Aurora - Dwarf Fortress In Space

Tamren wrote:

Couple new questions:
- How would I go about training a good geology team? From what I understand I just have to drop them off on a rock somewhere and pick them up when they tell me there is nothing left to do. But this only works on a colony right?

To expand on LtWarhound's answer, geology teams can search for materials on planets and moons, not asteroids and comets. They can make a huge difference, generally adding to the minerals on a body by about 50% or so (at a very rough guess). Also in the recent versions of the game many orders automatically form a colony at the body, and dropping off teams is one of them, so you don't need to make the colony before you drop off the team anymore.

- What do I need to start civilian shipping? I had a freighter designed with 5 cargo bays. But my economy tanked before I could make any starports. Are they required?

I am not sure if starports have secondary benefits for civilian shipping, the main purpose is as external Cargo Handling systems. All loading and unloading times at a body are reduced by the Starport level + 1. This is especially important at first, when your freighters are smaller and can fit fewer of their own cargo handling systems, and before you upgrade those cargo handling systems to be more effective.

Tamren wrote:

Looking at Yonder's posts make me think my efforts are a little too small scale. I have yet to make a ship bigger than 120 kilotons. Anything bigger just takes far too long. But I've also been a bit lazy about pre-fabricating ship components, that will likely help a lot.

Before getting up to 150ktons in this last game the largest I've gotten my civilian ships up to was 140 ktons. 120ktons are already some seriously large ships that can fit lots of terraforming components, asteroid miners, cargo bays, whatever else you are doing.

One thing I'm not sure about is how many slipways I should be adding to each shipyard. Any more than three and it can take many years just to add another slipway. So would it be better to just maintain more shipyards with fewer slipways?

My shipyards generally have 3-6 slipways. I can see going higher for really small shipyards, like for 3000 ton or smaller military vessels or something, or 1000 ton FAC yards, but for anything else the higher numbers of slipways aren't used as much, and make for a less flexible system, especially when it comes time to moving them to newer colonies.

Also, do orbital habitats count as part of the colony they orbit? From what I can tell they are designed to help support a population in a hostile place without the hassle of terraforming. I'm still not quite sure how to use them.

So Orbital Habitats add "perfect" living space to any body. Lets say that you had an Orbital Habitat that can hold 100k people on a partially terraformed planet. While there are less than 100k people on the planet they are all living on the station, they are still available as workforce though, the idea being that they mine or research or whatever during their shifts, but they have a hospitable environment to sleep and spend the rest of their time. Once the population gets large enough it spills over to actually use the infrastructure on the planet. Orbital Habitats can be used on any body, you can even have people working and living on Asteroids with them.

Note that they only work when in orbit around a body though, they need to be empty for transit. (The real reason is because the population code requires it, but imagine they are packed up for transport or something) So you have to put the Orbital Habitat in place, then ship in colonists.

Also note that in some ways Orbital Habitats are actually better than Colony Cost worlds, the installation itself is supposed to take care of so many of the population's needs that the percentage of population in the food and maintenance sectors is much reduced, so there are more useful workers available.

Lastly, can you give me a rundown of all the different weapon types? The official website has a tutorial for this... but its blank. Weapons, shields and sensors are something I haven't touched yet.

I'll see if I can get that for you tomorrow.

clever id wrote:

Tagged for Yonder's AARs. Thanks for reminding me to install this on the new computer.

Glad you are liking them! Sadly between the holidays and Skyrim I haven't had the time for more of the game for a bit, but luckily because of the AAR I won't come back to it later and forget what the heck I was doing and have to restart!

Yonder wrote:

To expand on LtWarhound's answer, geology teams can search for materials on planets and moons, not asteroids and comets. They can make a huge difference, generally adding to the minerals on a body by about 50% or so (at a very rough guess). Also in the recent versions of the game many orders automatically form a colony at the body, and dropping off teams is one of them, so you don't need to make the colony before you drop off the team anymore.

Not entirely true. I tried dropping my geology team on an asteroid I mined out and after about 6 months of work they discovered a 1000-ton deposit of Corindium. Rather underwhelming.

The autocolony is really handy. One annoying thing I ran into was that terraforming ships arriving in orbit wouldn't start a colony and do any work. I ended up using a colony ship to transfer over 1 worker which bugged the game but made the colony.

Tamren wrote:

Not entirely true. I tried dropping my geology team on an asteroid I mined out and after about 6 months of work they discovered a 1000-ton deposit of Corindium. Rather underwhelming.

Hmm... No I need to figure out exactly what the rule is, maybe it's anything about a certain mass and that was a really large Asteroid?

The autocolony is really handy. One annoying thing I ran into was that terraforming ships arriving in orbit wouldn't start a colony and do any work. I ended up using a colony ship to transfer over 1 worker which bugged the game but made the colony.

