[1.19] complete player industry update issues noticed

[Mark Laiho]

Congrats with bug fixing.

PS I've posted a few topics I never seem to get any replies even player ones so im sometimes wondering if im in a black hole or something.

As stated in other posts I have a full industrial network setup in the devries area. Up to supplying parts to the shipyard. I even see the odd freighter come in to deliver stuff when trading isn't broken. Note trading is a lot better than it was. I can see a lot of trade happening. However all it takes is for it to break in a couple places and the entire network starts breaking down eventually.

[station mining manager mod] without it most mining is broken. And they mine stuff far away and the wrong types etc. Not a problem for the H20 since they only need ice. When I say working with mod its because without the mod the ships very rarely unload materials even if you have avoided the zero item bug.

1 civ parts
1 arms fab
1 tech fab (2 gas miners working for some reason before mod)
1 construction shop (5 mining ships each working with mod)
2 metalworks fab (5 mining ships each working with mod)
1 integrated URV wharf (3 mining ships working with mod)
1 crystal supply (4 mining ships working with mod)
3 ecell fabs (4 gas miners each not working well even with mod)
2 medical dispensary
1 spice farm
4 cell rechargers (full of fuel but out of energy)
6 food supply (a lot of these have the 2nd food production not installed)
2 h20 additions (4 ice miners each overkill on the ice mining)
4 energy fab (full of ecells)

Every stations has atleast 1 dedicated freighter of each type required.
eg Food supply has 1 energy, 1 liquid, 1 container, 1 bulk freighter

I know the number of food supply fabs is stupid. But I need the space fuel production and that's the only way to get it since you don't have access to build the the distillery station.

the 4 cell rechargers cut down on the number of times I get a need fuel message since anywhere in devries I can hit yes to use fuel and it will find a local recharger and then that message won't crop up for 25 more jumps. There is well over a 100 ships here so it all adds up.

According to my spreadsheet even without secondary supply bonuses. I should be making around
95k/hr extra energy cells (note extra as in beyond needed by other fabs)
41k/hr extra water
I have massive oversupply of basic materials to avoid supply problems or that's the idea.
The only 2 things im short on by spreadsheet is narcotics and spacefuel. Which most of the time isn't required but a secondary supply. My economy however is still broken.

First killer that has a very slow work around that is a known bug:
If a mining ship is trying to offload ore to the station that's managing it if the station doesn't have any ore stored it won't offload. Periodically the station might use all the material and get stuck again.

Second killer
The mining ships mining the wrong materials. I have an big oversupply of antimatter cells. Seems every gas miner heads off to mine hydrogen and not plasma or ions. I have to use a the station mining manager mod to fix this. I have 5 gas miners per ecell fab. I have 1 ion and 1 plasma for hours now at each of the 3 ecell fabs. Without the station mining manager mod even the metalworks fabs and crystal fabs do stupid stuff and never really gather materials properly. The station mining manager fixes those stations fine. But gas mining is hugely stuffed. Since this is a required material for higher end production. With the station mining manager mod the gas mining ships are mining various gas's however its so damn slow I think I need 15 gas miners per ecell fab. The tech fab which has 2 gas miners for ions and plasma is well stocked and working fine.....if it had ion cells or plasma cells to work with. Note ice mining one material only with sequanas works just fine even without the station mining manager mod.

third killer H20 fab picking up water
Trade is mostly worked out but in a network like this a small problem will eventually break the system. But I do notice where its breaking. Currently the stations where trade is breaking down the energy fabs and the H20 fabs. Even without the station manager mining mod the 3 ice miners each is overkill I have over 300k ice in each one. But while all the food ration stations are out of water there is 300k+ sitting in each H20 fab. With the station mining manager mod I'm getting regular reports on ice mining so that's working.

fourth killer energy fabs picking up energy cells
I have millions of ecells in energy fabs but there not getting to some fabs.I don't know why since every fab that uses energy has 1 or more energy freighters but I have factories running out of ecells. Which is weird since I have 3 energy fabs that are completely full..... no spare room for ecells. Each energy fab has a minimum of 2 energy freighters each

fifth arms tech fab production previously mentioned no comments received.
I had mentioned that the arms fab only seems to produce astrobee launchers and missiles. Which is very bad since generally you want basic weapons to feed the shipyard. However after the fab was supplied with materials the missile fab changes what missiles it makes so I thought the issue was solved, that it was cycling through products. However while the station is stockpiling various missiles for sale it doesn't stockpile any other weapons. Its stuck building astrobee launchers. I'm tempted to build a turret and missile sections of a arms supply fab but if I run into the same problem it will be bad I have a limited number of station spots left.

