Fuel economy question

[ogredpowell]

I’m early mid game (I think- tier 3 weapons, conquered two neighbors). Question on fuel and decreasing usage/trade

I produce more resources than EVERYTHNG but fuel- which is -240. I think I have lots of fuel mines….

I’m buying enough that I don’t have a ‘deficit’ in storage

1) is this normal?
2) is there a way to see who I’m buying it from? What is the AI doing differently than I am to have a net positive?
3) how do I decrease usage? My ships all have one solar panels and I THINK my stations have enough solar panels to cover (ex energy collection 150, energy use 140).

[EsoEs]

I SUSPECT, can't confirm, that the fuel consumption you see is not entirely accurate. What I mean is that if you have a big fleet that comes in for a refuel, your comsumption will go up quite a bit, but then once theyre full, the rate goes back down. Again, just a suspicion.

One thing I have had OK success with is using Fuel Tankers with Mining Engines to supplement Caslon extraction. They are kind of a pain to micro (then again, what isn't) but they do help.

Also, Im not sure the default Mining Station design incorporates the Small Mining Engine. I always design manually, and wind up adding more Mining Engines than the Auto-Generate has. More mining engines along with Fast Mining tech and I basically never have issues with Caslon.

[battlefield91]

Most efficient way to safe fuel is to research new reactors which have a higher energy per caslon output. Also using faster Hyperspeed reduces fuel consumption a lot.

[ogredpowell]

Thank you!

[Radamanthe]

In fact, mining stations usually don't need fuel as their energy collectors should provide enough energy, especially when the station does not use its weapons (ie. most of the time). The design screen may be a bit confusing about that, but that's what I concluded in the end.

The game currently allocates FAR too much caslon for all mining stations. Logistic has a hard time to fill the initial demand. I guess keeping up is not really an issue, but in my game, my mining stations were multiplying too quickly to reach a point of "keep up" for most of them. Hence I always had a big negative balance on caslon, getting worse as the time passes. Don't forget that the balance value is about mining rate vs demand, not actual consumption.

At some point, I manually set all mining stations maintain value for caslon to 500 (instead of the +20 000 value on automatic). Downside is that you must set their resource stock management to manual instead of automatic (or the algorithm will restore soon to unreasonable values), but for a mining station, it's not really an issue as it... well... mines resources regardless of that value. Then my caslon balance progressively grew up until being largely positive.

[dostillevi]

It's the result of stations never being able to meet demand. As soon as a freighter drops off caslon, it immediately fills up from what it dropped off, leaving the station in demand. This will happen too every single station that needs Caslon, except planets.

On top of that, freighters will bring far more caslon than is needed to fill up the stations, and then dump the excess into space.

The combination of those two things drives a huge Caslon deficit and pushes freighters into constant unnecessary runs to refuel stations with caslon, depriving other resources of freighters.

Try manually adjusting mining, research, and resort station caslon reserves to zero. It's very easy to meet demand if you do, but keep in mind that stations will run out of energy if they try to defend themselves.

[Anthropoid]

Freighters literally just DUMP stuff into space!?!

[ogredpowell]

Thanks for the help- also looked at my economy, looks like I spend about 1000 credits buying fuel but 4000 selling so must be making a surplus …