Allow Repeat Order ships to belong to a station (Suggestion)

[Scoob]

Hi,

Due how short-ranged Station-assigned traders are (Limited to Manager / individual ship Captain level) and how long it can take to level up above two stars, I rely on "Repeat Order" a lot for longer-range logistics.

These ships essentially work for TWO stations, loading up and one, offloading at another. Simple. However, they do not belong to either station. You can assign a ship to a Station, but if you then set a Repeat Order it loses that assignment. It'd be great if it kept it. This would keep the property lists cleaner and less cluttered, and I can just go directly to a Source station to see what it's exporting via this method. Things work as they are of course, it's just not very elegant.

In the current v7.50 Beta, we've gained the automatic ship replacement feature - which is great - but my critical logistics ships (those "Repeat Order" ones) CANNOT benefit from this. A ship has to be subordinate to something to use this. So, being able to assign a ship which already has a behaviour such as "Repeat Order" to a station (or Carrier, or Support Ship) would add another layer of automation, as well as being neater.

I currently name my "Repeat Order" ships carefully, their name includes source station number (I number all my stations) then destination number, then Ware. Simple enough, but when you have dozens of such ships going all over the universe, replacing the inevitable losses becomes more involved.

This feature could be enhanced by allow the ship to be assigned to a station. As I allude to above, being able to assign any "Behaviour" to also be assigned to a station might be useful, but this post is primarily about the "repeat orders" behaviour, as I'm making good use of that currently.

[TheDeliveryMan]

Already possible:

- set behaviour to Repeat Order
- do not Confirm yet
- assign to commander (Trade group, Salvage group for tugs work, maybe other groups too)
- now Confirm behaviour Repeat Order
=> ship is assigned to station and runs a Repeat Order loop
- set up loop steps

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

[Raptor34]

They should just give us a simple logistics for commander thing instead, which would be the same as this but probably easier.
Like what if I want to feed missile components to a defense station?

[stooper88]

Already possible:

- set behaviour to Repeat Order
- do not Confirm yet
- assign to commander (Trade group, Salvage group for tugs work, maybe other groups too)
- now Confirm behaviour Repeat Order
=> ship is assigned to station and runs a Repeat Order loop
- set up loop steps

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

This is news to me and very appealing, so thank you! If nothing else, it helps declutter the unassigned ships list. I did a quick check and it does also work with mining groups too, albeit a bit jankily. Repeat mining orders are still bugged and cause ships to revisit every mining stop along their routes even when their holds are full. But this is supposedly fixed in 7.5 (I have not checked the beta). Also, ships placed on repeat order behavior aren't able to have deployables such as laser towers "insta-clicked" from the map view. So rescuing M miners (who uses S miners?) from sudden Kha'ak incursions will be a bit more difficult. Of course, this isn't an issue for L miners.

My interest in using this is to avoid the issue of station managers sending miners to far off sectors. Keeping them local allows escorts to remain nearby (without any of the fly ahead and wait or other types of separation nonsense at every jump gate). And as mentioned, local auto mining adds new fleets/unassigned ship entries to the property list. This keeps miners tied to their intended stations.

Anyhow, thanks again for the tip!

[azaghal]

Already possible:

- set behaviour to Repeat Order
- do not Confirm yet
- assign to commander (Trade group, Salvage group for tugs work, maybe other groups too)
- now Confirm behaviour Repeat Order
=> ship is assigned to station and runs a Repeat Order loop
- set up loop steps

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

(thank you for posting this, for the record)

This is neither a bug nor a feature - this is just insane (to put it mildly). How is a player even supposed to know that the interface behaves in this manner?

To be honest... After giving it a quick try, I would even say this has just got to be a bug... Even if useful at it...

Aside from this - will the assignment ever mess with the current set of repeat orders? For example if you assign a "mule" with repeat order to station as part of defense wing?

Best regards,
Branko

[blackphoenixx]

Aside from this - will the assignment ever mess with the current set of repeat orders? For example if you assign a "mule" with repeat order to station as part of defense wing?

I haven't seen anything like that and i use the "feature" a lot. The repeat order behavior completely overrides the assignment as far as i can tell.

It's also not limited to repeat orders, it works with most other default behaviours too so you can for example put all your autotraders into one fleet despite them trading different wares and in different sectors.
Though autominers are a little wonky, you can set them to different resources but they'll always go to the commander's sector to mine instead of the one you assign them.