Theoretically I have an oversupply of water and energy. But for some reason while they stack up in the station and is shipped out mostly it eventually bugs up and many stations run out of supply even though there are dedicated freighters for both sides the fab its going to and the supplying fab. Lack of ion and plasma cells is also killing the economy. Antimatter cells im over supplied with so I know it could work.

I could build another h20 add or ecell fab but they are somewhat broken for trading. So they will break as well. I will try getting a bunch of gas mining ships to help out the ecell fabs that might work. But its going to take a long time to get results due to speed of automated gas mining. If I find enough food specialists and 1 more pharmacy spec I can figure out what I need to do to get enough spacefuel and narcotics into the system. Im going to add more container freighters to the arms/tech and civ parts fabs to get the parts moving around and to sell to shipyard more regularly. Then I might test a URV fab just not sure which one I want to get yet.

Previously posted requests that would help a lot(I'm not sure its been read)
1. naming stations useful for the second point.
2. info telling me which station a ship has been assigned to
3. a setting with a ship that can be turned on or off that by default goes to get fuel cells if it can.

Thank you for the hard work its getting there.

[xandicar]

Wow, very detailed analysis. Great job done on this.

I now see that the feeling I have that some of my assigned freighters don't do their job isn't wrong. Thanks for that.

[Margarine]

This was an interesting post to read. I am guessing that providing access to your save file would help the Egosoft guys look at your issues.

[spankahontis]

I'm just wondering, are your factories working between Albion and Devries?

And if so, are they having difficulty passing through the gate? Do they end up in a back and fourth loop to and from the gate?

Maybe that's what's causing some supply problems with your game.

I noticed that the Ai's Energy Freighters are obsessed with Plasma cells M/AM cells and ion cells.. rarely see an energy freighter with or packed with Energy Cells.

[Mark Laiho]

Yay replies thank you.

All the stations are in devries apparently the station managers limited control to a area like devries or omnicron its not going further. So I limited my station building to devries so far. Which is good they don't visit Plutarch space. I imagine I might have to manually trade materials across.

Actually i found that capturing a freighter in albion and assigning it to a station in devries just made it sit there. But that might have been unlucky station manager might not have had anything for it to do at that time.

I have destroyed the a few ships covering the albion jump gate so its safer to capture ships and move them.

Spoiler

Show

Plutarch overwatch station is mostly destroyed all the hull sections with guns so its a floating wreck. That took a long time. PS a nova drone wipes out a small section of guns with shield with one hit and it doesn't repair at all. Only problem is if you stop and fire one your ship starts moving forward towards what your trying to shoot from a safe distance...

That's how I'm filling holes in my production supply somewhat for the ion and plasma cells buy capturing the odd energy freighter loaded with them.
I've only hit the Plutarch energy freighters they stock up on am,ion and plasma cells as well. I'm trying to be friendly to the other corporations in plutarchs area of ops so that I can get captains and engineers without heading back into devries.

I might have to set something up to share one of the save game files if it will help.

Hmm also I have to check each station manager if they have cash to do this
open asset list scroll to stations. detail station, find manager, detail manager to find out if he has credits left. rinse and repeat for 30 stations.

add to suggestion list for empire building people the list of stations should include the managers bank account otherwise its a really big pain since no warning messages are being issued for running out of cash or failed trades running out of cash and if there have been I haven't noticed a single one and I don't play afk. All my stations were fine cash wise so far but some were relatively low still above 7mil though.

[quintupularity]

I am certain I don't have any constructive advice for you, but I wanted to pass along my dimwitted and mystified compliments to you. That's a detailed and carefully considered trade network you've built in your game. I have NO idea how you managed to do it when I haven't yet managed to build a single station.

I concur that there is a disheartening lack of necessary information in every aspect of the game I've encountered so far and the information that is available is difficult to find. In my opinion, the only way to save is it for the developers to, well, do some developing and create a better interface. X3 was unnecessarily complicated. Alas, XR is not an improvement.

Your trade network can eventually be fixed with some careful scripting and I think your trade woes will eventually be fixed. The UI, however, will need a complete rewrite.

[Mark Laiho]

This is mostly due to a lot of save game file editing to save time. I'm just persistent.

A lot of it was shortcuts for time to earn money or ship resources in. Like resources for station building added them straight to the ship rather than stealing off Plutarch or buying from omnicron. Making sure the ordered ships built. And mostly free drones buy one sub in the rest. Completing the station weapons and shields that are stuck constructing. Removing trade orders that aren't working etc.