There are several different places you can tag a body as a colony. One of them is the "Potential Colony Sites" screen, another is that screen that filters and sorts the bodies by their mineral amounts. I think you can also do it from the system overview page.

Yonder wrote:
Tamren wrote:

Not entirely true. I tried dropping my geology team on an asteroid I mined out and after about 6 months of work they discovered a 1000-ton deposit of Corindium. Rather underwhelming.

Hmm... No I need to figure out exactly what the rule is, maybe it's anything about a certain mass and that was a really large Asteroid?

I've had no problems using Geo-teams on any thing I can place a colony on. Asteroids, comets, I've found minerals on them. It can take a while, and there is no sign the team is actually doing anything, so that may have caused the confusion. Asteroids and barren moons are what I use for geo-team training.

Shipyards, I normally make 2 or 3 civilian shipyards, one set up for the big projects (larger freighters, jump ships, terraformers, asteroid miners, fuel processing ships, etc) and one for smaller stuff (small fast freighters, colony ships). Then 3 naval shipyards, one sized for destroyers (6 to 8 thousand tons), one for cruisers (9 to 15 thousand tons) and a FAC facility (1000 tons). The number of slipways per yard is dependent on need - fewer early on and add more later to allow for conversions. The FAC facility tends to have 10 slipways, since my naval doctrine tends to use them a lot. Both for fleet elements and system defense.

Re: geology teams. If I recall correctly, their discovery time and amount are tied into the size of the body being processed. So asteroids will give you small amounts and will take a long time to discover.

To create colonies, as Yonder mentioned, you can click on a button in the bottom of the system body screen (F9) after highlighting the appropriate body from the list.

Weapons... that's a lengthy topic. In a nutshell, there are two basic types: missiles and beams. Missiles are a bit complicated. You really should find a tutorial or two on how to successfully deploy missiles. Beams are a bit simpler. They use capacitors to discharge a beam of a given strength. Capacitors are recharged with a power plant. You control targeting with beam fire controls. There are several types of beams. Here are a few examples:

Lasers are your run of the mill main go to beam weapons. The beam diminishes over distance. The damage it inflicts is 1 block (please someone correct me if I got this wrong) wide (so a beam of strength 3 will cut through 3 layers of armour).

Microwaves destroy shields and internal electrical components (e.g. sensors and fire controls).

Masons ignore shields and armour and inflict 1 point of damage per shot to internal components.

Gauss is best at point defence, capable of firing several "bullets" per shot.

This article should give you a reasonable overview of beam weapons.

Sweet thanks.

I have three geosurvey teams now, each one is climbing towards 120 skill. I hope to get them to 150 someday. Right now I'm having them practice on any asteroid 400km or larger. So far they have discovered numerous deposits on asteroids ranging from 10k tons to 200k tons. My very first team found over 1.5 million tons on the moon and went on to find 100k tons of Neutronium on Mars. Score! On one game I totally shafted myself by running out. Lesson learned there.

I finally managed to get some civilian industry going. I'm making ships in the 130k ton range now. Its AMAZING how fast a ship builds when you prebuild all of its major components. I used to worry about having enough slipways, but I've discovered that its better to have multiple shipyards with fewer slipways. Makes it easier to switch around to different designs. I'm currently colonizing and terraforming mars. My first generation colony ships can carry 200k people. Which in retrospect was a little low. I'm building a second one and I'm considering making a new design. So far there are three civilian mining colonies, including one on a moon by Neptune. They come with their own mass drivers too! Nice touch. So far the only civilian ship is a luxury liner carrying people to the Mars colony in style. Hopefully that will pick up speed.

Next on the agenda is making some dual grav/geo scouts and sending them through the jump points to poke around. Hopefully they won't find anything, I literally don't have a single sensor in the Sol system other than the deep scanners on Earth. I also designed an engine-less terraforming ship and a tug to pair it with. The tug has 40 engines on it, it can fly at .03% cee! I'm not sure how much they slow down when you get it to lug a 250 kiloton terraformer, will find out once my shipyard capacity catches up.

EDIT: Aaaaand Mars is rioting. Send in the troops! My first troop carrier seems to be a failure in design. It has 10 troop bays which are supposed to hold a battalion each, but I can only fit a single ground unit.

EDIT: So what kind of designs do you guys use for your freighters? So far I've been working with three different sizes. 5 cargo bays, 10 cargo bays and 25 cargo bays. All of them are designed to add up to multiples of 50 and they increase in cost (1300-1600-2500bp) and speed (2000-3000-4000km/s) as they get bigger. I don't really use the smaller ones, I made them so that the civilians would have access to a (relatively) cheap design.

