Has anyone tried shipyard/wharf/trading/mining station combos?

[Raptor34]

I've recently come on to the idea of building what I call starbases, which are basically all of the above centered on one station, +solar panels too I guess, patterned off the style of ST's Federation Starbases where with the Terran hexa dock being the upper ring.
But I digress. Since apparently miners seems to more intelligently mine multiple resources for the same station these days, I was thinking that rather than having separate trading stations and stuff all over the place, I'll just consolidate them all into one station instead. Throw in some sensor arrays and admin stations for position defense, then place one of them at each spot according to viewtopic.php?p=5265932#p5265932 and I'll have a galaxy wide network able to both distribute materials everywhere while also providing production for auto ship replacement. And of course a sprinkling of defense platforms on it too so it can defend itself.

All in all none of these are anything new. What might be new otoh is that rather than the usual shipyard just buying it's materials, I plan to sell them too. Which I really don't know how well, or not it'll work. I don't expect to open them to the general public, so that's no worries, and my ship replacement isn't too heavy. I'm just wondering whether the AI would become dumb or something with a shipyard selling it's resources. Or it'll just work out like a normal trading station and the worst that could happen is that I occasionally not be able to build ships when I want to.

[LameFox]

It's not something I've tried but it sounds plausible. I know you can set a reserve of wares not to sell using "sell all but", so assuming it still uses those reserved wares for ship building (on this I have no idea), it might even be pretty easy.

[grapedog]

well NPC's will never come to buy resources from a station, the game logic isn't designed that way... so any sales of raw resources will have to be your own ships, though you might already be aware of this point.

i suppose it could work, but how many are you trying to build? and if you build too many of them, i'd imagine it would be hard to source parts to fill it up without getting really expensive.

but trade stations/raw resource trading stations work fine together.... ive done it before, just not too often. I don't normally build trade stations... but ive done the combo a couple times and its fine.

It's not something I've tried but it sounds plausible. I know you can set a reserve of wares not to sell using "sell all but", so assuming it still uses those reserved wares for ship building (on this I have no idea), it might even be pretty easy.

I use the "sell all but" option often, but always for final products that I want to have on hand... like smartchips or hull parts... where I know I can pull 3k smartchips from factory A if I need them immediately. Probably have to mess with a stations mid-tier wares to test how this works... but I would imagine the "sell all but" means that it will keep those wares regardless of what you got going on, even keeping them from building a ship. easily testable though in the middle of a stations production chain to see how it works.

[Raptor34]

Oh right. I could do that. Though honestly I'm not too worried about that part, but I'll keep it in mind if it turns out to be a serious issue.
I'm more wondering if the manager AI would derp out somehow because of conflicting priorities or whatever.
Then again, the stations are still taking awhile to build, so it'll be a bit before I can see how it works or not work.

If it works then I'll probably look into mass retiring my other trade stations, since those I previously built without really thinking too much. Or maybe I did, but those were from Boron DLC if not earlier so I can't remember what my intentions were. We really could use an ingame notepad.

well NPC's will never come to buy resources from a station, the game logic isn't designed that way... so any sales of raw resources will have to be your own ships, though you might already be aware of this point.

i suppose it could work, but how many are you trying to build? and if you build too many of them, i'd imagine it would be hard to source parts to fill it up without getting really expensive.

but trade stations/raw resource trading stations work fine together.... ive done it before, just not too often. I don't normally build trade stations... but ive done the combo a couple times and its fine.

It's not something I've tried but it sounds plausible. I know you can set a reserve of wares not to sell using "sell all but", so assuming it still uses those reserved wares for ship building (on this I have no idea), it might even be pretty easy.

I use the "sell all but" option often, but always for final products that I want to have on hand... like smartchips or hull parts... where I know I can pull 3k smartchips from factory A if I need them immediately. Probably have to mess with a stations mid-tier wares to test how this works... but I would imagine the "sell all but" means that it will keep those wares regardless of what you got going on, even keeping them from building a ship. easily testable though in the middle of a stations production chain to see how it works.

I meant resources as in everything including ship building materials.
But as for raw resources, like ore and all that, I'll be adding miners set to trade.
As for the number, 12 according to that post I linked. That allows me galaxy wide coverage. Ideally what it'll allow me to do is to basically flow my say Terran resources from one end to the other end. Eventually.
Might look into food trading too, somehow my Argon wharf in Argon territory is starving. I don't even know why. You'll think the NPCs can keep it fed.

[grapedog]

I'm not sure I understand how this station would be different from a fully self supported shipyard? maybe i'm confused as to your premise, what you're trying to do...