Lots of buggy station and ship building so I use a lot of saves and have to go back a lot to get around the ship construction and station building. I even periodically backup the saves in critical stages. The save game files are getting close to 50MB each now. So lots of time wasted and even with that its hit 5days game time.

The majority of the stations were built before 1.18 so the stations were being built but no real trading happening. As you said once the trading is completely fixed it should work real well. with 1.18 everything started moving a bit.

1.19 helped even more I think the last few stations built just fine. A lot of station building bugs during construction can be fixed by leaving the zone and coming back.

Usually there is a ton of info online to help out but not yet for rebirth.
Like the construction drone and marine cargo limit on the pride of albion. Or how to dump cargo out of the pride of albion some things are just hard to find. Until you click on right thing out of curiosity.

[Mopy]

I know the number of food supply fabs is stupid. But I need the space fuel production and that's the only way to get it since you don't have access to build the the distillery station.

If you want the Distillery station, you need constructors bought in OL. Bear in mind it needs Plankton though rather than food rations

- Edit OL, not Albion.

[Mark Laiho]

Thanks for the info I didn't realise until today that a construction ship built elsewhere had different stations to build.

On the plus side the extra ration production feeds the ROC habitations and makes a bit of money on the side.

I'm wondering if I want to test build the civ shipyard or one of the medium shipyards but I don't think I can get medium ships out of it though that would be really useful.....

[hannahb]

One of the things I am curious about is how the NPC stats affect all this. For instance, does a better captain on a mining ship mine faster? It would be nice to have some documentation that spells out what effect NPC stats have on the various jobs the NPCs are performing, if any effect at all.

[Mark Laiho]

I'm not completely certain but assuming I'm not mixing my titurels and arawns up. I have grabbed lifts with capitals around devries quite a bit especially from molten archon back to glaring truth. And I think the ships turn faster to line up for boost when the captain has a higher nav skill. But I could be wildly mistaken.

[scottykad]

Just assign 1 or 2 scaldi's per station, thats all i have as they hold all wares and can do multipul runs instead of back and forth with dribs and drabs, i dont use the mining mod and my miners are mining exactly what they need to mine (yes assigned to the manager) what you have there is a complete clusterfu*k of stations and its probably you that broke the economy with that many stations its bound to cause problems with other econimies, performance and, the computer trying to do all the calculations needed is going to make things break, the games already broken as it is, plus in order to get what you have there you need to cheat in the money, alot of time for something that will make the game worse. i bet you are having fun

[spankahontis]

Lots of buggy station and ship building so I use a lot of saves and have to go back a lot to get around the ship construction and station building. I even periodically backup the saves in critical stages. The save game files are getting close to 50MB each now. So lots of time wasted and even with that its hit 5days game time.

Yeah, I couldn't use my XML Editor after 30MB's, it would freeze, it couldn't handle the size of the file, had to use notepad.

So I take it you edited the save file when it came to 'reinforced metal plating' as I've never seen a freight carry this stuff yet which is a vital part of the station building process.

[Mark Laiho]

Yeah I edited it directly into the construction ships cargo. Then after the construction was completed removed the excess materials. Didn't want that to mess anything else up. The reinforced plates uses chemical compounds which I had a tough time starting to produce but seems to be working now. Have a pile of them. Incidentally at this point I should be able to not have to edit the materials in the construction ship. The civ ship parts fab and tech fab should build the required parts and supply them to the station construction once its all up and running properly.

There isn't much of an economy to muck up with in devries. The existing npc economy consists production wise of:
3 or so Energy fabs
1 H2o addition
3 wheat fabs
1 crystal palace that makes food rations internal meat production
uses energy and wheat
1 cell recharger

Demand wise they have
1 shipyard
a bunch of habitations needed food and some energy.
the crystal palace has a few demands but it mostly supplied by existing npc economy.

I have some of the stations set to restricted racially I assume means me. But even if it isn't the overproduction of energy, water and food will just make small sales to the npcs and the all the rest of the trading feeds into the production of parts for the shipyard since the only person to sell those materials to is me. so high percentage of the trading is going to me and doesn't interfere much with the existing devries almost non-existant economy. If I tried this in omnicron well ouch.....

There is a bigger trade network in albion and omnicron each. If mine is broken well I expect there more complicated ones to be broken as well. All the npc stuff is saved in the same format as the player stuff in the save file. I'm only trying to feed 1 arms fab, 1 tech fab and 1 civ parts they have many each of those or similiar.