What I'm wondering is which of these designs is the most efficient. The bulk of a freighter's time is spent either loading or in transit. So I have enough cargo loaders to keep the time in port under 12 hours. (The light freighter loads in 5). Smaller freighters are MUCH faster, which means quicker turnaround times and faster delivery overall. On the other hand bigger freighters are much more efficient in terms of cost per ton.

Time to break out the calculator. Lets assume the orbits are such that the trip from Earth to Mars is 200 million k. If we factor in the loading/unloading time the formula for efficiency on a one way delivery should be Cargo/Travel+Loading*2 and give us a figure in units of cargo delivered per hour of travel time. Just for comparisons sake I made a gigantic 300 kiloton freighter for comparison which moves at 1000km/s.

Light: 23.4h / 5 cargo = 4.68
Medium: 33.8h / 10 cargo 3.38
Heavy: 52.4h / 25 cargo 2.09
Giant: 79.8h / 50 cargo 1.596

So as it turns out giant freighters get your cargo there faster. Lets see how much I'm paying for that efficiency.

Light = 1298bp / 5 = 260
Medium = 1608bp / 10 = 161
Heavy = 2510 / 25 = 100
Giant = 2945 / 50 = 59

So it looks like bigger is better. A bigger freighter will transfer more units of cargo over time and at a cheaper cost in resources. On the flipside they also take ages to build and massive slipways. If you just need a little job done fast like delivering a single mass driver. It can be useful to have some of these little courier freighters to fill the gaps.

Also I just discovered that setting the number of NPR races at worldgen to zero reduces my end turn lag to almost nothing. Huzzah! From what I understand the game does generate more as you explore. So I'm sure I will bump into something eventually.

EDIT: I just discovered that I can make PDCs into terraformers. What I was doing before was tacking them onto an orbital habitat so that they counted as a space station and hence could be constructed by factories instead of a shipyard. Only orbital habitats weight in at 250 kilotons (which is why most shipyards couldn't make em) and are effectively wasted space and excess weight. PDC terraformers are even more bare bones, and you can even make them in sections if you have to.

The only downside is that I can't find a way to tow a PDC between planets. I would have to ship them in and assemble them using factory power. In a really hostile place like Venus this would require orbital habitats to support the workers. I'm looking into using some engineer brigades to fill the same purpose. Supposedly each brigade counts as a factory, but this isn't displayed anywhere in the stats menu.

I also started to experiment with tugs and making asteroid miners and fuel harvesters without engines. Tugs also double as tankers in my empire. They work pretty well, but the big problem with using them is that you can't tractor a whole task group at once. And when you tractor a group it splits them up out of the original task force. So they are really only good for moving something once, repeat orders just get irritating.

Been hitting some bugs as well. I have an empty colony that puts the game in a loop when I try to abandon it. And sometimes my geosurvey teams will teleport back to earth.

That's a lot of info to respond to, so I'll just address a few points.

First advice is... plan for long term. Especially when it comes to colonies. It's ok for a colony to take 150 years to get built up. Don't gimp yourself trying to get it perfect and operating at peak efficiency right NOW!

Always watch your money flow. It's ok to have a negative income for a while, when working on large projects, but it's very easy to get your economy into a deflationary mode and run out of money. Once you're out of money, it's a real PITA to get yourself out of that hole.

I find it very helpful to have multiple ship variants. As you already concluded, small ships for quick zippy jobs; large behemoths for more long term projects. You'll probably have to adjust your strategies and add new ship designs as you uncover new systems with their own unique challenges.

About discovery... you can sort of cheat your way a bit. New systems aren't generated until you actually discover them. Which means that all the bad guys in them aren't generated until you actually make the jump and "create" them. So, it may be a good idea to procrastinate in your home system until you are well set up. Then uncover one system and integrate it into your empire before moving on.

And finally, generating another empire is like having another player playing against you. They start when you do, with similar tech as you. As the game progresses they will progress, more or less, along with you. So when you eventually meet them, they'll be somewhat of a challenge since they are at a similar level of tech. But that also means that the AI is playing a full game in parallel to you. They are also sending out survey ships to other systems and possibly spawning precursors and other bad things in the universe. When you do not allow them to spawn, I don't think you'll find a fully developed race in your game.

I turned off generating NPRs at the start because I hated having my turns lag when they stumbled upon something. Anyhow its been a couple of restarted games since and I learned a couple of new things.

- Its not a great idea to make scouts grav and geosurveyors at the same time. Weighs them down and makes em slow.
- Its handy to have a lot of scouts, but not essential. By the time you are ready to exploit any resources they find, they will already have scouted another two star systems.
- Find a good source of Sorium and make fuel from day 1. Fuel refineries are dirt cheap to build, so build hundreds. You can always turn them off if you need to. When you start sending out ships with 500000 liter fuel tanks stocks tend to plummet, and generating fuel takes time.