[Raptor34]

I'm not sure I understand how this station would be different from a fully self supported shipyard? maybe i'm confused as to your premise, what you're trying to do...

Because I don't want to plan and built out a fully self supported one. It's both a pain and looks ugly since I'll want to occasionally visit.
Essentially it's just a trading station with a shipyard tacked onto it. And it can send out one (1) PD wing too though I'll need to figure out what to do with that. I haven't had time yet to figure out my new defense settings. Especially since the bombard command might be bugged atm and my plans relied on that working.

[grapedog]

I'm not sure I understand how this station would be different from a fully self supported shipyard? maybe i'm confused as to your premise, what you're trying to do...

Because I don't want to plan and built out a fully self supported one. It's both a pain and looks ugly since I'll want to occasionally visit.
Essentially it's just a trading station with a shipyard tacked onto it. And it can send out one (1) PD wing too though I'll need to figure out what to do with that. I haven't had time yet to figure out my new defense settings. Especially since the bombard command might be bugged atm and my plans relied on that working.

ahh, ok, i understand it now.

I don't know about the trade station side of it, some of the non-shipbuilding wares... but as a personal rule I only ever build shipyards/wharfs with no production capability, or only the basics for ECells and supporting a workforce used to populate the ships, so you're food/med production chain.

I suppose it would work fine, and actually help to offset some costs by trading in all wares.

[Raptor34]

I'm not sure I understand how this station would be different from a fully self supported shipyard? maybe i'm confused as to your premise, what you're trying to do...

Because I don't want to plan and built out a fully self supported one. It's both a pain and looks ugly since I'll want to occasionally visit.
Essentially it's just a trading station with a shipyard tacked onto it. And it can send out one (1) PD wing too though I'll need to figure out what to do with that. I haven't had time yet to figure out my new defense settings. Especially since the bombard command might be bugged atm and my plans relied on that working.

ahh, ok, i understand it now.

I don't know about the trade station side of it, some of the non-shipbuilding wares... but as a personal rule I only ever build shipyards/wharfs with no production capability, or only the basics for ECells and supporting a workforce used to populate the ships, so you're food/med production chain.

I suppose it would work fine, and actually help to offset some costs by trading in all wares.

I suppose I should outline the basic ideas. Or at least the gameplay intentions beyond the roleplaying one's.

Firstly as mentioned it's a trade/distribution station, so I can push goods from one end to the other. Doubly so since I don't really have that large an industry, so it's more like say suck up all the Terran production in Terran space and push that towards Split space in case I do anything there that needs Terran materials. NPC production mind, not my own.
Secondly, with auto ship replacement drawing from your own shipyards, these are also intended to provide basically more places to generate replacements. Though tbh I don't know how it works, does it auto build at the nearest? Or is it just random. But if it's from the nearest, then a network of shipyards would make good sense. And of course the distribution part of the station would ensure, to a certain extent at least, that wherever these shipyards are they would get fed. Eventually.
A distant third is they also come with sensor arrays and admin stations for PD. So in theory they could defend something. Though since all enemies come through gates and one PD is not good enough to deal with Khaak, I have EQ docks dealing with the actual gate camping instead.

Oh and I also added some of those observation decks so I can hang out and look at things. Which is also why I do not want a full production chain. What's the point of spending all that time designing something nice if you can't look at it imo. It is a beautiful game after all.

[Raptor34]

well NPC's will never come to buy resources from a station, the game logic isn't designed that way... so any sales of raw resources will have to be your own ships, though you might already be aware of this point.

This has changed apparently. I've just saw a BOR Liquid Distributor coming to buy Helium.
So yay, I don't need that many of my own traders now.
Though I don't know if NPCs actually have mining stations now or if this is purely for NPC to player interactions.

[grapedog]

well NPC's will never come to buy resources from a station, the game logic isn't designed that way... so any sales of raw resources will have to be your own ships, though you might already be aware of this point.

This has changed apparently. I've just saw a BOR Liquid Distributor coming to buy Helium.
So yay, I don't need that many of my own traders now.
Though I don't know if NPCs actually have mining stations now or if this is purely for NPC to player interactions.

Interesting! I'll keep a look out for this, see if it's happening in my game too.

[Raptor34]

well NPC's will never come to buy resources from a station, the game logic isn't designed that way... so any sales of raw resources will have to be your own ships, though you might already be aware of this point.

This has changed apparently. I've just saw a BOR Liquid Distributor coming to buy Helium.
So yay, I don't need that many of my own traders now.
Though I don't know if NPCs actually have mining stations now or if this is purely for NPC to player interactions.

