Station Subordinate Limit

[BelatedHero]

Tonight I learned something new. Looks like a single station cannot have more than 256 total subordinates. This is total, not each type. So if you have 100 traders, you can only have 156 miners for example. Good to know for people that prefer mega factories wanting to do Terraforming where you need ungodly amounts of ice, silicon, ore and methane.

I don't recall reading about this limit anywhere before, so sharing it with everyone.

[Berserk Knight]

You can circumvent it somewhat by assigning subordinates to the subordinates with the "mimic" command.

[Imperial Good]

Another way to circumvent it, that is likely less elegant than what Berserk Knight suggested, would be to setup nearby trading stations and have those feed mineables to the station. For example having 4 nearby trading stations would allow for 1024 mining ships related to supplying ore for that big station, although slightly less efficiently due to having to dock with the trading stations and then trading to the main station.

[GCU Grey Area]

Another way to circumvent it, that is likely less elegant than what Berserk Knight suggested, would be to setup nearby trading stations and have those feed mineables to the station. For example having 4 nearby trading stations would allow for 1024 mining ships related to supplying ore for that big station, although slightly less efficiently due to having to dock with the trading stations and then trading to the main station.

Can confirm this works, it's what I'm doing in my current game. Have a total of 6 mining stations (3 in Grand Exchange & 3 in Trinity Sanctum) supplying my HQ, which is currently in Scale Plate Green. If anything it's made the supply of minerals & gases more efficient. Each mining station only deals with 1 type of mineral & 1 type of gas so there's no possibility of mining ships being unable to mine a complete load because they were unable to offload a previous cargo of something else.

[BelatedHero]

Indeed, I did the mining trading stations as well. It definitely works. In addition I had my HQ collect ice and methane for terraforming because those are used raw and the HQ will be bouncing around the universe. Sometimes far from the mining stations thus reducing the delivery speed of supplies. It was on the HQ I hit the limit.

But now it is all done, I Terraformed the last planet last night! WooHoo!

[exogenesis]

Trouble is these extra 'mining way-stations' in this work-around for the mining-ship limit
(which is needed due to the current multi-mineral mining poor behaviour / bug)
can get pretty complicated if you're trying to get any significant size of 'cross-galaxy' operation working.

e.g. I'm supplying the Xenon & also building nearly all ships for NPC factions,
& I had to draw the below picture in order to understand what I've ended up with.

I reckon this has given me far too much grief,
what with getting the price-settings right, & having to build a ridiculous number of M/L docks.

Should be so much easier & sensible, if only multi-mineral mining for stations worked better...

http://www.Exogenesis.co.uk/ORE+SILICON1.png

[BelatedHero]

Should be so much easier & sensible, if only multi-mineral mining for stations worked better...

Agreed. The patch notes for the upcoming 4.10 patch claim this is improved. Here's to hoping that the changes work well!