Are Civilian Ships Possible?

[SacremPyrobolum]

Would it be possible for the game to introduce civilian ships which actually have an impact on the trade and the movement of people within your empire without slowing the game to a halt late-game?

I loved how in Sins of a Solar Empire trade and refinery ships were actually represented and would actually have an impact on your economy instead of just being props used to represent trade. If a ship reached a trading port it would generate credits, if you lost it it didn't. Made your empire feel much more alive.

EDIT: I am well aware there is a mod for this. That is no substitute for native support.

 

[Pyramid_Head]

Just not manually controlled. That would be awful. Make them automated
Make trade agreements a lasting kind. So when trade agreement have been signed between empires their planets with space ports start generating trade vessels, which will automaticly start coursing between various empire planets.
1. Frequency of trade vessel generation must depend on factors like sulprus amount of food and planet\system economic developement, so having more than 0 food balance on the planet with maxed pops would make sense. Also starport modules and planet buildings of course.
2. Trade routes should be fully automated, without excessive clicking, just to represent trade going on.
Edicts and policies regarding trade could go along with it.
3. Trade routes should start working like Master of Orion 2 - initially costing you some resources to establish but then gradually increasing their profits. This will encourage long trade agreements and build of trust, rather than trade deals of 1 mineral for 30 years to exploit the faulty mechanics.
4. They should be auto-renewable, unless empire wishes to close them. This is to prevent godawful mechanics we saw in Civilization V - where player have been constantly spammed with "trade deal expired" messages. Initiate a deal then don't cancel it, just make cancelling it before set number of years causing a diplomatic and reputational malus. But if, for example, trade deal is set to last 10 years cancelling it after that won't cause any problem or penalties.
5. Also, with recent dev diary and piracy changes they could build their own raiding bases, instead of one large motherbase, and raid trade routes of various empires. So important and valuable trade nodes should be protected.
Trade laws could determine what kind of trade empire prefers, for example a stream of small freighters, constantly coursing betwen trade nodes or a caravan of several large ones, so it's either small but steady and less valuable to piracy trade, because lossed are deluted or big profits but more desirable target for pirated, and requiring more protection, like spanish treasure fleets.

 

[Drakonn]

There's a mod that adds civilian trade and it's pretty good. Can't speak to the late game performance though as I haven't gotten that far using it.

 

[Rath12]

The food trade mod is one of my favorites. My capital world has no food production, it just imports.

 

[Ixal]

One quick way to add civilian ships would be to have outposts not simply add their output to the storage but have them send a transport to the nearest planet and only when it arrives the minerals/energy gets added to the stockpile. On the way back the transport carries the energy required for maintenance.
If you destroy the ship you get the cargo.

Performance would be an issue. Already the game slows down late game and with additional civilian traffic it will only get worse.

 

[Eustreptospondy]

Distant Worlds: Universe also does it quite well IMO, wherein coporate owned ships ferry resources around and even go off mining planets and asteriods which noone else is exploring. The massive volume of ships, all with a distinct purpose and goal in mind makes that game feel very alive, which I desperately wish Stellaris would also do.

 

[safe-keeper]

Stars! had a full-fledged logistics system where each world had its own stockpile of minerals and you had to build freighters and load them with cargo to ship resources, and colonists (who doubled as space marines) to where they were needed. So for example, if you had ships remote mining some uninhabited planet, you would need one or more freighters to ship the minerals to the inhabited planet that would actually make use of them. It could get micro-heavy and frustrating, sure, but it was a neat idea.

For Stellaris, I imagine ships carrying food and perhaps also migrating pops or even traded minerals and energy credits. Would be interesting if, kinda like with the convoys in HOI, you actually had to safeguard your shipping against enemy attacks, and if I, say, trade 200 minerals for star charts, the deal doesn't go into effect before the ship(s) carrying the minerals reach their destination. If it is destroyed, you lose the resources and need to send another ship.

Less sure about ships from orbital mining stations to inhabited worlds in Stellaris. Perhaps there could be a blockade mechanic or something, but if enemy ships can reach those stations, they typically just destroy them very quickly anway.

 

[Pyramid_Head]

You can set a kind of charters to colonization on certain planets and mines or entire systems so private investors\corporations\enthusiasts can go and build it there with some form of payoff, akin to authonomy mechanics.

 

[safe-keeper]

You can set a kind of charters to colonization on certain planets and mines or entire systems so private investors\corporations\enthusiasts can go and build it there with some form of payoff, akin to authonomy mechanics.

Now that would be really cool.

 

[Tionix]

And pirates should grow stronger based on how much successful raiding they do!

 

[TheDellingr]

i would like to see that i can choose to ignore civilian ships/Stations in a war.

 

[Ezumiyr]

There's a mod that adds civilian trade and it's pretty good. Can't speak to the late game performance though as I haven't gotten that far using it.