Interesting! I'll keep a look out for this, see if it's happening in my game too.

Wonder if it's a Boron thing. I searched "Liquid Distributor" using the search bar and I found 4. All Boron.

[grapedog]

This has changed apparently. I've just saw a BOR Liquid Distributor coming to buy Helium.
So yay, I don't need that many of my own traders now.
Though I don't know if NPCs actually have mining stations now or if this is purely for NPC to player interactions.

Interesting! I'll keep a look out for this, see if it's happening in my game too.

Wonder if it's a Boron thing. I searched "Liquid Distributor" using the search bar and I found 4. All Boron.

It would make sense in my head for the Boron to have ships specifically out gathering water, since water as a ware is much more important to them.

But you said it was gathering helium, so it's a bit off from that. I suppose its just for Boron flavor.

[Raptor34]

Interesting! I'll keep a look out for this, see if it's happening in my game too.

Wonder if it's a Boron thing. I searched "Liquid Distributor" using the search bar and I found 4. All Boron.

It would make sense in my head for the Boron to have ships specifically out gathering water, since water as a ware is much more important to them.

But you said it was gathering helium, so it's a bit off from that. I suppose its just for Boron flavor.

Well, they are Porpoises so...
But I did another quick look around, apparently some of the Boron Trading Stations, though not known by that name, but they have the map symbol, do stock stuff like Silicon and Helium. So that's probably why.

[Eyeklops]

Be aware that adding e-cell production to ship yards and wharfs can do odd things to the ware storage ratios. You may have to manually reduce the ware allocation for e-cells. If the below is wrong, I encourage correction:

For a production station, production modules get 100% of the storage.
For a shipbuilding station, shipbuilding wares get 100% of the storage.

In a mixed station, production storage and shipbuilding storage are roughly equally split.
The station will have e-cell storage requested by the shipbuilding modules (some % of 50%) + e-cell storage requested by the production modules (100% of 50%). Since the only production modules are e-cells, production will request about 50% of the total storage for e-cells. That's on top of what the ship building module requests for e-cells.

Aside from the above nuance, any station with a shipbuilding module automatically sets the "sell all but" amount to "max" for all shipbuilding wares. Meaning it won't ever automatically offer them for sale. You'll have to uncheck "automatic sell amount" for every ship building ware and lower the value to get wares moving around between stations. I surmise with would be my biggest annoyance with setting up a 10+ station distribution network.

All of my saved stations designs are split-up into mega-build-everything shipyards, pure ship yards , ship-building-ware stations, and pure trade stations. Then when I drop them on the map I know I don't have to worry about fiddling with sub-settings in the station configuration menu. They just work.

I see what you're trying to do, and it can be done. It's just a PITA to do the setup on. Some things to think about.

Also, if you want to move the wares as fast as possible from one end of the station network to the other: add ware storage slowly over time. Maybe start each station with 1 S or M storage module, then as the stations get filled up swap them out for L storage units. If you start by loading each station with 5 or 10 L storage units it will take days and days for the system to naturally fill in the farthest links.

[Raptor34]

I'm aware of that. I used to add ecells to my shipyards ever since closed loop. And my first shipyard had integrated food production too... Oh god the nightmare of every bit of space taken up by food and EC.
Though tbf this time apparently when I was going through setting them up in the beginning, I just discovered earlier to my dismay that while I mostly remembered to limit ecell storage, apparently I forgotten for a couple of the stations. Somehow.
Thankfully it seems that for one reason or another ECs are in high demand and they are flying off the shelves once I've limited them.

Incidentally, for my more or less completed stations I've also started putting the trade into the station, i.e. creating sell offers.
So firstly, I was hoping that I could just leave it all automated, but apparently for shipyards when you create a sell offer of a ware it needs, you also need to setup the sell amount thingy, i.e. that thing where you only sell when above a certain level. You cannot leave that one automated. And I don't mean because of one reason or another, the game doesn't let you do that.
Secondly apparently once you open up the sell offers it'll also start throwing resources automatically to the build storage as needed, so that is helpful for some of them which had issues sourcing hull parts automatically. Since my shipyards already purchase hull parts as a matter of course. Oh, and this part is independent of your sell limits. I.e. it can and will empty out your shipyard's storage regardless of your settings. I was wondering where all my shield components disappeared to. Incidentally this does mean if you're building a super well defended shipyard, you can in theory temporarily set it to sell the station building parts if you don't want to bother with assigning traders to trade for build storage or manually ship wares in. Assuming of course you're already assigning traders for the station itself.

