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In my current game I have 4 Cruisers that are critical for my plans to take over an enemy home-world. I estimate I need 8 of them to be safe and I've recently researched a size increase so I've also redesigned my base Cruiser. I start building 4 of the new Cruisers and give retrofit orders to the existing 4 (I make sure I give explicit retrofit orders for important ships because if you give retrofit orders to a fleet it will build the most recent design - not necessarily the one you want).

3 of the new Cruisers leave Space Dock but one of them is having trouble completing construction on a handful of components. To make matters worse, none of the initial 4 ships have finished their retrofit. I wanted 8 ships to attack the enemy home-world and now only have 3 with 5 still under construction.

OK. Something is wrong. I've been lazy and just let the game run along without checking my material needs. Getting to this point in a game is usually one of frustration for newer players but in reality this WTF? moment can be quite a bit of strategic fun.

Step 1. Locate the problem.
The first thing to do is select the item constructing your ship. I'll first check the 4 ships in retrofit. I select the Space Port they are sitting in then double-click the name of the port from the info panel in the lower left of the screen. This is a quick way to bring up the details screen for any item in the game.

The Ships and Bases screen tells me the Space Port is a large port so it can handle 8 ships at one time. Next click on the Construction Yard tab. I can see all my Cruisers are in the construction queue but the queue is full and it has a further 6 construction orders (mainly freighters and private vessels) once these are finished. It has clearly stalled.

Now select one of the ships from the list and click on the 'Show Construction Summary' button. This tells me all the materials that are required to build the selected ship which on its own is not of great value. Usually the missing materials are listed at the top of the list. In my case the top element is Carbon Fibre and it requires a few hundred units. Close the construction summary - we just wanted to get a feel for what might be required.

Next click on the Cargo tab and sort by the Amt (amount) column. Sure enough, there is the Carbon Fibre with zero quantity and a Reserve amount of a couple of hundred.
!!!Tip!!! If you scan through this list and find any element with a lower amount than its reserve then this is a problem for the base you are looking at.

So Carbon Fibre isn't reaching my Space Port. This now becomes the game's primary strategic objective.

Step 2. Why is there a problem?
I can't magically create Carbon Fibre and the freighter network will only transport materials if there is an excess on a planet along the chain. So now I need to find out why this has happened. The problem is actually much more serious around this Space Port because it can't build freighters and so there are not may materials even reaching the planet!

Now open the Galaxy Map (located in the lower right corner). in the View drop-down select 'Known Resources' and then select your missing material. The sources will show on the map.

Oh crap! The only source of Carbon Fibre in my area of the galaxy is a well protected planet of a player who is furious with me.

Step 3. Solve the problem.
Now my choices are either to try and befriend the player to get more Carbon Fibre or to secure the material through more aggressive methods. I'll take the later route. I estimate that my three Cruisers can break through the planetary defences but it won't be easy...

Other considerations.
So you can see I didn't automatically leap for the Expansion Planner. The Expansion Planner is not really all that useful for solving a specific problem at a specific location. I did look there but it told me I had some Carbon Fibre in my network but this was at other locations.

If my problem had been a lack of fuel then that would have been solved by building gas mining bases.

I hope this helps people get past their frustrations.

Remember, every problem is an opportunity.

Thanks for this. The only thing better than DW is the DW forum. Truly a wonderful core group of helpful people here. YOU know who you are!

Das123, always a pleasure to check you handy work

One quick note. In your case, the cruisers to be retrofited were ahead of the freighters. If it was the other way around you could have canceled the freighters to free up the resources reserved for them.
Not sure if this would work with carbon fibre though, don't remember atm if it's used only by the military or not.

Or, if the LSP itself had it in it's components you could have retrofited it to a smaller version with four construction yards (in order not to lose the cruisers). This way the extra carbon fibre would have gone to the cruisers.

Scaling the Space Port down is good lateral thinking. I hadn't thought of that. I'm not sure if I would have done that though because it feels a little like an exploit.

I had tried a few things with the retrofitting ships - none of which worked. Tried moving to another port with materials and also tried your suggestion of scrapping the ships around them. It seems that once construction (or retrofitting) has commenced it needs to be finished before it can take other orders. If they had been sitting outside the queue I'm sure I could have moved them elsewhere.

