My mining stations are full but freighters aren't picking up the stuff.

[Lonck]

I made a custom star base that has resource collectors and placed them on almost every planet on my starting system but the problem is that the freighters aren't picking up the stuff even from the starting civie mining stations. What can I do to make them pick up stuff more frequently? Freighters just idle around the capital and do nothing. Will removing the trade component make them pick stuff faster?

[Kadrush]

They only take the stuff they need, also early game trade (internal and external) are really slow because the reduced universal population and colonies, which reduces the demand. Check your expansion planner and see your demand. Also it is good to have idle freighters and the can supply your construction ships as they make research/resorts and other bases in deep space.

[Lonck]

Thing is, they don't.  My construction ships need to be moved manually if they out of resources same with my custom shipyards sitting in the middle of a system.  And my latest game I had 90% of freighters idling in deep space while my two colonies (one of em the capital) had 0 fuel (Carlson) while my stock say 80k and demand is 30k.  Does this mean that the freighters think my colonies are fully stocked when in reality all this Carlson is actually sitting in the my (state controlled) gas mining bases in gas clouds far far away?  Somebody needs to make a strategy guide fast cuz this game is super complex not to mention the lack of control.

[Kadrush]

First thing is, build spaceyards only at planets, you need their stock cap (the station uses the planetary stockpile), build a spaceport at that planet. Copy your spaceport to a starbase, remove the trade center and the other junk, keep the yards and factories, build on the planet. Gonna say it again, never build spaceyards on deep space, it is really hard to supply them and ship building gonna take forever.

About your deep space projects, check your demand, sometimes you need an specific strategic good to finish the job, which you dont have, thats maybe the reason why you cant finish the construction and your freighters are idle.

About the guide, check my topic "Kadrush´s trategy tips", as I am slowly working in a "guide"

Cheers,
Kadrush

[Lonck]

But why do my freighters just sit idle in deep space while my colonies have no fuel?  is this a bug or something?  Is there a way to manually restock my colonies?  They don't have the money to buy it from my gas mining stations?  Will removing the trade component make them more eager to transport goods from my mining stations to my colonies? 

[Kadrush]

Wait, did you actually added a trade center to your freighters?

[Lonck]

No, I meant removing the trade center from mining stations so that the freighters hopefully get a bigger incentive to go a get the resource from stations.  Right now they just stand there while my stations are full and my colonies are running out of resources.  Because of this my constructions ships only get half of the resources they need to build, but for some reason they initiate construction with only half the necessary resources and they get stuck working on a base with no resources. What this means is that the build station animation is on but ships aren't building cuz their cargo bay is empty. And yes their cargo bay is big enough. This only happens every once in a while but its annoying when it happens.

[PaulP]

The problem seems to be not that they aren't picking it up but that they only pick up very small amounts at a time. I'm playing on a 400 star map, so things are spread out pretty good so it takes a while for ships to get the cargo to the destination (made even worse by the reduced hyper speed in RotS). My worlds are perpetually empty of Caslon, and yet the ship transporting Caslon has a huge cargo bay but only grabs 200 to bring to a world thats 5 sectors away. By the time it reaches the location it uses up more fuel than it has transported. The mining base is sitting there with 20,000 caslon unassigned, and a variety of little bits ranging from 200 to 2000 waiting to be picked up. Even my smallest cargo ship has a larger cargo hold than that, and my large cargo ship's hold is NEVER used. And since most of my colonies are perpetually out of caslon, my cargo ships are also flying around with no fuel - making transportation take even more time.
 
And its not just my empire. The other races seem to be having the exact same problem - I flew around with a ship that has a long range scanner and I see tons of cargo ships going super slow (obviously out of fuel), and trying to refuel my ships on friendly empire's planets results in nothing happening (they are out of fuel). Its not a galaxy wide shortage, there are mining stations packed full of caslon everywhere. The AI is just too stupid to transport anything. Was this happening in the regular DW? Maybe its just made worse by the slow down of hyper engines? Could also be that im on an irregular 400 star galaxy, so there is a good bit of distance between each star... But if the stupid ships would just import more than 200 at a time there wouldn't be a problem.