It's pretty good for one game. Then it's boring very fast...
Since there's no gameplay associated to it, it just adds ships on your screen, which has two consequences:
- it makes the game slower, especially in end game in huge galaxies
- it makes it harder to find military fleets

I used to think that civilian ships would be a nice addition to Stellaris, now I think that there are two possibilities:
1- Make them purely decorative. No gameplay associated to them (or just modifiers), and their visual representation can be disabled. At most, something like in EU4 (you can add merchants, you can have modifiers for better trade, and you can even send pirates) or CK2 (you can build trade posts). That's the "easy" solution.
2- Create a deep gameplay for them. Not just automatized trade routes with some related policies - that's just boring. You can enjoy that for 1 or 2 games but most players will be disappointed eventually. It requires to be something unique to Stellaris. What would be nice is the possibility to have specialized sectors. Mining sectors would have mining ships, tourism sectors would have cruise ships etc. The player would decide the kind of civilian ships (or even non-civilian, if he sets a military sector) there are in his empire, depending on his empire ethics. He would give certain sectors to specific factions. That way, factions would directly control a part of your empire's economy, and it would be visually represented by those civilian ships.
Sometimes they could even give you "quests", like escorting a big cruise ship throughout the galaxy, or rescue missionaries that have been sent to a world populated by primitives by a religious order sector.

Of course I would prefer option 2, but option 1 is nice for everyone who just want to see civilian ships.

 

[Nyrael]

Mods already did it with what the game has, so it's definitely possible

 

[scaper12123]

If the game can run alright when our fleets send out hundreds of tiny fighter ships when entering battle, i'm sure it can run alright with a small number of civilian vessles flying between systems. The only thing that will have to happen is that they'll have to be controlled by a minimum number of AIs, if controlled by an AI at all.

 

[Drakonn]

If the game can run alright when our fleets send out hundreds of tiny fighter ships when entering battle, i'm sure it can run alright with a small number of civilian vessles flying between systems. The only thing that will have to happen is that they'll have to be controlled by a minimum number of AIs, if controlled by an AI at all.

Yea, performance should be a top concern when adding civilians to the game.

 

[safe-keeper]

Thinking more about it, I think civilian traffic should be abstracted like in EU. If we are to imagine worlds of billions of people, it doesn't make much sense to just have a few civilian ships flying around. Think about all the cargo ships and tankers sailing on the seas of Earth today. Abstracting them into "trade routes" makes more sense, in my opinion. Someone else brought up map clutter and performance issues, too, and that's a good point.

Physical, on-map ships for things like trade, though? Probably feasible.

 

[Drakonn]

Thinking more about it, I think civilian traffic should be abstracted like in EU. If we are to imagine worlds of billions of people, it doesn't make much sense to just have a few civilian ships flying around. Think about all the cargo ships and tankers sailing on the seas of Earth today. Abstracting them into "trade routes" makes more sense, in my opinion. Someone else brought up map clutter and performance issues, too, and that's a good point.

Physical, on-map ships for things like trade, though? Probably feasible.

Don't know. Then we're getting into the abstraction of "Consumer Goods" which is a nice starting point but would definitely like to see fleshed out more (buildings to produce them, port buildings, etc). I'll admit that the few civilian ships flying around from the mod made it more immersive to me even if there wasn't quite the number that would actually be there.

 

[zanaikin]

Btw, there is a mod for this.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=693402022&searchtext=

The Civilian Trade mod automatically creates the "traders" vassal group under every multi-system empire, and the traders will auto-build ships that roam between planets. Planets where a trader arrives get a temporary boost to resources (but also ethic divergence).
There's also a roaming civilian 'circus' group that improves happiness once trade is high enough.

The mod comes with techs that increasing the traders' power (# of ships), and some edicts that... I don't fully understand yet ^^'

The mod is very stable and I highly recommend it. Its only downside is that the traders' AI don't avoid systems under attack.

 

[Almond_Brown]

Add another Map overlay layer that can be turned on and off like the ones we have now. The Trade layer would add lines indicating where the Trade flows between planets/Space Ports and its current direction of flow. If required, small moving balls/blocks (symbols) could be seen moving along these routes showing how much trade is ongoing to a max #.

Have each symbol represent a value = to # of ships using that route and Raiders could attack symbols along a route which would provide a pop up of the attack on the route providing time to respond. Due to the vast distances, raiders could not wipe out a whole trade route unless you totally ignored it and allowed the raiders to do just that.

If ships were lost to raiders, and the raider issue had been resolved, a right click on the route would add another ship to some max value of ships the route required to be maintained, be it food or resources being moved.

 

[kineticspartan]

Thinking over this myself I had an idea. Considering that the map is essentially flat, maybe the devs should look at a trade system similar to "Empire: Total War" where the trade ships are presented as low detail absrtact vessels? It would seem to be the best option as it gives us the immersion factor of seeing the ships coming and going but also is low on graphics resources.
Also, another idea would be for there to be a difference in the desnity and number of ships displayed- with proximity to the home and core worlds, as well as the amount of resources being shipped having an effect on how many trade ships are present in system (so that a core system, or system where a large amount of trade passes through, would have more trade ships on screen than a new frontier world in the middle of nowhere.)