Edit: Also my biggest annoyance is actually procuring fully crewed traders and miners. Because that takes so much time it doesn't feel that bad setting up a dozen stations because what I do is only start really fiddling with the settings when I have the ships needed to assign to it. So it's like I do 1-2 an hour or so. Not that bad.

[jlehtone]

A Trade Station is essentially storage with explicitly added wares with buy and sell offers.
A Mining Station is a Trade Station, where the wares are Solids and/or Liquids. (Bottom tier wares.)

A Fabrication Bay auto-adds (top tier) wares with buy offers. As discussed, storage reservations and sell offers might require extra effort after that. Then again, you will do detailed config anyway, for the "distribution network".

There is also a question of throughput with these top tier wares. What if you manage to bring in wares slower than the Bay and sales are able to consume? The question is naturally always there, even with just Bay or just sales.


I did observe ZYA Shipyard once. Those have both L and XL Bays. A ship consumes all its materials at start of assembly. There was Raptor in the queue, as well L sized ships. Whenever there were enough materials for next L ship, it did start to build. The Raptor had to wait. In principle, continuous sales could stall big ship production just like the Ls did stall that Raptor. (Naturally, with huge storage it is easier to fill it up than when you can barely make one Raptor.)

[grapedog]

A Trade Station is essentially storage with explicitly added wares with buy and sell offers.
A Mining Station is a Trade Station, where the wares are Solids and/or Liquids. (Bottom tier wares.)

A Fabrication Bay auto-adds (top tier) wares with buy offers. As discussed, storage reservations and sell offers might require extra effort after that. Then again, you will do detailed config anyway, for the "distribution network".

There is also a question of throughput with these top tier wares. What if you manage to bring in wares slower than the Bay and sales are able to consume? The question is naturally always there, even with just Bay or just sales.


I did observe ZYA Shipyard once. Those have both L and XL Bays. A ship consumes all its materials at start of assembly. There was Raptor in the queue, as well L sized ships. Whenever there were enough materials for next L ship, it did start to build. The Raptor had to wait. In principle, continuous sales could stall big ship production just like the Ls did stall that Raptor. (Naturally, with huge storage it is easier to fill it up than when you can barely make one Raptor.)

ZYA has the warforge which should only be making raptors, not any other ships, from what i remember.

[jlehtone]

ZYA has the warforge which should only be making raptors, not any other ships, from what i remember.

The "once" was before ZYA got War Forge. Besides, I have not seen the Forge in my game. Perhaps the update did not add it to existing playthroughs?

Overall, the point was that continuous nibbling can delay accumulation of large enough chunk that larger ships require. Raptor happened to be a very large chunk, a case were it was easiest to spot.

[grapedog]

ZYA has the warforge which should only be making raptors, not any other ships, from what i remember.

The "once" was before ZYA got War Forge. Besides, I have not seen the Forge in my game. Perhaps the update did not add it to existing playthroughs?

Overall, the point was that continuous nibbling can delay accumulation of large enough chunk that larger ships require. Raptor happened to be a very large chunk, a case were it was easiest to spot.

i cant remember which update added it, it's been in for a while... but yeah, depending on how old your game is. I'd check my 1.0 save, but I accidentally did all the wrong story choices including siding against ZYA, so now my universe is peaceful and boring as hell, and I only log in to do new DLC's on it. I have another old save from when the SPL were added, which I sided with ZYA, i'll have to see if they have one.

edit/add: yep, no Warforge in that one. So I guess if it isn't included in the startup for ZYA, it won't ever get built. That seems weird.

and yeah, the raptor is probably the easiest one to get delayed due to its costs.

[Eyeklops]

ZYA has the warforge which should only be making raptors, not any other ships, from what i remember.

The "once" was before ZYA got War Forge. Besides, I have not seen the Forge in my game. Perhaps the update did not add it to existing playthroughs?

Overall, the point was that continuous nibbling can delay accumulation of large enough chunk that larger ships require. Raptor happened to be a very large chunk, a case were it was easiest to spot.

i cant remember which update added it, it's been in for a while... but yeah, depending on how old your game is. I'd check my 1.0 save, but I accidentally did all the wrong story choices including siding against ZYA, so now my universe is peaceful and boring as hell, and I only log in to do new DLC's on it. I have another old save from when the SPL were added, which I sided with ZYA, i'll have to see if they have one.

edit/add: yep, no Warforge in that one. So I guess if it isn't included in the startup for ZYA, it won't ever get built. That seems weird.

and yeah, the raptor is probably the easiest one to get delayed due to its costs.

The ZYA Warforge will only show up in games started in 6.0 or later.