Matrix Games Forums

Playing as Mortalen and planets and bases are auto building military ships. How can I stop the auto build?

And they are under Feudal control... Thus not under manual control.

Must be something new with the latest upgrade I haven't encountered before

Under policy settings, go to Construction and put it on manual. That should do it....GP

Isn't it a feature of the feudal government type that the private sector builds military ships limited to certain roles? As far as I know, the way to stop the autobuild of these is to choose a different government type. Policy settings won't affect it.

Feudal ships under private control are funded through the private economy, and sadly use state resources (Steel, Polymer and such). This is effectively a downside of Feudalism, as it reduces the private funds available due to maintenance costs completely disappearing. Those few random Escorts can't win battles so they're utterly useless, except perhaps against that 150 strength Gravilex you forgot to clear with your fleet.

You can, however, find the ships in the Control Panel (the menu on the left) using the "Ships not in a fleet" filter. They're easily scuttled, after which the private economy will attempt to replenish them, which is a quick way to transfer Private Cash to State Cash. This also works on Freighters, Passenger Ships etc., but Feudal escorts are always redundant.

Unfortunately this will cost resources to do; a good reason to have Escorts only use resources you have plenty of, allowing you to control the private > state economic hole slightly more than other governments can.

Overly harsh evaluation of the Feudal escorts... one I don't agree with completely. You should always have the few extra resources for these escorts and having the private sector build stuff is always good for your economy as well.

I have used these feudal ships to great effect in my recent Mortalen campaign where I just decided to fight all the pirate rather than pay them, these ships helped with that in the early game allot. Against pirates these feudal ships are actually decent because you don't pay any maintenance for them and the civilians have plenty of cash to spare.

As the game go on their importance will obviously be less and less, but they are built in such few numbers anyway that in the mid and late game it does not matter and are just a small income and not really a drain.

You can also manipulate with the designs so they use one design and you use another, they always use the lates heavy escort design you have active. If you have two heavy escort designs active make sure theirs is the latest one, you can control yours in other ways.

You also can't scuttle feudal escorts the way you can with freighters, at least to my knowledge. Something I would like to do... I have one or two still using skip drives trying to jump very long distances and will likely never arrive until the game is finished...

I do agree that the roaming escorts running around is a complete waste of resources otherwise, neither the player nor the AI should every do this, that is what defensive fleets are for, they can be small and spread ut in strategic location to react to raiding threat and pirates.