37 hours in, shipyards are constantly out of materials, equipment docks don't work.

[Aven Valkyr]

Am I doing something wrong? I have 6 medium haulers and 2 large haulers. I have them set to deal with materials for shipyards. I have a hard time buying ships to expand my empire as I have to manually control my freighters all the time to focus on specific needs of specific stations. There's constant backlog of ships being built. I can't upgrade any of my ships.

Speaking of which. Why is it that I would need engine components to supply my ships with crew? Why is it that the thing lacking in actual ship construction hinders other things like missiles supply and ship crew? This is rediculous as expendable items should not have the same resource requirements as ship construction. I just don't understand where the design dicision came in where you need engine components/hull components/shield components to staff your ships?

As my empire grows the demand for shipyard items grows more and more. It's getting harder and harder to produce ships and staff them. The #'s I'm seeing at some shipyards are astronomical as orders for ships start piling up and stations are at a deadlock. I have also noticed that if you order a ship with just say like 35 hull components needed (easily fulfilled), by the time your freighter gets to the shipyard all of a sudden it needs 1000 hull components and WILL NOT start ANY projects until that # reaches zero. Even though the ships on order at that time should have been constructed as their required material needs are met.

This is literally a game breaking bug for me. I can no longer build ships. I don't know what to do here. Also, equipment docks refuse to upgrade my ships especially with staff. Even though they say everything is OK and they are not lacking materials. Is everyone else having this same problem?

[nickolaiproblem]

Am I doing something wrong? I have 6 medium haulers and 2 large haulers. I have them set to deal with materials for shipyards. I have a hard time buying ships to expand my empire as I have to manually control my freighters all the time to focus on specific needs of specific stations. There's constant backlog of ships being built. I can't upgrade any of my ships.

Speaking of which. Why is it that I would need engine components to supply my ships with crew? Why is it that the thing lacking in actual ship construction hinders other things like missiles supply and ship crew? This is rediculous as expendable items should not have the same resource requirements as ship construction. I just don't understand where the design dicision came in where you need engine components/hull components/shield components to staff your ships?

As my empire grows the demand for shipyard items grows more and more. It's getting harder and harder to produce ships and staff them. The #'s I'm seeing at some shipyards are astronomical as orders for ships start piling up and stations are at a deadlock. I have also noticed that if you order a ship with just say like 35 hull components needed (easily fulfilled), by the time your freighter gets to the shipyard all of a sudden it needs 1000 hull components and WILL NOT start ANY projects until that # reaches zero. Even though the ships on order at that time should have been constructed as their required material needs are met.

This is literally a game breaking bug for me. I can no longer build ships. I don't know what to do here. Also, equipment docks refuse to upgrade my ships especially with staff. Even though they say everything is OK and they are not lacking materials. Is everyone else having this same problem?

Are you selling hull parts and engine parts this well know as either being bug/feature (debate is still ongoing on which it truly is) anything that shipyards are out of create a station to produce that ware then start to sell that ware from stations via your already existing trade network. Plus side to all of this extra cash flow and more ships that you can buy.

[graphicboy]

Have you tried setting them to "distribute wares"? I did this for smart chips when things were desperate (before I started building stations), made a fortune, and solved the missing resource problem.

As soon as you have the money available, drop stations near the wharfs/shipyards that build exactly what's needed.

My last play through (before the game choked on itself), I was sitting on $16 billion.

[SumUser]

Howdy! I had the same issue and here is a part fix, part explanation:

1) Many times ship yards, wharfs, and equipment docks will display a low resource warning even though the item you are requesting does not need those resources. First, if the item does not require what they are low on, just order it anyway. If the ship gets stuck in queue follow these steps:
a) make sure there is a captain on board before you place your order. If the ship has no captain and the game won't let you "buy" one due to the queue being stuck, either dock another ship and transfer a crew member or just hire a random dude walking around.
b) make the order (be sure the items you are buying does NOT require a resource the station is low on).
c) go to your map (shift + M), right click on the ship that is making the order, go to the information menu, go to the behavior tab, and delete any orders in the "Order Queue" EXCEPT the one that says "equipment change"

It will now do the upgrade based on whatever the cool down timer would otherwise require. Why it does this, I don't know but it is a real pain in the rear end.


