of income is per Launch Pad and can be easily scaled simply by changing the build cost of the freighters. In fact, you don't even need a scrap return above 100% at all, since the build cost is never actually paid anyway. It just needs to be sufficiently higher at a Spaceport than at a Launch Pad that it's almost always worth taking the time to send the freighter to the Spaceport before scrapping it. Also, you could have technologies that increase the effectiveness of your Launch Pad-based mining by giving more expensive freighter hulls or components. The extra cost is never actually paid and does not affect build times, so it only affects the gain from scrapping.

[Parasite]

You would still need to pay to build the ship right? even if it has a "0" build amount, it means you can build as much as you want, but I think you would still need to pay for it.

So each turn you would spend 10000 * 10 colonies to produce the next round of frieghters when you scrap them you would get 10000 * 10 * 1.1 back. So you would net 10000 minerals from the ten colonies to spend on other things like warships or building more launchpads.

Also the "1" rads able to be built means that the frieghter engines and movement would need to be modded or adjusted somehow. Possibly the bridge and engines could just cost organics, then it is getting better.

[geoschmo]

What he's doing there is taking advantage of the bug where if you mod a construction queue to have a 0 rate in minerals it will build at an infinite rate in minerals and not deduct the minerals from your totals. So the answer to your question is, no, you don't actually pay to build the ship. At least not minerals. In his suggestion you would pay mainly organics and get back minerlas when you scrap it.

[Puke]

interesting, this sort of fits in with the organics based economics model from my old GritTech mod, and the more recent (and actually complete & published) Grit-Econ mod.

Just working off the numbers that you quoted (sure, they can be lowered) I think thats too much profit. Rather than lowering them much, I think it would be better to actually make the empire pay for the mineral cost of the ship. That way, you would have to produce enough resources (could still have a 1 turn build rate) to make it worth building the freighter in the first place.

Also, it may be good if the launch pad generated resources. That way, you would be incented to place a mineral launch pad on a high mineral planet. you would be incended to place a radioactives launch pad on a high radioactives planet.

[geoschmo]

Puke said:
Also, it may be good if the launch pad generated resources. That way, you would be incented to place a mineral launch pad on a high mineral planet. you would be incended to place a radioactives launch pad on a high radioactives planet.

The idea though, as I understood it, was to disassociate resource production from facilities and make it dependant on a steady stream of merchant traffic flowing around the empire.

[Puke]

well, right.. but youve got to be able to build your initial ships somehow. would the original colony construction and freighter investment be funded completely by the homeworld?

and would resource bonues on planets be simply ignored, then?

if thats the way of things, you might completely change the gameplay, and reduce all planets to one slot each. that way their colony type would be directly related to what facility they had on them.

[Magnum357]

Ya, I sort of agree with Puke. In my mode, you still need to have Mineral/Organic(Workforce)/Radioactive facilities to produce Resources for you. The Frieghter Network is in my mode to give you an "Extra Boost" of income for your empire, not as the sole basis of income. Besides, how would the AI build anything without stock resource facilites? Got to give em a chance right? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Another problem I'm having is resource storage. In stock play, you have 50000 points for each resource. I was thinking of lowering this amount considerably, but am not sure if this is wise. In my mode, I set this at about 5000 points, so far, my frieghters are going the Shipyard to be scraped at a fairly regular basis (at 110% scrap). The game seems to give me the extra income for one turn, but the next turn it sets back to 5000 points. What I want to know is it better to just keep the storage value at 50k like in a stock game? Or would setting the storage value of things at lower values make this Frieghter Network idea more valuable (and more costly if your Frieghters are destroyed)?

Also, I wanted to make the Storage values low because it would create more incentive to build Storage Facilities on Colonies instead of just tying to build as many Launch Pads as possible.

[Suicide Junkie]

The main problem with stock storage facilities is not how much they store compared to the base/minimum per empire.

Their problem is that they do not store much compared to how many resources you get from an extractor.
Instead of storing a couple turns worth to spend once, you could replace that storage facility with an extractor and get more resources to spend ALL the time.

In Carrier Battles mod, I increased the storage per facility to 200k. Now it actually has a considerable benefit compared to an extractor... You can have 1000 minerals each and every turn, or you might want 200 turns worth of storage for emergency spending all at once.

[Magnum357]

Ok, so you decided to make Storage Facilites very valuable (compared to stock) by increasing their Storage capacity by 10X. I was thinking the same thing too.

But you only answered half of my question. In my example above, I've set Storage capacity as low (at least initially) to experiment with the idea of "one turn profit" you might say. Right now in my mode, Frieghters take a little time to build (about 5 months average depending on design) and move at a limited speed. When they reach the Shipyard for scraping, I get that 110% pay which seems to boost my resources above the limit for one turn. After that, the program sets my Storage Resource limit back to the 5000 value the next turn. What I want to know is if this method is useful in a mode or is it just a waste of time/money/energy to have an extra boost of income for one turn?

What if I had a large fleet with Maintance above my extraction/trade/storage? Would this extra "one turn profit" margin be useful or a waste of time as it wouldn't help much?

[douglas]

The storage limits are only applied at the very end of the turn when all spending for that turn has already been done. As long as you are spending the income immediately, the storage limits are irrelevant; they only limit how much you can keep to spend the next turn.

[Magnum357]

I see. Sounds like then there really is no "one turn profit" like I had thought. So seting the storage values low won't really do much except limit how much excess spending you can do. If this is the case, I think I probably will set it back to 50K then.

[Wolfman77]

You can only carry over your maximum resource storage from one turn to another. If you have it set at 5000 that will be the most you can have at the start of a turn untill you buils more storage facilities. 5000 sounds a little low if your ships scrap out at 11000 though.

You can mod in stock resource facilities as AI only if you want, then the AI can do their normal thing and you can have the freigters for human players. If you want them for just a bonus then 110% might even be too high, unless you had freigter hulls that were less at the begining of the game, like 2000 then after reaserching you got more expensive ones. Otherwise they might be too powerfull at the begining and too weak at the end of a game. Trial and error is the only real way to know as I don't think anyone has tried this before to the extent you are.