In my current game I started with only 5 research labs and its amazing how slow the pace gets. Unfortunately it looks like I will have to abandon it. I've explored 6 systems already but there just isn't enough minerals within easy reach. Sol had less than 50k Corundium in it, including Earth. And half of it was accessibility .6 and stuck on a comet out past Pluto. Even after I sent skilled teams to survey all of the major planets I didn't have much at all. In my previous game I was drowning in resources, my geologists literally started with nothing and found 1.5 million resources on Mars alone.

Just to rub it in the game generated a planet two systems over with a HUNDRED MILLION of every resource on it.

Anyhow even if it wasn't the greatest design. I still like how very symmetrical my scout ship turned out:

Halifax II class Exploration Ship 6,000 tons 580 Crew 2184.5 BP TCS 120 TH 600 EM 0
5000 km/s Armour 1-29 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/10/10 Damage Control Rating 10 PPV 0
Maint Life 13.65 Years MSP 2276 AFR 28% IFR 0.4% 1YR 23 5YR 341 Max Repair 150 MSP

Fusion Drive M-Class (6) Power 100 Fuel Use 50% Signature 100 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 1,000,000 Litres Range 600.0 billion km (1388 days at full power)

Improved Gravitational Sensors (5) 10 Survey Points Per Hour
Improved Geological Sensors (5) 10 Survey Points Per Hour

Four of these ships were paired with a fifth who carried the jump engine with identical tonnage and speed.

Fraser II Jumper class Exploration Ship 6,000 tons 575 Crew 1448.5 BP TCS 120 TH 600 EM 0
5000 km/s JR 5-50 Armour 1-29 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/2/2 Damage Control Rating 9 PPV 0
Maint Life 7.42 Years MSP 1358 AFR 31% IFR 0.4% 1YR 43 5YR 649 Max Repair 324 MSP
Flag Bridge

J6000(5-50) Military Jump Drive Max Ship Size 6000 tons Distance 50k km Squadron Size 5
Fusion Drive M-Class (6) Power 100 Fuel Use 50% Signature 100 Armour 0 Exp 5%
Fuel Capacity 1,000,000 Litres Range 600.0 billion km (1388 days at full power)

Improved Gravitational Sensors (1) 2 Survey Points Per Hour
Improved Geological Sensors (1) 2 Survey Points Per Hour

Pain in the butt with survey ships is military rating for gravitational sensors. So you can make geological survey ships as commercial ships, thereby avoiding degradation and necessary repairs, while gravitational survey ships are classed military grade and therefore must come in for repairs from time to time.

Resources are randomized for the most part. If I get dealt a really bad hand, I'll generally restart. I don't need a perfect bonanza of resources in Sol, but it's nice to not run out of something in the first 100 years.

Random comments:

Tamren, in slow threads like this one I would dispense with your avoidance of double posts. This thread gets very little traffic, but the eyes that do come are interested and understanding, so I would just post each time instead of making edits hours later.

NPR Size: When the RNG determines that an NPR should be generated their is another random table look up to generate various basic types of NPR civilizations, while it's relatively unlikely it can generate either a Colony or Homeplanet of a multi-system NPR, and I believe when that happens it travels farther down jump points a ways to seed the rest of their Empire. So even if you dispense with starting the game with NPRs you are not necessarily missing out on the chance to fight larger Empires.

As far as Freighters go I like to make a 5 Cargo Hold first freighter, then I go to 20, since that's how many spaces are needed for Terraforming and Research Stations. I haven't gone larger than that (except when I made 25 in earlier games because I thought that was what Terraforming and Research Installations needed) but I can see doing that in the later game, going up to 40, 60, or more. When I make larger freighters I also put more Cargo Handling installations on, in the same proportion, so that there aren't any downsides from making and using the bigger vessels.

Once I start making the large freighters I don't build anymore small ones, but each time I design a new big one I design new small ones as well for the Civvies to use if they so desire.

I prefer separate scouts, one design for geo, one for grav. The grav scouts get jump drives, heavy armor, good passive thermal, huge fueltanks and high speed, so they do tend to be destroyers in their own right. The geo scouts are small, expendable, decent speed, poor armor, decent thermal sensor, and work in packs with a jump drive equipped mothership - which carries extra fuel and some additional repair parts, simply because I keep having grav-scouts mooch parts off the geo-mothership.

What I've found is the grav-scouts tend to survive, but the geo-scouts get munched a lot. That's due to the differences in tasks - the grav scouts aren't in a system as long. So the geos are cheap cheap cheap. Both designs do get a small active sensor, used when the enemy is firing on them so I get some information on who just killed the scout.

