Autonomous Logistics Between Ships

[icy storm]

Crews will try to fill buildings with resources from all available storage bays nearby, even from other ships. Also add a storage priority designation, so crews will try to move resources from generic storage bays and designated storage bays with lower priority to storage bays with higher priority. Crews do so only if both ships are stationary, or they will only transfer resources in their own ship instead. This should make the game easier by reducing the need of player manual resource management between ships.

For example, if you designate a storage bay in an industrial ship A to store ammunitions with priority 8, and a combat ship B with cannons and/or storage bays designated to store ammunitions with priority 10, so long both ships are stationary and in resource transfer range, your crews will automatically start to transfer ammunitions from ship A to ship B, until the latter's cannons and designated ammunition storages are full. Further more, if ship A has storage bay that is designated to store steel, your crews will also transfer those steel that ship B possibly received by salvaging from ship B's generic storage bays into ship A.

When it comes to mining and salvaging, crews should move the resource they picked up to the buildings in need, even the buildings are not in the ship they are from. After that, designated storage with highest priority. And finally generic storage bays. So your combat ships without any storage bay can still help salvaging enemy ships as they will transfer the materials to your other ships with spare cargo space.

This should make it a viable choice to separate ammunition production from combat ships. If you do so in current build, it requires a huge amount of player micro management to manually transfer ammunitions from one ship to another by mouse clicks. Also it becomes possible to build DIY space stations which supply your ships and receive minerals and ship debris from them.

[safe quartz]

That's a really cool idea! I hope this game gets more automation.

[simple jackal]

A problem may be that you don't want crew moving between ships at you are moving because then you have to get them

[icy storm]

What about allowing crews to do so only if both ships are stationary? You will likely to command your combat ships to fight if logistics is interrupted by enemies, doing so will stop the logistics immediately.

[safe quartz]

When scavenging there is also a button to make your crew return quickly, maybe that could work for this as well.

[icy storm]

If you dare, you can also place your supplier ship and combat ship both stationary before the enemy, so your crews will start to refill your combat ship with ammunitions at the same time as the combat ship firing at the enemy. It may not work though, for projectile weapons do have an recoil, and any movement renders the ship no longer stationary.