Ship supply use per turn

[Ed Kolis]

Drones and fighters have a base supply use per turn, even if they aren't doing anything, but it seems kind of weird that ships don't - I know it's better than SE3's "supplies always Last 1.5 years no matter what the ship does" but there should at least be a minimal supply usage just for keeping the ship running... I don't think it's possible to do this by adding supply usage to Bridge/LifeSupport/CrewQuarters/MasterComputer because the game doesn't check those every turn... anyone else think ships should use supplies just for sitting still? Maybe we can get it put into the next patch...

[Silent Sorrow]

It's so odd that you should bring this up just now because I was thinking the same thing only yesterday. I'm new to the game and am just getting into it (love it so far) and early on I encountered another empire in a quick start game. I had four destroyers and parked them at a warp point in the enemy system. It had taken me a fair amount of resources to travel to the system such that I didn't care to risk driving in further and attacking any ships/planets.

At first I thought, "Oh wait, I can't do that (sit there and do nothing) because I'm going to run out of supplies anyway." So I advanced a few turns and checked my supplies only to notice that I hadn't lost any. So sitting there consumes no supplies. I, too, thought this odd given the fact supply use was modeled in the first place. In game terms what this meant was I was able to kind of "blockade" the system while waiting for another fleet to be built that I could send there for an actual assault. I can see how I might be able to exploit this and gain a quasi-unfair advantage.

What I'd like to see is that even if your ships are doing nothing they use supplies but only at a very fractional rate. For example, at present, I think it's something like 25 or 50 units of supply used for each movement point. For sitting idle, you could be charged something like two points/turn. This would nicely simulate ships being out in the field on garrison duty or whatever but still using supplies and still requiring periodic resupply or rotation back to rear areas.

[Suicide Junkie]

The supplies used by your engines is the sum of the individual supplies used, multiplied by the number of times you use them (# of sectors moved).

So, a ship with 5 Ion Is (10 supplies used) uses 50 supplies per square.
A ship with 5 Ion IIs (8 supplies used) plus 4 Gravitic Drive Is (9 supplies used) spends 8*5 + 4*9 = 76 supplies per sector moved.
If that ship moves 10 squares in a turn, it has spent 760 supplies.

[Taera]

Practicaly the sitting-there-doing-nothing thing with using little supplies can be explained quite good. Normal creature requiements (living quarters / life supports) requie so little supplies compared to a ship engine or a missile you wouldnt notice. You can also think of a built-in mini generator that performs all this for you or an energy recyle system.

Sensors and machinery requie electricity, which is again a minor supply usage compared to engines and weapons and shields.

[Dogberry]

Given the depth & amount of detail offered by this game overall.. I don't think that a minimum per-turn supply usage would be out of line or otherwise inconsistant.

Dog

[Baron Munchausen]

All the game has to do is read and use the 'supply usage' settings on Crew Quarters and/or Life Support. It already checks cloaking devices to subtract the 100 supplies per turn, so why can't it do Crew and Life Support?