Feature request: Let station managers buy substitutes for destroyed ships

[spalan]

Executive summary: Station managers, especially highly trained ones, are smart people. If I assign a trader or miner to a station and that ship gets destroyed, it would be great if the station manager could simply buy a ship of the same type and loadout at the nearest shipyard, give it the same name, and employ it in the destroyed ship's place.

The whole idea: At the moment, I have a large empire with more than 70 stations and way more than a thousand ships, and ships get destroyed rather regularly. I would have to constantly go through the logs to see which ship was destroyed, try to figure out the particular type and loadout from the name alone (because that's all that's in the logs), purchase or build another, and assign it to the station. This is simply too much to handle if I also want to play some missions or enjoy my game, so it sometimes takes me days or weeks until, on an inspection tour through all my stations' statistics, I figure out that a station has lost three ships again and has been producing far less than possible for many in-game hours. So why not give the station managers the ability to replace destroyed ships on their own initiative, if they have enough cash in their station accounts? This would save me and other players with large manufacturing and trading operations lots of work and massively increase our playing experience.

[Falcrack]

I generally prefer the AI make fewer assumptions about what I want. There may be times when I want a substitute ship ordered, and I will do so. There may be other times where I do not want such an order made. I don't want to AI making that decision for me, unless there is some checkbox somewhere where I can explicitly indicate I want this to happen. It may be helpful when you are in the stage of the game where you describe with hundreds of stations and thousands of ships, but would not be useful for me in an early game.

[spalan]

Oh, I agree, you should of course have the option of turning that on or off at the station level.

[grapedog]

I don't know if you are playing vanilla or modded, but there is a mod that does exactly this. It's pretty awesome, even copies the same name over afterwards so you don't have to rename it.

[LameFox]

Would certainly be nice for larger games, especially when you have a shipyard of your own. Could also benefit fleets needing to replenish lost carrier fighters or so.

[SirBerrial]

Would certainly be nice for larger games, especially when you have a shipyard of your own. Could also benefit fleets needing to replenish lost carrier fighters or so.

Thats mostly why I skip carriers - having to restock grunts is not fun.
Restocking traders and miners is equally unfun.

[iforgotmysocks]

Make a mod request. Would have coded that a long time ago if i had more time and less things piling up. Should be fairly easy to code.

[SirBerrial]

Make a mod request. Would have coded that a long time ago if i had more time and less things piling up. Should be fairly easy to code.

Mod already exists.
But the mod cuts off access to the ventures, whenever those become available. Don't really want to do that for now, and this particular feature seems like a huge qol improvement for lategame.

[spalan]

I don't know if you are playing vanilla or modded, but there is a mod that does exactly this. It's pretty awesome, even copies the same name over afterwards so you don't have to rename it.

That sounds great - do you have a name for that mod? I couldn't find anything that sounded like what you describe.

[grapedog]

I don't know if you are playing vanilla or modded, but there is a mod that does exactly this. It's pretty awesome, even copies the same name over afterwards so you don't have to rename it.

That sounds great - do you have a name for that mod? I couldn't find anything that sounded like what you describe.

I don't know if its on nexus, I found it on steam... i use a mix of steam and nexus mods for my current playthrough.

Player Restock Subordinates

[builder680]

Mod is called "Restock Subordinates" iirc and it's great. Only issue I have is that it does not copy turret behavior, but other than that it's perfect. I'm sure we'll get shut down soon though for talking about mods other than ship mods in the general forum. Perhaps this thread should go in the S/M forum as a request that's already been fulfilled.

[jonesmz]

I had opened a question about a similar topic in the past: viewtopic.php?f=146&t=442364#p5082570

I'd love to see X4 gain a feature where a station manager can restock ships, with some rules on budget, ship type(s), fleet composition, fleet orders, repair behavior, and so on.

Similarly I'd also really *really* like to see the new player "office" in the HQ in the 5.0 beta be expanded to also have offices for fleet admiral positions that allow the same thing to be done on fleets that aren't assigned to stations.

Even if the *ONLY* thing about this feature is to let fleets get re-stocked, that's still a big improvement to the current micro management.

[Insects]

They could also handle this by having a Replace button on the destruction notification which restores the ship and orders.

You don't always want a ship automatically replaced, the fact it got destroyed can be a sign that you need a better ship in the role.

[Imperial Good]

Having "ghost" ships would be fairly useful, similar to the game Factorio for lost entities. The player could select such a ghost, right click on a shipyard/wharf and order a replacement which then automatically is assigned to that role. Dealing with crew skill would be tricky though as not all replacements might be suitable, so additional features would be needed to handle that.

Similar to restock, settings could be made to automatically order replacements, including for wings destroyed in combat. This would be a late game feature where cost matters little to the player while convenience matters a lot.

[Insects]

That would be nice interface. The Ghost could be a flight recorder or escape pod which either flys itself home or has to be recovered as cargo.
Maybe advanced escape pod could be a Loadout option and it saves the pilot who will rebuy their ship.

I guess now they have tugs your wreck could be towed back and actually repaired rather than scraped.
Repair also avoids the big problem of no single shipyard being able to make mixed faction loadouts, your own repair station could restore anything and be a game accomplishment on the way to a player wharf.

For automation tug ships could be set to recover your wrecks and either stockpile iinside the station, or immediately begin the restoration if adequate wares.
Restored ships resume their orders, minus cargo. Pilot stars perhaps a complication but can work something out.