Commercial Shipping

Commercial Shipping refers to interplanetary trade operated by the civilian sector, and is important part of the Empires economy. Trade is established and controlled by Shipping lines, who maintain their own shipping fleets to carry trade goods and colonists between the empire's colonies, generating wealth though taxation. While Civilian contracts allow the player harness civilian shipping fleets to move installations between worlds. the player to move various installations between worlds.

Shipping Lines

Shipping Lines are ran by private companies. They form and maintain their own shipping fleets, these fleets do not require government resources such as shipyards, fuel, maintenance, crews or precious raw materials. Such fleets employ Freighters, Colony Ships, Fuel Harvesters, and Luxury Liners. Each Shipping Lines develop their own designs, separate from what you create, but take advantage of new engine tech and other systems as you develop them, expanding your trading capacity.

Shipping Lines will carry trade goods and colonists between the empire's colonies, handle civilian contracts and harvest from gas giants. As soon as a commercial design with freight, passenger or harvesting capacity is available, the shipping lines will slowly begin building them. If shipping is profitable, more companies will be founded. If no civilian ships are built in your empire, make sure that the shipping lines have the wealth to buy them. The cost of a ship is equal to its Build Points.

You can use the 'Shipping Lines' overview screen Ctrl+L to see the details of these companies, and their shipping fleets. You can see how much wealth they currently own. They will pay dividends to their shareholders from that money and use the rest to buy more ships. To encourage shipbuilding, you can subsidize them. Each click on the "Subsidize" button adds 1,000 wealth to their coffers. You'll slowly recover that expense, though, because they pay taxes for every shipment they make. The amount of taxes generated by shipping can be seen in the 'Wealth' tab of the Economics window.

• Shipping lines will never buy a jump-capable ship, nor make use of such ships parked at Jump Points to reach a colony outside your home system. To enable civilian shipping between systems, you must build Jump Gates. Remember that you need a gate on both sides of the JP, or the ships can't return.

• You can grant and receive trade access to other Empires, gaining access to alien trade goods. It should be noted that trade routes are not mutual. Each empire calculates its own trade routes separately, and trade is 'one way', like exports or deliveries.

• Civilian ships will avoid systems where there has been recent conflict unless sufficient warships are in that system to provide protection (this is shown on the galactic map as red numbers above the system, the Danger Status of systems will gradually reduce over time)

• You cannot command private ships, however, you can ban certain destinations preventing private ships from travelling to those system bodies (planet, moon, asteroid, comet). This is done via 'Ban Body' button in the System window F9.

• Although ships can land on any colony, you should consider building a Commercial Spaceport on high-traffic worlds to speed up loading and unloading.

• When a new ship is built, the shipping line will retire the oldest ship of the same general type (with a minimum of 10 years older) that is not currently carrying cargo. All civilian ships will be scrapped when they reach 15 years old, regardless of whether a new ship has been built.

Civilian contracts

You can use civilian contracts to harness civilian shipping fleets to move installations like mines and factories between worlds for a fee. One colony must have a Supply contract for a certain good, another a Demand contract. You can set these in the 'civilian' tab of the Economics window.

For example, to have the civilian ships move mines to Mars, add a supply of 50 mines on Earth and a demand of 50 on Mars. The civilian freighters will begin shipping mines to Mars now. The contract list will be updated to show how much goods are still waiting. You will be notified if a ship tries to pick up freight that is not available on the planet. If more than one colony has demand for a certain item, you cannot control which one is served first.

Colony ships (with either cryogenic chambers of passenger modules) will automatically pick up colonists and transport them to your colonies as long there is enough infrastructure to allow population growth.

See Also and Notes

• See Trade System for details on Civilian Trade Goods and how the civilian sector builds infrastructure.
• As of v7.0, Shipping range is unlimited, previously it was limited to 4 jumps.
• Prior to v6.00, civilian shipping lines used players designed ships. See Commercial Shipping v5.60 for tutorial and relevant information for that version.