This is something that has been bugging me for a while and hopefully Jay will consider fixing.
It’s very, very common in the game to have a re-supply junctions where often two (or more) carriers arrive at the same time. Compared to NP1, the carrier actions are NP2 are just awesome (great implementation Jay) so it’s pretty easy to set one carrier to do a “Collect All” and the others to do a “Drop All” … and then they continue on their merry paths.
However, while the ships are always dropped, they aren’t always picked up … per the Codex:
“Carrier actions are not sorted in a particular order, so if two fleets arrive at a star in the same tick, there is no guarantee that one will drop ships off before the other tries to pick them up. To ensure this happens as expected you should make sure the pick up happens a tick after the drop off.”
Now, I realize it may be difficult to sort out the “right” thing to do if multiple carriers arrive at the same time with conflicting orders (collect all, garrison, etc.) so I’m not asking for an “N-Complete” solution to handle all cases. However, I would respectfully suggest that the FIRST thing that should be done is any carriers with “Drop” orders should do that … after that, then let the existing code sort things out.
I think one of the intents of the greatly enhanced/automated carrier orders was so people didn’t have to wake up at O-dark-30 to check their fleets … so it’s very frustrating to check in the morning and see half your ships left behind.
I.e. the current approach rewards the “night owl” who can login every hour to “fix” this problem in real-time and defeats the purpose of setting waypoints and checking the game periodically.
Sure, I know I can wait one tick … but should this really be necessary?
And if you are meeting re-supply ships at several stars en-route to the front, it’s even more in-efficient since you may need to pause that hour at each junction along the way to be sure you got the ships.