And finally, I don't worry about multiple sensors or improving them. The bulk of the time spent surveying a system is travel, not surveying.

I've also played around a bit with sensor buoys, which the scout just drops as they fly by. Jury is still out on them. They can be nice when the scout is running away, since the enemy will fly by the sensor, giving me a chance to get some intel on them... before they blow the sensor up. Which is still intel of its own, lets me know that they are armed and definitely hostile.
*

One doctrinal point I kept flipflopping on was engines in the picket ships. I park a picket ship at every jump point that leads into 'my' space, as a tripwire, a early warning device. Inside my borders, every jump point gets a picket ship. Normally they are the smallest, cheapest, most expendable ships in the fleet. Decent thermal sensor, small active sensor (only turned on when I'm sure they are going to die, so they can get some information on their attackers). These ships are holes in space when parked near (not at, near) a jump point, and with their small size, you need a decent active sensor to spot them. They literally have no thermal signature at all, so passives won't find them.

The thing I never can settle on is if I give them engines. Without, they are dinky, which helps keep them from being spotted, and cheap, for when they are spotted. But, then I have to dedicate a tender to carry them out and plant them. Or replace them. With an engine, they can move to station on their own, and shuffle around to cover holes as needed, but then they need fuel tanks, so they are bigger, easier to spot, and more expensive.

Why a picket on every jump point inside my empire? Dormant grav points.

Yonder wrote:

As far as Freighters go I like to make a 5 Cargo Hold first freighter, then I go to 20, since that's how many spaces are needed for Terraforming and Research Stations. I haven't gone larger than that (except when I made 25 in earlier games because I thought that was what Terraforming and Research Installations needed) but I can see doing that in the later game, going up to 40, 60, or more. When I make larger freighters I also put more Cargo Handling installations on, in the same proportion, so that there aren't any downsides from making and using the bigger vessels.

Once I start making the large freighters I don't build anymore small ones, but each time I design a new big one I design new small ones as well for the Civvies to use if they so desire.

Don't terraformers need 25 holds? That's what all the tutorials and the wiki said. I'll have to double check that. In any case I stopped using terraformer ships. All of my designs are orbital habitats with tens of terraformers tacked on. I use tugs to shift them around.

For freighter sizes I find that I always start with a basic 5 hold design. Even with basic nuclear pulse engines they are light enough to make good speed. By the time I'm ready to begin serious off-planet mining and colonization my scientists have usually made it to Fusion engines which allows me to double the cargo holds to 10 with even better speed. The 10-bays become my basic standard and are generally what the civilians end up building.

Iroquois class Cruiser 90,200 tons 965 Crew 2569 BP TCS 1804 TH 7500 EM 0
4157 km/s Armour 1-179 Shields 0-0 Sensors 1/1/0/0 Damage Control Rating 1 PPV 0
MSP 18 Max Repair 62 MSP
Cargo 50000 Cargo Handling Multiplier 100

Fusion Drive C-Class (30) Power 250 Fuel Use 5% Signature 250 Armour 0 Exp 1%
Fuel Capacity 500,000 Litres Range 199.5 billion km (555 days at full power)

This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes

As engine tech gets better I increase the size in multiples of 5, but I haven't progressed past 25 holds yet in any of my designs. Whenever I upgrade to a new mark of freighter I recycle the design to produce colony ships, spaceliners, asteroid miners etc.

Tamren wrote:

Don't terraformers need 25 holds?

Hmm... Maybe? Now that you mention it I may have just done the math for Research Labs and assumed Terraforming Installations were the same.

Research labs fill up 1000 cargo holds so its almost impossible to carry a whole one. Terraformers are 25, everything else is 5. Infrastructure and trade goods are .5. And minerals are 2500 tons per hold. So for that reason I generally stick to multiples of 5.

Tamren wrote:

Research labs fill up 1000 cargo holds so its almost impossible to carry a whole one. Terraformers are 25, everything else is 5. Infrastructure and trade goods are .5. And minerals are 2500 tons per hold. So for that reason I generally stick to multiples of 5.

Hmm... I wonder if I was drinking while I did this math...

Are you sure it's 1000 and not 100?

Edit: it's 100, a task group of 13 size five freighters carries .65 research labs. I have no idea why I was thinking 20.

Oops yeah its 100. But really I can't think of a reason why I would need to move my research labs away from earth. Unless perhaps you were doing one of the disaster scenarios where you have to evacuate Sol.

