Matrix Games Forums

Hi all,

I'm playing as pirates. Great start, but now I'm really struggling with endless unfinished construction projects and ships.

I have ~4 starports, 4 constructors, one colony world (thanks to capturing a colony ship) and about 7 independent worlds with facilities (no crime networks yet). Also have at least 2 mines for all but one strategic product, and 10+ mining ships and gas mining ships. So should be LOTS of resources. BUT, I have resource shortages almost everywhere, for construction and ship building.

I THINK the problem is that all my ~60 freighters are doing smuggling missions to empire worlds, rather than moving my own materials around. Is this possible? I used to accept pretty much all smuggling missions, but have stopped doing that recently, however many still have quite some time till they run out, and in the meantime I'm going backwards compared to the competition.

Questions:
1) will freighters do smuggling missions rather than move my resources around? How can that be changed?
2) anything else that might be going wrong? I think I have enough freighters, mines, ec.

Yes, your freighters place smuggling missions above your own faction's needs. They will happily sell off your last unit of Caslon while your explorers are left stranded from lack of fuel, and peddle away all of your building materials while your construction projects are stalled and you can't get any new ships built.

Discretion is the better part of smuggling. Don't sell things you need. Smuggling can actually hurt your income, too, as owned planets will try to buy back lost stock from NPC merchants. This costs more than you made from smuggling.

Also, spaceports over planets that you don't own (in your case, one planet) have finite storage capacity, as defined by how many cargo bays you installed. When they're full, oh well, no new goods can be delivered. Even a spaceport over an owned planet needs at least as many cargo bays as your largest freighter just as a transfer platform to the planet.

And do your starports have enough docks to handle large numbers of merchants at once? As in, eight minimum for a small port? My HQ usually has 20+ docks, just to be sure. Makes a difference.

Normally you don't need more than 2 freighters per mine, unless you plan to do a lot of smuggling. As in playing an actual Smuggler government. In that case go ahead and add a third freighter per mine.

Star Ports make good waystation/supply depots for dedicated smuggling operations. Neutron stars are good places for them, as you can still use solar panels and no one ever visits them (thus less likely to be attacked), since they have no planets. If you want to be really secure you can build space ports in deep space, but their solar panels won't work out in the void and they'll slowly suck fuel forever. You'll have to decide if that's worth it or not. Again, you will need lots & lots of cargo bays to store things in.

It's a trade-off: Planets have limitless storage, but suffer the most when their stock gets taken for smuggling missions. Spaceports and starbases don't cause economic backlash when emptied out, but have much more limited storage capacity.

If you are playing a dedicated Smuggler faction and want to build your infrastructure around this, I would suggest the following: Isolate your homeworld from your smuggling operations by placing a network of waystaions (spaceports and stabases) between yourself and your favorite customers. That way your freighters are more likely to take supply from one of these outposts than from your homeworld, since they're closer to their destination anyway.