There are so many stations cause im trying to feed enough materials into the civ ship parts and arms tech fab continually supplied. I'm hoping to setup a URV fab for excess if any. If I did just a few stations id have to put them up in omnicron or freeplay in albion where their is an economy they can interact with. Devries is devoid of high-end industry which gives you an opportunity to fill the lack, which is what I'm trying to do.

I am happy when I score a station managed trade for 5mil+ which I assume is parts being sold to the shipyard.

Scadis have a little problem. There universal cargo bay when I looked at them was broken into 4 smaller bays. So they could only carry limited amounts of stuff admittedly of each type. The dedicated freighters carry far more of one item and its a little easier to figure out what broke... They also seem to move a bit faster. On the down side there are more ships that might run into problems. On stations which require heavy bulk shipping I have a some of my few titurels. They have a true universal cargo bay as well. I could be wrong about the scaldis if they have changed since I last looked at them.

I'm also getting steady stream of messages about ice mining so since the ice miners are unloading at the h20 fabs i'm assuming that ships aren't getting stuck there now or atleast one docking port is open.

I seem to be getting more messages from the station mining manager about hydrogen, ion and plasma mining starting so i'm assuming that the gas mining vessels are unloading and heading back out. I'm not sure I'm feeding enough in so I'm getting more gas miners assigned.

All up it looks like its starting to move nicely along but i'll have to check if there are any issues in a few hours after I get the rest of the gas miners built and assigned.

[spankahontis]

The Cell re-charger for Devries is pretty much broke as well.

[Mark Laiho]

That's why I ended up building mine next to theirs, atleast I can see always see one.

Useful note for people building stations in devries. When you buy drones for you station. Your only ordering them. Since there is no actual stations building drones in devries the orders don't get filled. You either need to ship them in from outside devries or build them. Yes the shipyard in devries has them on market, but there for constructed ships. As far as I'm aware you can't move them to your stations from the shipyard. So for me the freighters all have to have enough cargo drones to support themselves.

required cargo drone calculation
required = [total cargo shown - 10000(jump fuel)] / 4000 (per cargo drone)
I usually roundup to the next 10.

All my freighters are self supporting cargo drone wise. Or my trade would grind to a halt real fast. Since my stations don't have cargo drones yet. If freighters can do multiple cargo drone runs now then atleast my freighter load and unload fast.

I found the energy supply problem. I had my energy freighters assigned to each station that required energy. I was wondering why some of them was out of energy. I found 13 of my freighters stacked up on an ROC station while mine had barely any coming to pickup. So just a little under half of my energy freighters were actually moving ecells. I set the stations to be racially restricted and started reassigning them. Eg. station 1 energy freighter at ROC energy fab reassigned to station 2. station 2 energy freighter that is at ROC energy reassigned to station 1. They all started trades with my stations. Since this was working i started doing this for each station. While I was going this a pile of my freighters started taking on ecells on-board next to me while the ROC station NPCs sat there. They had 2 NPC freighter qued before mine the entire time. Then I noticed even if set to racial restriction some of the energy freighters were still being set to trade for energy from ROC stations by the station managers. So sooner or later they would pile into the station with the stuck NPC freighters. Especially since the ROC station being stuck would fill up with ecells and the price would get lower.

So i have reassigned the majority of my energy freighters to my energy fabs which works. NPCs aren't clogging my stations. So I'm seeing a constant stream of my freighters picking up cells and moving off now. This means however that the station managers will be selling ecells. Sooner or later they will sell them to NPC stations since the racial restriction doesn't work and they may get stuck again. Also i have to have energy freighters to move the am/ion/plasma cells. Hopefully they won't get stuck picking up ecells at the ROC energy fab that is stuck. If the racial restriction works then it won't be a problem.

I suspect that the problem above is the same problem with water. I suspect that some of my liquid freighters are stacked up on the 1 NPC h20 addition station.
In which case ill have to reassign all my liquid freighters from the various stations to my h20 stations as I did with the energy freighters and hope they don't get stuck on behind NPCs again.

The same thing might happen with various materials the ROC uses. So I'm going to have to watch the food rations.

If the above issues is what is breaking my economy then setup right a player economy and trades mostly works with 1.19 as long as the NPC traders don't block up a station.

I'm off to check the ROC h2o station.

PS with all the gas in system I only managed to notice the couple of my freighters near the ROC energy fab while travelling between mine. When I started to fly towards the bottom the number of ships I had stuck there started to become apparent.

[Nikola515]

I was having same problem with energy and liquid Rahanas too. Also I noticed that my energy freighters keep getting stuck while selling energy to NPC stations. Another thing my stations accounts keep losing money. I know it is impossible to lose money with this station(H2O Additives Fac ) I don't need ice anymore because I can use E.cells to make ice. I give station 16.000.00c and now it only have around 7.000.000c.... Do you have any problems like this????

