Matrix Games Forums

Is this a bug?
I keep having dozen of private sector ships just iddling and slow boating away from spaceports with cargo destined for said spaceports. Not iddling near planets or bases but just slowboating hours on end with cargo/tourists, not doing anything.

And also many times my fleets will just have that one ship that's low on fuel who slow boats away forever with nothing damaged and refuses any sort of manual command, just stuck slowboating away.

Can you check if they're actually moving at speed, or just drifting? I had a bug somewhat like this, but much less severe, that seemed like a collision avoidance issue - ships in queue to dock would bump each other, and in some circumstances the bump would cause a ship to drift indefinitely and not accept orders, until reloading the game.

They're all slowboating at random speed depending on fuel level. I just left them to see what they're doing for several ingame hours...it's dumb.
I installed the beta just now and all of a sudden they started moving towards the planets/spaceports but not engaging hyperdrive at all just slowboating back.

This game dramatically needs some basic qol features to make it playable beyond smallest galaxy size.

A feature to automatically apply population policies to all planets of x type not ALL planets, seriously.
Scrolling through 40 colonies individually setting population policies and that's just early mid game on a large galaxy size.

Some filters for planetary facility buildings and auto dismantling with thresholds...DW 10 years back had such a feature and made automated colony building painless.
If I leave it to the AI it's going to kil my economy in 2 years, it just spams military facilities EVERYWHERE, I merely enabled suggestions and it is bombarding me with it's reckless desire of filling every of my 39 colonies with military buildings, nothing else, my gov is democracy and 0 wars.
A filter where you can say if planet pop this size, auto build stuff, not just spaceports.


Every time you spawn a new colony, some 30+ freighters are built. Meanwhile bout 50% of your entire 700+ freighter fleet is either iddling, flying half way across your empire for cargo that can be found much closer or flying to restock some random casion mining station with ...casion.
The way private sector works it's really weird. Stations drop 5 units below the maintain amount, you got a freighter loading 1000 units of said cargo, spend 20 minutes on the route only to either idle forever with the cargo because meanwhile another freighter filled the order or drops those 5 units and magically space dumps the rest...seriously?

In this state, it's just visually pleasing but it might as well be a scripted behaviour in the background with no ships at all and you wouldn't know the difference. Like citizens in cities skylines walking 15 ingame days to work and back.

Is the cargo they drop due to my spaceport not having enough cargo bays ? I thought they only need 1 as prerequisite, just like planets don't have cargo bays but can hold indefinite amounts.

Why is the freighter dumping precious korabian spice into space by thousands of units when it could simply wait and fulfill another order or dump it on the planet??????
As of now the entire private sector feels like a visual filler afterthought.

terranu1 wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 6:48 pm They're all slowboating at random speed depending on fuel level. I just left them to see what they're doing for several ingame hours...it's dumb.
I installed the beta just now and all of a sudden they started moving towards the planets/spaceports but not engaging hyperdrive at all just slowboating back.

oh i remember such an issue from like a month ago, but in my game it was a few fleet ships that drifted away from a mining station where they were supposed to refuel.
and reloading the game made them realize to fly there or something like that.

terranu1 wrote: Thu May 05, 2022 6:48 pm Every time you spawn a new colony, some 30+ freighters are built. Meanwhile bout 50% of your entire 700+ freighter fleet is either iddling, flying half way across your empire for cargo that can be found much closer or flying to restock some random casion mining station with ...casion.
The way private sector works it's really weird. Stations drop 5 units below the maintain amount, you got a freighter loading 1000 units of said cargo, spend 20 minutes on the route only to either idle forever with the cargo because meanwhile another freighter filled the order or drops those 5 units and magically space dumps the rest...seriously?

In this state, it's just visually pleasing but it might as well be a scripted behaviour in the background with no ships at all and you wouldn't know the difference. Like citizens in cities skylines walking 15 ingame days to work and back.

Is the cargo they drop due to my spaceport not having enough cargo bays ? I thought they only need 1 as prerequisite, just like planets don't have cargo bays but can hold indefinite amounts.

Why is the freighter dumping precious korabian spice into space by thousands of units when it could simply wait and fulfill another order or dump it on the planet??????
As of now the entire private sector feels like a visual filler afterthought.

interesting that someone else noticed this cargo thing...
back a month ago when i had a game with no polymers sources and freighters refused to buy it from my ally it made me look at what my freighters are doing for a while...
and i noticed a bunch of them flying over grabbing ONYX from a nearby colony even though the colony they deliver it to has 2500+ of it. they carry over 1100 onyx while they can just unload 20 on the planet.
and whem they came back to deliver it they unloaded like 50 units onto the colony and the rest vanished into nothingness. and that for like 5+ cargo ships that arrive one after the other that all took that route.
also noticed back then that groups of cargo ships tend to all go in the same direction.. as if they work down a list of what stuff to deliver back.. "oh its onyx missing"=a bunch of cargo ships go get that, than 10 min later you notice a bunch of cargo ships all on the route to get vodkol... than 10 min later they all on onyx again. (while the stockpiles are nearly filled)
also noticed that alot of these deliveries are for items where the stockpile limit was set to 0 and there was 2500+ on the planet... and they still all went and got mroe stuff. (maybe its a bug with that limit set to 0) well no idea.

but cargoships did behave kinda weridly back a month ago on that save i played...
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like here is the stockpile of onyx shown at 2588 the maximum they can unload to is 2601... while the AI has its stockpile limit set to 0. and freighters arrive
with 1100+, deliver 20 of it to the colony, than sit there with the rest and it vanishes when they get the next order. and here is a case where i manually set all stockpile limits to 1000, but they still all try to get mroe vodkol from the south planet... so there a visible blob of them on that south route... a bit later a blob of them is on the east route to get onxy... then a blob to the north to get argon... and a bit later i see them blobing to the south again, as if they work down a list of what to get even though the stockpiles are basically full.

Yes, it's a bit sad but I hope one year from now we'll get a "private sector" area of the game that's actually meaningful, this is basically the only thing that actually separates DW from the other games yet which do fighting much better, in this rendition private sector seems to have been forgotten entirely at launch.
There's plenty of ways to make it believable and working without killing the simulation due to too many checks each cycle.

From what I can see currently the resource scarcity is forced by simply "dumping" some 90% of resources into space and the freighter AI itself being as lazy as it can, before it does a restock That's due to resources being infinite and extracted at a very fast pace even with the basic tech. This ends up in a bloated number of freighters being spammed with the sole purpose of dumping resources into space.
I had one game where I couldn't figure why the hell I have a terrible casion crisis, I just built some 5 new casion mines and I can't seem to manage to fill my mere 20 frigate fleet with fuel for once. Because freighters load casion then reserve it to refuel. They end up with a huge casion stock in transit of which some 80% will never make it and just be dumped into space.

Ships reserve station fuel as soon as they dip somewhere below 80% fuel, no way to control that so you got your fleet and this gas station with a huge amount of fuel reserved for being dumped into space or refueling freighters who do that, it will run circles around this station for ages until it will finally refuel.

If you have more than 20 colonies, you'll start seeing new colonies being completely ignored for ages, one at a time and worlds with stocks already filled being surrounded by swarms of freighters waiting to dump their cargo in space. That's simply forcing scarcity to create a false sensation of new colonies struggling to grow. Ships should swarm towards the new colony and fill it's resource stocks but the AI simply spams some 40 new freighters often at this new colony, keeping it resource paralyzed even more.

Saw a few time this issue with military ships and didn't report coz reload fixed it.