Moving my research labs away from Earth is a huge priority of mind actually, because I run into labor shortages on Earth pretty rapidly. When you get into that situation Labs are the easiest thing to move, despite their sizes. Construction factories and shipyards are easiest if you keep them together, so that you can send all of your minerals to one place. The best place for manned mines will be Earth for a few decades, even with some unlucky resources. Fuel refineries are rarely that population intensive, so that leaves Labs.

In my games I always terraform Mars first, if there are good minerals there I keep it empty until it starts to make sense to ship my mines there, if it has poor minerals I start sending my labs there. After Mars I terraform Luna. I'be never been lucky enough to have both Luna and Mars be resource rich, I suppose if I was I would just with their roles after a few decades, but as it is I've had my research based on either Luna or Mars in every game.

Interesting. I'll keep that in mind. In my current game it is is currently 2059 and I am colonizing and terraforming Luna. Mars doesn't have any resources of note on it so I'll probably get around to it later when I need space to grow. I haven't even touched the jump points yet. Most of my efforts are collecting enough resources to get my economy and research running.

It's always a good idea to quickly terraform Mars and get a budding colony going on it. It will boost your economy a great deal when there is two colonies to trade between, rather than just Earth on its own.

Yeah you can never have too much income. And smaller populations grow a lot faster than big ones, so it helps to have multiple colonies.

Are labour shortages really that hard to deal with? In 34 years my population has grown from 500 million to 1.2 billion. Earth has 50 labs, 1000 factories and 1000 mines that will soon be moved to Luna. The workforce there has a 40million surplus. I don't build more labs because I don't have the money to use them.

Admittedly I don't have any ordnance or fighter factories running at all. The worker crunch may come the first time I need war production.

MoonDragon wrote:

It's always a good idea to quickly terraform Mars and get a budding colony going on it. It will boost your economy a great deal when there is two colonies to trade between, rather than just Earth on its own.

Yeah, this is why I always Terraform Mars first, even if the Moon has many more resources (which is the way it was this time around).

Tamren wrote:

Are labour shortages really that hard to deal with? In 34 years my population has grown from 500 million to 1.2 billion. Earth has 50 labs, 1000 factories and 1000 mines that will soon be moved to Luna. The workforce there has a 40million surplus. I don't build more labs because I don't have the money to use them.

I would argue that an income crunch is another form of population shortage, while it's a taxpayer shortage rather than a labor issue. I would say that labour shortages are the hardest shortage to actually deal with, since there is so little you can do in the short term. Financial shortages can be more quickly alleviated by shuffling of Governors in the short term, or stopping production of certain sectors of your economy. Building Financial Centers and Researching the Financial boosts are other hands on things that you can do. For a mineral shortage, once you get the critical mass of Jumpships, freighters, Automated Mines, and Asteroid Miners you can always shift mining to new, better sites, and you can generally even do that fairly quickly. For labor shortages you can't just lessen the amount of production you do, you actually have to shut down entire economic sectors, and those take half a year to get moving again. Other than that all you can really do it install governors that boost population growth, but it will take many decades to really dig yourself out of the hole.

Luckily labor shortages are also the easiest to weather, mineral shortages can totally grind you to a halt, and money shortages generally hit harder and more suddenly and can affect you more than labor shortages generally do.

As another data point, I have been flirting with labor shortages for awhile now in my game. I am 64 years in, and have a combined population of a little over 2.1 billion people, keep in mind, however, that the larger a colony is the larger its Service sector becomes, and the less hospitable it is the higher the Agricultural sector becomes. In my game Luna, Mars, and Earth all have large enough populations that they've hit the minimum productive worker floor of 20% of the population. (Edit: That's the minimum that you can get through expansion of the service sector, expansion of the Agricultural sector due to Colony Cost can go all the way to 100%, leaving no labor. With the default temperature and atmosphere tolerances Venus is in this category prior to any terraforming.)

Here is my breakdown per colony:
Earth:
Total Population: 1.295 billion
Total Workers: 258.9 million
Shipyard Workers: 90.2 million (This is the part that was a mistake, I have more and larger shipyards than an Empire of my size and age should really be trying to maintain)
Maintenance Workers: 4.5 million
Construction Workers: 87.7 million (1754 factories)
Fuel Refinery Workers: 10 million
Financial Center Workers: 17.3 million
Mine Workers: .05 million (Accidentally left one mine behind and haven't bothered moving it)
Scientists: 55 million (55 labs)
Worker Shortage: 5.85 million (2.3% production penalty)

Luna:
Total Population: 431 million
Total Workers: 86.23 million
Shipyard Workers: 10.4 million (Moved some extra civilian shipyards here so that Earth workers wouldn't be "wasted" on them)
Maintenance Workers: 2 million
Financial Center Workers: 17.3 million
Mine Workers: 44.45 million (889 mines)
Worker Surplus: 29.38 million