Edit: Station was making money on beginning ( I made around 21.000.000c)

[Mark Laiho]

Really hard to say. I put the same rough amount of cash into eash station manager. I've noticed some go up and some down. The profit messages I'm getting are from station managers so I assume the small profit messages are food/energy/water to npcs and the larger ones are parts to the shipyard.

Cause my stations are in devries and there is little npc economy to interact with I assume the drops are buying from npcs. I have no idea if profits from selling from one of my stations to another of my stations recovers those loses or is ignored completely. There is no messages or logs so hard to say.

If we can get the managers balance showing up in the assets screen you could quickly glance and see if there running low right now you have to detail the station, detail the manager and rinse and repeat. There are no messages for running out of cash or materials so you need to monitor and notice.

On the plus side patch 1.20 unjammed the npc station I noticed its freighters weren't still stuck there later.

I'm slowly rearranging my freighters so where possible they sell output from the station rather than shipping supplies in but this isn't always possible. This seems to work better.

I'm unsure as to what changes they did to station managed mining with 1.20 so ill stick with the station mining manager mod since I get messages in the middle of the screen rather than the cockpit window each time a mining ship heads out and what it is going to mine and where.

I also recommend the verbose trading mod. This mod tells you when a freighter receives an order, when it starts to transfer wares and when it is finished. or even when there is an error. This allows you to figure out when its docked with the station or if its still stuck and not docking or its broken and you need to fix it. This information helps a lot with manual trading. Also when you get a trading ship to leave squad and join squad to reset a trade it will send a message when the trade is re issued to the trader.

I found that the h20 stations were fine but mine had freighters with issues. There was a freighter loaded with water that stayed docked I had join it to my squad and then assign it back to its original station. I reassigned all my liquid frieghters to the h20 stations so hopefully there pushing water out as needed.

With energy fabs and h20 its far easier to assign all the freighters to the energy fab or h20 so if you find a liquid freighter stuck at the h20 plant just join it to squad then reassign to the h20 station much simplier than trying to find out the original station it was buying water for. Unfortunately this idea doesn't work well for higher end production stations.

[Nikola515]

I think what happened money wore going to my account instead of station accounts (im not 100% sure) But I know that it cant drop that much. Also I did same thing what you did, all energy Rahanas to Energy Array and liquid to H2O. Ships are not getting stuck for now and stations are starting to make money again.

[spankahontis]

Really hard to say. I put the same rough amount of cash into eash station manager. I've noticed some go up and some down. The profit messages I'm getting are from station managers so I assume the small profit messages are food/energy/water to npcs and the larger ones are parts to the shipyard.

Cause my stations are in devries and there is little npc economy to interact with I assume the drops are buying from npcs. I have no idea if profits from selling from one of my stations to another of my stations recovers those loses or is ignored completely. There is no messages or logs so hard to say.

If we can get the managers balance showing up in the assets screen you could quickly glance and see if there running low right now you have to detail the station, detail the manager and rinse and repeat. There are no messages for running out of cash or materials so you need to monitor and notice.

On the plus side patch 1.20 unjammed the npc station I noticed its freighters weren't still stuck there later.

I'm slowly rearranging my freighters so where possible they sell output from the station rather than shipping supplies in but this isn't always possible. This seems to work better.

I'm unsure as to what changes they did to station managed mining with 1.20 so ill stick with the station mining manager mod since I get messages in the middle of the screen rather than the cockpit window each time a mining ship heads out and what it is going to mine and where.

I also recommend the verbose trading mod. This mod tells you when a freighter receives an order, when it starts to transfer wares and when it is finished. or even when there is an error. This allows you to figure out when its docked with the station or if its still stuck and not docking or its broken and you need to fix it. This information helps a lot with manual trading. Also when you get a trading ship to leave squad and join squad to reset a trade it will send a message when the trade is re issued to the trader.

I found that the h20 stations were fine but mine had freighters with issues. There was a freighter loaded with water that stayed docked I had join it to my squad and then assign it back to its original station. I reassigned all my liquid frieghters to the h20 stations so hopefully there pushing water out as needed.

With energy fabs and h20 its far easier to assign all the freighters to the energy fab or h20 so if you find a liquid freighter stuck at the h20 plant just join it to squad then reassign to the h20 station much simplier than trying to find out the original station it was buying water for. Unfortunately this idea doesn't work well for higher end production stations.

Do you find that you have to add squad/remove/add again to break any pathfinding bugs?