Repairing and Retrofitting Mission problems

[kfoelsch]

I'm noticing a pattern where I get a fleet beat up, and then it seems to take forever to repair. I can build new ships faster frequently than old ships will repair or retrofit. Any suggestions on what to do about this?

[henri51]

Make sure you have enough resources to repair or retrofit. It sounds more like retrofitting to me and being short of resources, otherwise it should not take longer to retrofit than to build the same ships.Another possibility is priorities: the AI could be building freighters and mine ships instead of repairing your ships, but I don't know what the priorities are. Another possibility is if you are building at a different place than building, and the former is short of the necessary resources.

In general, building larger fleets than you can support or colonizing too fast can grind your production to a halt because of lack of resources or lack of funds.This is particular true when you start at pre-warp.

Henri

[invaderzim]

As far as I can tell, repairs don't use resources. A construction ship with an empty cargo hold can repair all your ships for free.

Retrofitting at a distant shipyard that doesn't have resources however will slow things down. Also, check to see if your spaceport is clogged by freighter construction. You can upgrade the number of construction yards and plants very quickly and cheaply. Just manually upgrade the design, add 5-10 yards and retrofit it. Also make sure there are enough docking bays for your fleet to refuel if they need to do that.

The downside is that further upgrades will remove those construction yards unless you take over the upgrade process. But spaceports are relatively easy to upgrade anyway, just pile on more weapons and shielding as needed since there are no space restrictions.

[kfoelsch]

This is one of those areas of the game that induces gratuitous frustration. Why isn't the AI smart enough to take my ships to places where they can be repaired?

[Trifler]

Check out your spaceport's info box. Are there ship's waiting in line to dock? That means you should probably consider adding more docking ports (or just upgrading from a small spaceport to a medium, etc.). As others have mentioned, it may be busy building freighters. The info box will tell you what's under construction, if anything. If you look at the spaceport's design, you can see how many Construction Yards it has. That determines how many things it can build and/or repair at the same time. If you don't have enough resources, then ships will remain in a Construction Yard indefinitely until the resources it needs show up.

[kfoelsch]

I'm assuming refueling works exactly the same way?

[Aszh]

Not exactly... barring using construction ships, ships have to go to shipyards and get into a construction yard to retrofit/repair. To refuel, a ship only has to go to the nearest shipyard OR gas mining facility that produces the necessary fuel type and a docking bay. So spreading gas mines in strategic locations around your empire and adding docking bays to the design can help ease the headaches of refueling and the traffic to your spaceport.

If you want to get real fancy, you can match the number of docking bays your gas mines have to your fleet sizes, so they can all refuel at once, as long as the fleet isn't so large its fuel requirements dwarf the mine's production.

[kfoelsch]

A major problem I seem to be having was fleets that were too big. When you have a fleet that has more ships than there are docking bays available, the game just shuts down. Not my idea of friendly automation.