As to the ship yards and wharfs being out of supplies, basically there seems to be a order backlog when the game starts and it's basically a matter of defending the sector, helping re-supply the sector ship yard and wharfs, and giving it time. At 200 hrs in, almost everything is stocked to the brim and trade has really slowed down. The biggest thing I did was built a fleet early to protect Hatikvah's Choice 1 & Holy Vision as thats where most of the xenon were coming from in my game. This reduced ships being destroyed and thus made it "easier" to let the stations catch up.

I started in 2.0, currently in 2.21 vanilla (no mods).

[Aven Valkyr]

Holy crap 16 billion??? I will try to build stations that provide the materials. In my playthrough it's engine/shield/weapon components that are severely lacking. There are plenty of stations that trade it. I guess with my 8 miners and 7 haulers all set to distribute the wares those stations are lacking might not be enough of a network to really get established. My problem is building more freighters. The stations are so severely constantly out of materials that I can't build freighters to supply the network. The one big thing I have noticed, and I believe is a bug, is this:

When I go to build a ship and find a station that almost has all the resources needed less say 50 of a certain component. I will say OK, build the ship and wait for those 50 units to come in. Then what happens is suddenly the station needs 800 of the units. Then by the time my freighters get there and the station now needs 1200 of those units. The station will not build the ship until ALL of the units are supplied so that it builds several ships at once. It would be nice if the station would somehow remember that my ship only required an extra 50 of the units so that when those 50 units are supplied, the station goes ahead with the ship build. But it does not. It sits there until all units required reach zero and then 8 ships all get built at once. It's a finnicky system and I'm having to do manual trade runs of multiple freighters to get all the supplies I need to a single station. My suggested changes to pilots and the star rating system goes hand in hand with how trading itself works. I feel if Egosoft tweaked the autotrade system and how piloting ability works (the star rating system) that we could have this bug ironed out. Also giving stations the ability to remember how many materials each ship needs instead of waiting until all the units are there to do multiple builds at once, would go a long way to eliminating this problem.

I will look into building stations but like I said I have yet to figure that all out. Maybe I will look at hiring a constructor and doing the engine part thing. Thanks for the tip!

[Aven Valkyr]

But biggest thing I did was built a fleet early to protect Hatikvah's Choice 1 & Holy Vision as thats where most of the xenon were coming from in my game

I started in 2.0, currently in 2.21 vanilla (no mods).

I need to do this as well but the defense platforms are already built (in those same systems) and there are K's and I's running around. I can't fight against that and they are quickly escalating and destroying stations. I can't keep up with the xenon invasion with the way the game mechanics force you to build ships. I'm a little frustrated but I still completely love the game, it doesn't deter me from playing. I just need to get a massive network of freighters running around (I'm thinking 50) before I have both the cash flow and the ability to build bigger ships without having to wait. Thanks for the tips!

[Général Grievous]

When I go to build a ship and find a station that almost has all the resources needed less say 50 of a certain component. I will say OK, build the ship and wait for those 50 units to come in. Then what happens is suddenly the station needs 800 of the units. Then by the time my freighters get there and the station now needs 1200 of those units.

Yeh, i think i have the same problem in Trinity sanctum. Shipyards need smart chips. Anytime. I have 2 stations with a total of 8 smart ships modules inside the same sector.
Smart ships are still lacking and shipyards do not produce anything.
Maybe it's a storage problem? I don't understand, as the 2 stations sell wares and earn credits from it.
It's hard to believe that 8 smart ships modules are not enough to feed 2 paranids shipyards...

For the Xenons... Well, in my game, Teladis built 10 defense platforms in Scale plate green and the sector next to Ianamas Zura.
Got Xenons in Hatikva's fath and inside the Paranid sector, but they are quickly destroyed. (not very fun... )

[r4tch3t]

Try chucking a silicon refinery and an solar power plant with 20 smart chip factories. Churn them out.