I'm also inclined to think of it as an exploit and we also rarely get there. But it springs to mind another idea in case we'd really need to go this far.

Let's consider the following scenario: a spaceport with two construction yards, three docking bays, four ships for retrofiting and not enough resources to complete them.
Now in order to resolve this we need to retrofit the spaceport to add a couple more construction yards and have a ship like the one I discussed in my newest thread retire there to add the resources we need. It should work like this:

1) The fourth ship is queued for retrofit but not even docked as there is no room -> for this one we can change the order temporarily so that it does't interfere with our operation

2) We retrofit the spaceport to add it two more construction yards
2.1) The third ship to be retrofited now moves from the docking bay to one of the new construction yards and it will also eventually stall.
2.2) We dock our resource packed ship to the recently freed docking bay and retire it for it's resources at the final free construction yard.

3) Resources available, work resumed and retrofiting done; later we can bring back the fourth ship for retrofiting.

It may sound cluncky and there are faster ways (and somewhat more expensive I suppose) but this is a proof of concept and it might help with those tens of ships blocked in a queue until resources get there the conventional way. Sometimes I even went to the editor to solve this.

This scenario is the reason I would like to have a military freighter class ship. This freighter is controlled by the player and can pick up the needed resources at one station and deliver them to another. I don't want to control the private sector, but I would like to be able to move some critical resources when needed.

I wonder if Eric ever thought there'd be this kind of ultra deep analysis going on about his game? Truly remarkable. [8D]

I doubt it. Elliot probably just provided all those screens for the hell of it [:D]

One quick note. In your case, the cruisers to be retrofited were ahead of the freighters. If it was the other way around you could have canceled the freighters to free up the resources reserved for them.

You can click and drag to reorder your construction queue too without cancelling (IIRC) [8D]

ORIGINAL: WoodMan

One quick note. In your case, the cruisers to be retrofited were ahead of the freighters. If it was the other way around you could have canceled the freighters to free up the resources reserved for them.

You can click and drag to reorder your construction queue too without cancelling (IIRC) [8D]

Yup

You can mine as a military operation by hand, just add a mining engine to a small expendable frigate or escort with a high cargo bay. Get to the planet, mine it empty and scrap the thing in a yard together with it's fright. Though this kind of micromanaging sucks... I wonder if you can transfer ressource in military ships per hand as of now or legends. You pay for military cargo ships of course, but sometimes they would be SO useful.

I honestly think the civilians should do all civilian stuff, and out of the control of the player. Make it a bit more about optimizing the civilian sector.

This has a nice guide on examining the resource problem. What I miss is easy to access to questions like:

1: Where are my current carbon fiber resources? I only know the known ones, not where my mines are. For carbon fiber it is not so hard if resources are somewhat rare, but making sure you have a good spread of gas mines is not so quick to see.

2: Is carbon fiber in decent stock all over the empire? Maybe I need another mine in the western parts?

This is in my mind rather simple overview features that could be added to the expansion planner or galaxy map without requiring one year of development... Or maybe a new, fancy resource overlay where one can filter resources?

ORIGINAL: Bingeling
Or maybe a new, fancy resource overlay where one can filter resources?

This is all available from the Galaxy Map.

ORIGINAL: cookie monster

ORIGINAL: Bingeling
Or maybe a new, fancy resource overlay where one can filter resources?

This is all available from the Galaxy Map.

There are lots of caslon sources in the galaxy, I want to easily where my mines are. Or rather, where they are not... I have an empire across much of the galaxy. I want to have ship building centers in each corner, all with access to somewhat local strategic resources. I wonder if I got a steel resource in each corner or not.

If you got an easy way to find this, I am all ears.

I recall reading that Erik has mentioned Legends will attempt to make resource more relevant in DW with the Legends expansion. The frequency of occurance is being tweaked.

1) Can someone confirm the vague impression I have that there will also be a resource abundance slider for game setup?

I hope resources can be made more relevant. I rarely have resource issues past the early game as I expand quite strongly. Of course this means we'll need the tools to easily identify where there may be bottlenecks as Bingeling above rightly queries.