Trade
There are several different types of trading and trade income and benefits in DW2.
The primary benefit of trade is that it gives you access to construction and luxury resources you may not otherwise have, preventing shortages and also driving up the development and happiness of your colony worlds. That can be a big benefit vs having no trade. In the Diplomacy screen for each empire, you can see which resources they can provide you are missing or have a shortage on.
This also only works if you have trade with another faction that has resources you need and is close enough and has the freighters to provide them. You may have Trade with someone across the galaxy, but until you and they have the hyperdrives to reach that distance, it won't help much.
Secondary benefits come through trade income. With Restricted Trade Agreements, only resources that are in abundance will be traded and they will cost significantly more than their normal prices. This tariff can be seen in Resource Trading Income (your trade partner buys resources from you) and Resource Trading Expenses (you buy resources from your trade partner). Limited Trade will trade any resource that is not in critical shortage and at a lower tariff.
Free Trade removes all tariffs and also makes all resources available, first come first served, regardless of their shortage status. So you have access to each other's resource economy as if it were your own. The main benefit to Free Trade is that you no longer incur additional expenses when buying resources from your trade partner and if they have some nice luxuries or rare construction resources in low supply, you get equal opportunity access to those.
Also, if you have no resources that your trade partner wants, but they have a lot that you want, you will end up giving them more trade income than they give to you.
Finally, there is Bonus Trade Income. This comes from Commerce Centers and every time there is a trade, the Commerce Center will generate some additional income. With Commerce Centers on your spaceports, you'll get some straight trade income with each transaction, but it won't generally be as big as the tariffs, but it's also pure profit.
Max Pop, Suitability and Support Costs
What is the Suitability for your human population on that planet? For a 54% quality Ocean moon, I'd expect it to be quite low, barely habitable and sure to have high support costs. Basically they'd be living in a constructed floating city amid massive hurricanes and such.
This is also why they are maxed out at 642M even though at full suitability the planet would support 5 Billion or so.
If you hover over the planet quality in the bottom left, it should tell you the Suitability by race on that planet.
We plan to add additional warnings about low suitability in the UI as soon as we finish dealing with critical issues.
Stealth
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 9#p4973619
Civilian Freighters Carrying Few Resources
The civilian economy works based on the desired Maintain levels at various locations and meets the needs as they arise. Sometimes in order to proceed with ship construction, or to have enough for a retrofit, or to in the future build a spaceport, or to meet the construction and luxury resource needs of a growing population, the orders are not large. At other times, they can be quite significant.
You can see throughout the forum feedback a lot of players often complain that X resource is not arriving in a certain place fast enough.
There's a lot of push and pull between the efficiency of being timely with getting resources where they need to be so the state (the player) doesn't have to wait too long to do what they want to do and the efficiency of delaying shipments simply to fill up a freighter. We've tried it both ways and erring on the side of reducing delay leads to a better functioning civilian and state economy. Overall, while this does vary over time and with each economy, it's not unusual to see freighters making long trips with relatively small cargos from time to time as they try to make timely deliveries of just what is needed.
Colonization choices, Tech and Terraforming
You can colonize below +20, just make sure you have an understanding that the world will need more support until it gets to +20 or above. Ocean planets by default range from 50% to 70% quality. At normal difficulty, that gets reduced a bit, but with the Ackdarian bonus, that still means that overall Ocean planets should range from +13 to +30 for the Ackdarians (keep in mind that a raw quality of 50% is the minimum for colonization = 0 suitability removing any other modifiers).So reading the Galactopedia. It talks about how the "suitability" of a planet is calculated.
Playing as the Aackdarian. I'm suppose to be getting quite a good bonus of +20 to Ocean planets.
Yet the Galactopedia also says that colonizing planets under Suitability of +20 isn't good as it will be a major net drain on your income due to unsuitable planet, and or require substantial more income to get it up to speed.
Problem is it takes a 71% or higher quality planet to reach that point.. Basically you need a Gaia perfect Garden of Eden world for a world you're suited for, before it's remotely worth colonizing.. This just doesn't seem right.
Also in a majority of my games, I'm seeing sub 50% planets consistently, meaning even Ocean planets are generally hitting the +10 to +15 suitability, making them not good candidates for colonizing (going off of the devs +20 baseline)
That's before you factor in colonization research or terraforming facilities.
Researching colonization can push that up another 10, terraforming can eventually do the same, for a final range with all possible boosts of +33 to +50.
I will often colonize systems below +20 if they are otherwise strategic and I know that I will soon research tech or build a terraformer to get them up to +20.
Exploration: Resource Scanners vs Survey Modules
I will try to explain this a bit better and we'll make sure to add more of an explanation to the galactopedia in the future. The Exploration section in the Galactopedia does explain this conceptually, but not to this level of detail of component stats.
Resource scanners are great for exploring anything within their range at the same time and also not needing to get as close with sublight engines to start exploring. They are also faster than survey teams, but can't explore to as high a level.
Exploration range is the range (in game units, just like weapon range) that a resource scanner can explore to. Anything within that distance can be explored as part of one pass.
Exploration power is the maximum exploration level that scanner can reach with its scan.
Exploration time is the time to complete one scan and increase the exploration level.
For Survey modules, which represent actually sending a team to the planet or moon or asteroid for a closer detailed survey, they work similarly, just without the range.
Survey Amount is the initial exploration level a Survey module can reach after one survey.
Survey Maximum Level is the highest exploration level a Survey module can reach. This may take multiple surveys after the initial survey.
Survey time is the time each survey takes.
Survey modules are most efficient at finding things that are at or below their Survey Amount. It takes them much longer to find things that are at their Maximum Level due to the additional surveys required.
