Transports and Colony ships not loading

from GalCiv3 Forums

Could you just please delete the 'Colony not within range' check when launching a newly built ship? I can see 20 different planets on the explored map  that I can send my ship to  but the game just seems to do a range check from the shipyard - not a range check from your furthest colonized planet. So I have to waste time landing the colony ship on a nearby, out-of-the-way planet and loading colonists from there, before proceeding to my destination. If I build a colony ship or transport, I usually have a destination in mind  and there is no need to do a wasteful range check. The same check happens when launching transports. I've lost several planets to other races because of the travel time wasted in doing this.

15,237 views 14 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

You cannot load a ship with people from a planet more than 5 hexes away from where the ship is built. This is almost certainly working as intended. Opens up too many exploits if you can just teleport colonists from all over the galaxy to your newly built transport ship.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

yes it does a range check from the shipyard that is the point of the check if there is no planet within range of the shipyard there is no way of getting colonists there

Im not quite sure what you want to do here

DeskScapes - Bring your desktop background to life.
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

A planet can sponsor a shipyard, which sends manufacturing to the shipyard, from most any distance, as long as you factor in the decay rate.  A planet can only contribute population to a ship, colony or transport, if it is within 6 hexes of the shipyard. 

I believe you have a situation where you have a shipyard that has sponsor planets that are all more than 6 hexes away.  When you launch a transport or colony, it requires a minimum of 0.5 population.  You can't provide that because no planet is close enough to the shipyard.  You do not need the distance check removed.  You need it added in at the point where it can prevent you from building a colony ship there in the first place, because it knows you cannot launch it.

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

OK, I think I've got the logic of that now. I just assumed that the shipyard would be receiving the required colonists from the sponsoring planets (i.e. an intercolony transport system). I always have 5 planets for each shipyard (otherwise it takes too long to build anything). So the planets usually are quite a distance from each shipyard. I guess I'm stuck with building the ships and moving them to the planets to load them up. Thanks for the info. I was presuming that the message was saying that my colony ship couldn't reach a suitable planet - not that it was simply too far way from one of my planets to load up with colonists.

Reply #5 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

why dont you move the shipyard closer to one of the planets ? 

unless you have the traits that reduce distance decay part of the reason it takes so long to build anything will be that your planets are so far away

Reply #6 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Actually current situation is more of an exploit than other way around. Taking colonist from your manufacturing worlds is bad idea and it could hit manufacturing quite hard (because raw population is more important than anything else). But if you build empty  colony ships and make them take population from your farm world or just some world that is on the way of your colony ships (and btw, you can probably ferry some pop there from some non very good worlds, using smaller and cheaper ships) it's much more effective.

Reply #7 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Could a visible radius be added to the SYs same as it is with SBs? I've fallen foul of that a couple of times and had to spend what feels like forever unanchoring and relocating the yard.

 

On that note, any chance of unanchoring and relocating SBs that you thought you'd placed right but hadn't, or if you have a military SB where you don't want one anymore (such as a military SB which is now in the middle of your territory, having expanded significantly since building it and now want to put it nearer the edge again where it belongs)?

 

Would be cool if all but culture bases could culture flip too.

Reply #8 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting erischild, reply 3

A planet can sponsor a shipyard, which sends manufacturing to the shipyard, from most any distance, as long as you factor in the decay rate.  A planet can only contribute population to a ship, colony or transport, if it is within 6 hexes of the shipyard. 

I believe you have a situation where you have a shipyard that has sponsor planets that are all more than 6 hexes away.  When you launch a transport or colony, it requires a minimum of 0.5 population.  You can't provide that because no planet is close enough to the shipyard.  You do not need the distance check removed.  You need it added in at the point where it can prevent you from building a colony ship there in the first place, because it knows you cannot launch it.
End of erischild's quote

 

I have launched colony ships and transports from shipyards nowhere near planets.

 

The ships just come out empty.

Reply #9 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Empty colony ships can still be used to colonize a planet. You get a free 0.1 population when you colonize, but still get all the benefits of the Colony Capital and still get +0.1 growth per turn on the population. (This needs to be fixed.)

Reply #10 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Quoting Ash_Paradox, reply 7

On that note, any chance of unanchoring and relocating SBs that you thought you'd placed right but hadn't, or if you have a military SB where you don't want one anymore (such as a military SB which is now in the middle of your territory, having expanded significantly since building it and now want to put it nearer the edge again where it belongs)?
End of Ash_Paradox's quote

If it's at all like the current shipyard relocation, it'll be far too slow to relocate the stations relative to just building a new one unless the distance between the old and new site is very short.

Quoting Ash_Paradox, reply 7

Would be cool if all but culture bases could culture flip too.
End of Ash_Paradox's quote

Maybe to you, but not to me.

Reply #11 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

why dont you move the shipyard closer to one of the planets ? 

I' don't think it makes a difference. One of my shipyards is one hex away from my first colony. The other 4 sponsors vary in distance from 14 to about 100 (last isolated colony). There is 0% distance decay on any of them.


unless you have the traits that reduce distance decay part of the reason it takes so long to build anything will be that your planets are so far away

 

It does take a long time to build a large ship; I just assumed it was because I was concentrating on tech instead of manufacturing. I've just started researching manufacturing centers. When I started my first game, I assumed it was like GalCiv 2 and had a shipyard at every planet, but THAT seemed to slow down building even more, with just one sponsor. Maybe I'll try more shipyards, have the closest planet be the only  sponsor, and then switch major manufacturing sponsors around to the ones where  I most urgently need the ships.

Reply #12 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

are you specializing worlds for production? 

The way colonies are set up you wont get much out of them unless you specialize them

Are you adjusting your spending sliders? 

This kind of falls in with specializing but the spending for a world defaults to a balanced spending 

33/33/33. Manu/research/wealth.  And 50/50 military /social 

if you dont adjust that you will only be sending about 16% of your production to ship building

Reply #13 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

No, I usually have the same stuff on each planet, depending on the specialty tiles. I always have 3 factories, 2 labs, a hospital, farm and then add in other stuff like refineries and income tiles. Now that I've acquired the Manufacturing centers, it's only taking 7 or 8 turns to build a loaded ship. I might test the idea of having one planet closest to the shipyard do nothing but manufacture though. I just buily my first economic starbase yesterday and found out you can upgrade it for manufacturing, research and income so I'll build more of those too.

Reply #14 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

After launching colony ships or transports you can send them to a planet, orbit the planet (which unloads the ship) then eject the ship from orbit and get a new "load ship" window. This helps when the shipyard doesn't have a sponsor planet close enough with too low a population to load the ship when it is launched.