Mars:
Total Population: 384 million
Total Workers: 76.88 million
Maintenance Workers: 2 million
Scientists: 78 million (78 labs)
Worker Shortage: 3.12 million (3.9% production penalty)

Titan:
Total Population: 16.7 million
Total Workers: 8.27 million
Maintenance Workers: 2 million
Terraformers: 8.75 million (35 Installations)
Worker Shortage: 2.48 million (13% production penalty)

So overall I have a small population surplus, but in specific colonies I have minor shortfalls. I can't send any more Labs to Mars, because it's full, and I'm a little unwilling to have three colonies doing research. I am pretty comfortable with the status quo right now, if necessary the easiest step would probably be to move my Refineries to the moon.

As you can see I have pretty much expanded all of my industry to the limit of what my laborers can support. This is actually significantly beyond what my financial resources can support, but that's ok. I can't come even close to running all of my Shipyards, Mines, Labs, and Factories at the same time, however (almost) all of them can be employed at the same time, and finances can be easily managed by pausing any of those tasks.

That's a lot of workers... I'm still nowhere near that close. I'm very slow at expanding past the borders of earth. More so in my current game because I had a Duranium shortage for a long time, and you need it for everything. I quickly ran out after a decade and the only big deposit was way out on Titania with 600 kilotons. Thankfully my geologists found 800 kilotons on Luna, which is why I'm colonizing it first. Now my mining speed is looking better and I have just over 26 million colonists on the moon.

One flaw in my play is that I don't build freighters or colony ships until I reach internal confinement fusion engines. Usually its because by the time I am in a position to expand, my research has been going on for so long that it reaches a high level of engine tech.

I suppose what I should be doing is making freighter designs from day 1. Conventional engines are almost useless at getting anywhere farther than Mars. So my first geosurvey ships use nuclear pulse engines. It wouldn't take too much effort to put some on a freighter and start shipping infrastructure to Mars or Luna a bit at a time. IRL colonization efforts would probably start small anyway.

Do you maintain a fleet of your own colony ships or do you leave transportation entirely up to the civilians? Also, since they use later tech even my smallest ship is quite expensive. Civilian shipping never really goes anywhere without generous subsidies. Should I make a point of designing small cheap stuff or should I just invest more?

Also does the size of a shipyard affects how many workers it needs? One mistake I always make is to leave my shipyards on continuous capacity expansion. I set it, forget it. And then I realize I'm out of neutronium and come back to find a shipyard that can handle 700000 tons.

Tamren wrote:

Do you maintain a fleet of your own colony ships or do you leave transportation entirely up to the civilians?

I maintain a very small fleet of colony ships, which usually don't do anything. Even a small fleet generally transports passengers faster than Infrastructure can be constructed (or gotten for free on the civilian market), and as you can see once the Colonies are terraformed I still can't go shipping colonists around willy nilly, I have to carefully manage my labor pools.

That said, my small fleet does get some use, one for shipping around small batches of people if I disagree with how the Civvies are doing it. For example, I could fairly quickly move those excess workers from Luna to Earth and Mars if I wanted to, but I don't bother for such minor penalties. I will however, do so for Titan now that I have actually done this analysis and see that they are losing so much productivity there.

The other time I use the Colony Ships is when I switch over to a new colony after the previous one is fully terraformed. At this point I am moving a huge mass of Infrastructure as quickly as my freighters can manage it, which is more than enough to keep up with the small transport fleet. It's also a priority for me to get the Terraforming Installations at the new colony up and running, even if it causes labor shortages elsewhere.

Also, since they use later tech even my smallest ship is quite expensive. Civilian shipping never really goes anywhere without generous subsidies. Should I make a point of designing small cheap stuff or should I just invest more?

As long as your small ship is no larger than 5 cargo holds I wouldn't make one smaller than that (I'd also make my smallest colony liner around that size). When you only have one colony it's hard for the Civvies to make much of a profit, but as the number of colonies increases and (especially) their size increases all of your civvies will start to make steady profit. I have been too poor to invest in Civilian Lines for almost a decade and they are still putting out a two to three 40 kton vessels a year (in total, not each). Now in the early years subsidizing them is indeed a good choice, and one that will help them and you in the long run. It's especially worthwhile to subsidize a line until it has 4-6 of its own ships. They basically experience geometric growth, so if you can help them skip those early slow years it will help a lot.

Also does the size of a shipyard affects how many workers it needs? One mistake I always make is to leave my shipyards on continuous capacity expansion. I set it, forget it. And then I realize I'm out of neutronium and come back to find a shipyard that can handle 700000 tons.

I am pretty sure that the size of the shipyard does indeed affect the number of workers.