As for the shipyards heat, they definately need a hand with materials.
However if you go to trinity sanctum VII there's an ALI wharf there. The NPCs don't buy shops from them so it's always free. They have a selection of freighters from all races as well as ship upgrades from all races.

This is where I get all my freighters early game until I unclog the others.

Eventually you can build your own shipyards.
With these you can have a mega complex making all the materials needed for ships.
My biggest shipyard has 20 claytronics, 20 Hull parts, 5 of each ship tech and ask supporting modules needed.
Add on 10 L fabrication, 6 S/M and 4 XL plus equipment docks for each size.
65,000 population and massive storage space.

[Misunderstood Wookie]

Funny you all mention things like this, for the average player fixing the economy when nothing has even happened yet and we have no real money because building ships is slow early on then one may as well go play EvE online spread sheet calculator at least that never seems to run out oomf provided players don't sabotage your networks.

That said 80 hours into game and nearly all Paranid wharfs fail to build 3 freighters, I do not know what the AI is doing trade wise but clearly not meeting demands of anything and just pissing in the wind.
I remind that I am using the Faction and eco fix mod set and war modules.

[pref]

Holy crap 16 billion??? I will try to build stations that provide the materials. In my playthrough it's engine/shield/weapon components that are severely lacking. There are plenty of stations that trade it. I guess with my 8 miners and 7 haulers all set to distribute the wares those stations are lacking might not be enough of a network to really get established.

Ime these shortages will get sorted after a longer time (maybe even 100 hours+). Then the eco will get saturated, and i found no buy offers for most ship build resource wares any more.

I just ignored trading, and went for boarding first since i did not want to spend my time on the map setting up manual trade runs.
I found the existing trade scripts are not really usable for satisfying specific needs. They did not work well supplying intermediates, picked weird deals and ran with bad cargo utilisation.
Like trading with one SY which has a buy offer for 50 wares while ignoring another with a 10k offer posted at higher price.

Then by the time i finished with exploration and got enough money to start my own production dealing in drugs mainly, the shipyards were already full of materials so NPC economy fixed itself - or more like ended up at the other extreme, where they had no more buy offers posted any more at higher volume except for smart chips at the paranid wharfs. The rest wares had a 100 unit or smaller offers posted occasionally and also trade docks got full. Some wares had no demand at all (mainly the ones needed for engine and equipment production).

If you build stations they will make some profit regardless - npc ships seem to buy your products even if there are no offers posted, also there is logic in the scripts to remove wares from stations that are near full so occasionally you might see some offers as well.

Ime there is no way to plan economic activity in this game, scripts needed for that do not exist and production/demand is not something you can rely on longer term as NPCs will saturate market for most wares over time even without the player.
Due to lacking commands you cannot really take advantage of the shortages nor can you effectively eliminate them unless you queue 10s -100s of trade runs manually. Also your AT/DW ships will often miss the occasional higher volume offers later on.

Ime what seems to be the only working way of economic play atm is to set up support complexes within the 5 cluster range of each shipyard you care about, and the rest will be taken care of by NPC traders. Your own traders can speed this up a little, but not by much.
Or just wait/do other stuff a hundred hours or so and by then the economy will work without you just fine.

[Karmaticdamage]

The economy only starts out low on hull parts and engine parts. The factions will build factories for these and catch up eventually. In the late game you will find that the real demand is for adv electronics, weapon components, and smart ships. The amount of these wares produced in the game world is radically low, especially smart chips. I mean a lot of smart chips, as in like 20-30 of them are needed to get the economy going.

[rit]

I found that in the early game a simple station that produced Energy Cells, Hull Parts and Claytronics worked well as it would create some credits while also allowing me to supply the resources to build additional stations. I ended up just replicating this design around all the main sectors. At about 240 hours in with a far too quiet a universe demand for Hull Parts have dropped to zero, but it was very easy to expand them to service the growing smart chip demand.

From about 100 hours in I started to deploy some mega-complexes that include at least one of every product type for a race - Such things come at a high cost - around 100M credits and about 30 hours of build time, but such stations do remove the need to micromanage the production aspect of the game, you just add additional modules as demand changes. So as demand for smart chips increased I added additional Silicon Wafer and Smart Chip production. In the future, it will also be very easy to add ship production to these stations as they have everything on hand. One odd aspect of mega-complexes is that storage modules have a large number of turret points - so a large station with a large amount of storage placed at the edges of the station allows for a lot of defence capabilities.

