So in my game, I've got a decent empire going, actually have fuel stocks available outside the sol system, and have started building a military, although I ramped up production too hard, as usual, so I'm facing a bit of a duranium crunch at the moment. I just need to prioritize mines, automines, and asteroid mining ships, and hold off on adding more production, or at least slowing it down a bit.
I'm running into a few issues that I was hoping maybe someone might be able to assist me with:
1. Earth has a 22m worker shortage. Earth is my industry, shipbuilding, and research capital. It's also the main hub of my empire, so it tends to have the best mineral stockpiles. However industry, shipbuilding, and research all use a lot of workers, and it doesn't seem feasible to have earth continue to do all that. The easiest solution I see is to tow my shipyards to mars, which has a lot of workers to spare, but then I've got to make sure both earth and mars have enough minerals for their various production. Currently this worker shortage is preventing my research from really getting any faster, as I just lose efficiency as I add more research facilities due to the worker shortage.
2. Almost all of my civilian shipping is trading with aliens, but I'm making a negligible amount of wealth from it (Like 0.4% of my income). Meanwhile I have tons of shipping contracts not being fulfilled because they're too busy shipping garbage to aliens. I wouldn't mind if I made some wealth, but as it is, I'm making practically nothing off this, even though there seem to be about 30 ships going back and forth trading. Is this normal? I expected trade to be a lot more lucrative.
3. I can't really figure out how to make a tonnage efficient fleet with good range, and speed. So what I've been doing is making carriers with huge commercial engines, tons of fuel, and lots and lots of engineering spaces and maint storage, and 15000 tons of hangar storage. They travel at about 2000 km/s, so it's not horrible, but clearly they're not going to be able to keep up in battles, and they're not armed anyway.
Then I have a series of 15000 ton warships, with power boosted engines, and enough fuel storage for about 4 days of travel, going at 16000 km/s. I figure that speed will mean they should be able to close with almost anything.
My plan is to bring my carriers to the system where I want to fight, deploy the warships, and have the carriers hang back at the jump gate, ready to scram if they get targeted. Meanwhile the fast ships will engage the enemies. When the battle is over, the fast ships get back into the carriers and everyone can go home.
The problem is, these carriers are like 35000 tons. Each 15000 ton warship needs a carrier. This means I'm building 50000 tons of ship but only getting 15000 tons of firepower, and the rest of that tonnage is just to get it to the system it needs to be at, without putting a huge dent in my fuel supply.
My warships all have either gauss or 15cm lasers. I also have a gauss variant that drops a few cannons to hold some sensors, and another variant that's just a fast tanker to stick with the attack fleet for extended engagements. My 4x tracking speed fire controls have 16000km/s tracking speed, so I was quite happy to get the ships to that speed, meaning I don't need turrets to take full advantage of the tracking speed, saving some tonnage.
I noticed in the design display, it showed the tracking speed as the ship speed, rather than 16000 km/s, as I would have expected by from the fire control. I'm apparently still a little confused on tracking speed...
I know there are 3 variables in play.
Ship speed (if not turreted) OR turret tracking speed (if turret mounted)
Base tracking speed tech
Fire control tracking speed.
The way I thought it worked was:
Weapon tracking speed = The greater of Base tracking speed tech or ship/turret speed
Firing Tracking speed = the lesser of weapon tracking speed or fire control tracking speed.
Meaning I would expect any given weapon to never be able to track faster than the linked fire control's tracking speed. But it seems like the display is telling me that my lasers and gauss will track at the ship's speed, 16600, rather than the fire control's speed, 16000. If that's true, I'm wasting the space of the 4x tracking speed fire controls. Can anyone enlighten me on this?