KextV8 wrote: ↑Sun, 29. Jan 23, 16:02
blackphoenixx wrote: ↑Sun, 29. Jan 23, 15:53
So it looks like the Demeter still barely comes out on top without highways (an advantage that should increase with distance) but as soon as those enter the picture the Vulture & Tern will probably quickly pull ahead.
I never much cared for the Cargo per speed method of calculating. It ignores the reality that sometimes the bigger cargo saves you on Trip numbers so wins out, or that being able to purchase a bunch at a lower price can be more profitable than lower value transations more often. So, it's nice to look at AI trading through that perspective, but not as relevant for player directed trading/logistics where we have defined quantities we want moved to complete specific tasks.
This is one of those weird community reasons, that DEPENDS on something false, being true for the rest being true, but why are we ASSuming something to be true to begin with, instead of it being IF the ship sails with full cargo, but no you jump straight to THAT THEY DO sail with full cargo all the time.
The game has NO MECHANIC to fill ships cargo hold. The larger the cargo hold the larger the chance is that the ship is sailing without a full cargo. I have 10 Demeters and 1 L freighter on my HQ, my L freighter is sailing around with cargo filling 1-10% of it's hold, because the game doesn't see the size of trades.
Even the Demeters run around with less than full cargo holds. I think I've seen one trade where my L freighter filled it's cargo hold with 30K food and brought it home, the rest of the time it runs slow trades with way below half filled cargo, because the station can't produce or demand resources fast enough for even a 10 demeters to have enough work. So they see that we need 10 food and go buy 10 food, they don't wait until we need 30K food and send the big guy.
Now you can optimize stations for more efficient freighter operations, but no one is bothering mentioning that when they talk about full cargo ships as optimal and I'm not entirely sure you can optimize your station to avoid the problem of ships sailing empty.
So with how the game ACTUALLY works in mind, best freight ships is most likely a fleet of S, since they would be more nimble to react to demand/supply. Though then you run into them being flimsy and too easy to kill, returning you to the M class for reasonable cargo volume/speed/survivability combination. With L freighters is for heavy survivability requirement and long range transport that the game isn't really build to handle as stations is limited to 5 hops without repeat orders.