[SumUser]

As far as the economy freezing (demand drying up), you can hack stations to dump their storage and you can start a war with a faction to help speed up ship production and thusly the products required to build them.

However, for me, the number 1 improvement Egosoft could make to X4 is to improve xenon incursions and inter-faction conflict scripts AND rebalance station production modules. Energy production is too OP as it basically requires little cost to set up and doesn't seem to need anything to produce metric tons of energy cells. First, solar arrays should only work well in systems where the sectors have a proximity to the local star. Second, the module itself should require some resources other then just sunlight... Maybe a type of ore or nvidium (for the energy cell itself), some crew (food and medical supplies), and even water.

Ideally, you should not be able to create one super factory complex anywhere you want that is self sufficient. By rebalancing station production based on the sectors natural resources and creating more resource sinks in modules maybe an economy could form that doesn't have to be utterly deficient in the beginning followed by saturated to the brim by later-mid to late game.

I'm sure it's more complicated than just that though and it does seem Egosoft is putting a lot of production time in their big fixes, rebalancing, and new content.

[Général Grievous]

However, for me, the number 1 improvement Egosoft could make to X4 is to improve xenon incursions and inter-faction conflict scripts AND rebalance station production modules. Energy production is too OP as it basically requires little cost to set up and doesn't seem to need anything to produce metric tons of energy cells. First, solar arrays should only work well in systems where the sectors have a proximity to the local star. Second, the module itself should require some resources other then just sunlight... Maybe a type of ore or nvidium (for the energy cell itself), some crew (food and medical supplies), and even water.

In X2 and X3, Player Energy cells requires Cristals in order to be produced. And, as far as i remember, sectors had different bonus in term of sunlight.
It would be interesting to get back to this system.

Today, i build a lot of factories in Silent Witness, with a small shipyard. It requires less than 2 solar pannels modules...
It wasn't the same things in X3!

[Misunderstood Wookie]

However, for me, the number 1 improvement Egosoft could make to X4 is to improve xenon incursions and inter-faction conflict scripts AND rebalance station production modules. Energy production is too OP as it basically requires little cost to set up and doesn't seem to need anything to produce metric tons of energy cells. First, solar arrays should only work well in systems where the sectors have a proximity to the local star. Second, the module itself should require some resources other then just sunlight... Maybe a type of ore or nvidium (for the energy cell itself), some crew (food and medical supplies), and even water.

In X2 and X3, Player Energy cells requires Cristals in order to be produced. And, as far as i remember, sectors had different bonus in term of sunlight.
It would be interesting to get back to this system.

Today, i build a lot of factories in Silent Witness, with a small shipyard. It requires less than 2 solar pannels modules...
It wasn't the same things in X3!

Is what I am doing now, starting to build factories, in un-owned space, non fees to build no races to piss off I build them long straight paths between two jump games.
Initially I am starting with just refined goods in a sort of mega complex design that relies on simply high volume of raw materials and a butt ton of energy cells which the six to seven solar arrays seems to provide ample amounts with some to spare for trade sales I am doing so right on the edge of a profitable asteroid belt so resources are of no problem to feed this complex.

This will simply be how I produce enough ongoing funds too fund larger complexes.

[foxxbl]

As to the ship yards and wharfs being out of supplies, basically there seems to be a order backlog when the game starts and it's basically a matter of defending the sector, helping re-supply the sector ship yard and wharfs, and giving it time. At 200 hrs in, almost everything is stocked to the brim and trade has really slowed down. The biggest thing I did was built a fleet early to protect Hatikvah's Choice 1 & Holy Vision as thats where most of the xenon were coming from in my game. This reduced ships being destroyed and thus made it "easier" to let the stations catch up.

This is what is happening to me , no big demand on anything, Xenon contained. Which stations you build now, which goods to produce to create a good cash flow?
I am building now self-sustained Wharf, lets see!