Carrier Collection Optimisation

In a rather quiet game I’ve been playing, I’ve been spending a bit of time trying to find the best optimisation for looping carriers to collect ships. The way some of the stars are scattered makes it not such a straight forward job as usual, for example look at these clusters…

Cluster 1

Cluster 2

Especially with the 2nd one, the stars are spaced quite sparsely. I considered a few approaches and In the end I decided to pick a central star for the cluster and setup a few circuits which all drop at this central hub:

Cluster 1

Cluster 2

This aught to cut out the longest journeys between stars which would waste flight time. Then I link the clusters with Warp gates:

Interested to know how other people would approach this and if there’s a more efficient way.

Remember you have to take into account that carriers don’t always drop first per this thread.
Really sucks if you have the timing just right … and then watch your forwarding carrier leave a bunch behind - that Captain should be demoted! :wink:

I’m pretty sure Jay hasn’t had a chance to address this bug yet.

That’s true for cluster 2 where I have a central drop off star, with 1 circuit which collects from the centre and then drops at the warp gate (which is why I have a higher number of carriers on that circuit). In circuit 1 though they all drop in the same place, and the collection would be done manually so shouldn’t be a problem.

It might help your game, since you are considering this closely, to define what you are trying to accomplish.

I don’t mean to be snarky- I want to point out that you are chasing something that may not be what you want.

What does ‘efficiency’ actually mean to you?

So here’s a few things I think about when setting up carrier loops.

First off, the shortest distance from star to star is a direct line. Draw a line from the first star in a carrier’s loop to the last star, and the more the intermediate stars deviate from that straight line the more time is added. Now efficiency can be added with additional carriers, but even more could be made with those same number of carriers on more direct routes.

Second, figure out which direction you want your ships travelling. Never have your ships moving away from their eventual goal. Looks to me in that upper loop you have ships moving clockwise around a loop, so the ships from the star on the left move all the way to the star at the top before moving back down toward the central drop off star. Instead, the left star should have its own carrier loop directly to the central star (loop B) and the other two stars would get their own carrier(s) (loop A). Similarly with your loop on the lower left, it seems like ships are spending too much time travelling away (or at least not towards) their destination. Instead I’d have the two westernmost stars each have their own carrier looping toward the warp gate star, and the central drop off star would have its own dedicated carrier loop toward the warp gate star.

Thirdly, star industry levels can definitely affect how I set up loops. For example, say that middle star in the loop I labelled A generates 100 ships per day while the north-most star generates only 10 per day. I would probably start by giving the larger star a carrier or two to loop directly between it and the drop off star, The smaller northern star would get one carrier to loop to the larger. That would allow the higher ship count generated from the larger star to be collected more regularly without spending excess on carriers looping through both it and the smaller star each time.

Here’s another point with regard to keeping the ships moving toward (never away) from their eventual destination. If I have only allies to the west and south, and my enemy is largely to the north east, I’d make sure ships aren’t travelling too far away from the enemy just to reach a warp gate star; even if the trip is a little bit longer, it can be worth bypassing the closer warp gate star if it’s further away from the enemy, as in the diagram. In this case, I’d figure out if the trip back to the further warp gate, plus the probably wait time for another carrier to pick up the ships and go to the next warp gate star, would be more or less than just sending the ships directly to the next warp gate star.

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:smiley: Thanks kexsel - some very good advice there; I had a feeling there would be a way to improve on what I had put into place.