In my last game, I decided to not build terraforming facilities. Normally, I always do, but this time my doctrine called for fleets of terraforming ships. I forget how large they were, but 10-15 ship TGs gave out a very reasonable terraforming output. I actually like this doctrine better than the facilities one.

On the downside, ships that match output levels of a facility are more expensive then a facility. But with a good factory base, you can crank out modules at a fairly high pace. Once those, and engines, are built, putting together mega TF ships is pretty quick.

On the upside, they are mobile. Which means that they do not require massive cargo fleets to move them from one planet to another. This allows my cargo fleets to do something else productive, elsewhere, and also allows my cargo fleets to be significantly smaller, thereby recouping some of the costs required to build TF ships.

Most importantly though, they require no worker population to run. That means you can terraform a planet like Venus without population issues. In fact, the conditions of a planet are never a factor in the decision whether you will terraform it or not. You only have to bother with the questions of whether you want to, and how long it will take.

Which leads me to another change in doctrine from my last couple of games. And that's officers/staff. Lately, one of the first things I build are extra academies. Several in fact. I've come to realize you can never have too many officer recruits and/or academics/governors. I keep my academic list clean. Top one or two get work, and at least one extra is kept around just in case. There is nothing worse then losing a vital researcher to an accident and not having replacements.

I also hand out medals to my officers, based on their stats. This ensures they get promotions over crappy ones. And every time I get a new officer recruit that has good specialized stats, I make sure to checkbox his "keep him around" option.

When you go to officer's page (F5?), and select a naval officer, top centre will be a pane describing their details. In the bottom right corner of that top centre pane are a few checkboxes. One of them will say something like "do not retire". All of your assigned captains will not retire by default. It's just the unassigned grunts get cycled out every so often. It helps to "not retire" potentially useful grunts that you know you'll need in the future, even if you don't currently have a job for them.

Recently I've found that orbital platforms make the best fuel harvesters, miners and terraformers. Pretty much the only downside is that you need to tow them into place, but since they rarely get moved around this isn't an issue. A platform ship is one orbital habitat plus however many modules you want.

- They don't need engines.
- No population, fuel or other supplies needed.
- Even if the ship masses millions of tons it counts as a habitat, so you can use industry to make them.
- If you prebuild the major components, assembly is a snap. All they need to do is duct tape them together and add life support. This can take less than a month for a 100 module terraformer.
- When your engine tech improves you can make a stronger tug and a bigger platform. All you need to do is scrap the old platform (you get all the pieces back) and reassemble the modules. Next to no waste!

No jump drive is ever going to be able to handle 2 million tons. So if I can't tow these through a jump gate I will need to rethink my strategy.

MoonDragon wrote:

I also hand out medals to my officers, based on their stats. This ensures they get promotions over crappy ones. And every time I get a new officer recruit that has good specialized stats, I make sure to checkbox his "keep him around" option.

Where is this option exactly? Planetary Governers seem to serve for life. But I keep having to reassign captains to my mining ships because they keep rotating out with other captains with no relevant skills. I should give out medals more often.

I learned early on to despise a shortage of scientists. I always make 10 naval academies at the very beginning. So far it has worked out great. Make a big pool and let the cream rise to the top.

Aha, I see what you mean now. And medals are pretty much marks of excellence right? I need to spend more time in this tab. Having a good captain or governor makes a big difference.

When you make a medal, you can assign how many 'promotion points' it's worth. If you have auto promotion turned on, the game will promote people from each rank with the highest promotion scores. Medals allow you to fudge those scores without being a GM and overriding the game mechanics. For example, every new recruit I get that has crew training score of 100+ gets an extra 500 advancement points from a "merit badge" I give them. Eventually, these guys have a higher chance of being promoted up the ranks, and so I end up with higher ranked people that have higher crew training scores. This is especially useful for army officers, as unit training is dependent upon the commander training scores (all the way up the hierarchy).

MoonDragon wrote:

When you make a medal, you can assign how many 'promotion points' it's worth. If you have auto promotion turned on, the game will promote people from each rank with the highest promotion scores. Medals allow you to fudge those scores without being a GM and overriding the game mechanics. For example, every new recruit I get that has crew training score of 100+ gets an extra 500 advancement points from a "merit badge" I give them. Eventually, these guys have a higher chance of being promoted up the ranks, and so I end up with higher ranked people that have higher crew training scores. This is especially useful for army officers, as unit training is dependent upon the commander training scores (all the way up the hierarchy).

That's really clever, I had no idea you could do that, I thought the medals were purely fluff.

I figured out how to make a medal but I can't find the button to actually give them one. When you press Give Medal it brings up the list, but doubleclicking on the medal doesn't do anything and I can't find any other way to interact with it.