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[allegretto2500]

for me the biggest battle in this game seems to be not running out of supplies. it is VERY easy to find yourself stranded all of a sudden with no cash and supplies. its a real game-breaker. this feature needs some serious, serious re-balancing.

[Arakasi]

It does seem brutal when you first start playing the game - but you learn how to play around it and be careful with how many supplies you load up on.

[Thaago]

Well... tbh you get used to it. Not spending all available cash on ships, taking ships with salvage gantries to get more from debris fields, being efficient in battle by deploying less ships, taking recovery skills, being careful when recovering wrecks, and even scrapping ships in an emergency are all ways of avoiding supply spiral/death.

Running out of money/supplies is the only way to lose the game. It can be a bit harsh at times, but there has to be some pressure on the player to keep the edge on.

My rules of thumb: always have enough cash on hand to resupply (amount depends on fleet size), and always have enough days of supplies to reach a settlement. If ships suddenly take damage and the repairs would push a fleet past its endurance, stop the repairs on that ship ASAP.

[Null Ganymede]

There is a bump in the learning curve for fighting net-positive battles. Until you figure out a couple of ways to win fights cost-effectively that work for you, it can be rough.

After that point, the fact that logistics and ship endurance are important campaign-map factors is awesome and opens up a bunch of cool tactics.

[AdmiralRem]

Ya it can be rough in the beginning, but I would not change it.
Like people said you get better at planning and keeping track of things.

[Schwartz]

The unfun thing about these sorts of difficulty parameters is that money, supplies and fuel all amount to either 'having enough' or 'oops, gotta reload now'. There is no middle ground. This requires the player to plan and manage to stay afloat, which is great for a veteran but daunting for a newb. The satisfaction of keeping yourself going is not nearly as noticeable as the frustration when you run into a wall.

I don't see the problem with lessening fuel / supplies required for your own personal game. Hell, I might even add that to my own settings mod.

[SafariJohn]

The unfun thing about these sorts of difficulty parameters is that money, supplies and fuel all amount to either 'having enough' or 'oops, gotta reload now'. There is no middle ground.

Properly balancing constant resource drain can be done. For example, when I ran out of resources while playing Ashes of the Singularity, I could tell which of my actions directly caused it. Contrast that with Supreme Commander, where running out of resources felt arbitrary and annoyed me to no end.

We need to be able to predict money/supply/fuel usage easily and accurately in our heads, or else the game needs to throw up the warning signs long before it becomes "you're screwed".

I think money is okay, and I've run out of supplies several times and turned out okay, so that is mostly fine. Fuel is the frustrating one, because you're fine until you aren't, and at that point the game takes control from you.

[Shrugger]

IMHO the only annoying thing is that AI fleets can't run out of fuel/supplies/crew/money.

[taerkar]

Considering how many AI fleets there can be tooling around that might be a compromise for stability/speed.

[intrinsic_parity]

It's really easy to keep track of your fuel status. There is a map overlay that shows your max range based on fuel as a circle on the map. Theres a bit of error with storms and stuff so I play it conservative, but I can't remember the last time I ran out of fuel. Supplies are a lot harder to predict because you can lose a bunch from hazards and battles, but there is also a much larger margin for error since you can go for a quite a while without supplies before you start losing important stuff. Experience definitely helps with managing supplies, but I don't think it's as binary as people make it seem. I also definitely feel like I have control over resource usage, and can avoid resource drains easily if I am worried. I also change my fleet composition if I want to spend a long time exploring.

[bowman]

My rule of thumb is to keep enough supplies in my cargo holds for 100 days of maintenance. You can see your supply cost/day in the lower left of the campaign view. There is a skill for -25% supply use for maintenance (I believe it is a T2 skill, though) and there is also one for -25% fuel use, along with one that is +50% fuel salvaged. All three are pretty good cost savings imo but I also explore quite a lot.

I do shift that a little for when I'm running only frigs/destroyers in the early game because A) simply not enough money to waste on that many supplies and B) you don't need it with burn levels that high+not being strong enough to really venture super far out yet.

Early game: ~70-150 supplies
Mid: 200-500 supplies
Late: 800-1200 supplies
Hyper-late: 1700+ (multi-capital deployments are very expensive, and generally I'm not doing it for direct profit but to raid visit my neighbors)

Ships have varying costs depending on their tech level and overall strength. Low-tech, heavily-armored ships have generally higher fuel/LY while high-tech ones have higher maintenance costs. Capital ships also guzzle fuel- the normal curve is:
Frigates: 0.5-1 fuel/LY
Destroyers: 2-3 fuel/LY
Cruisers: 3-5 fuel/LY
Capitals: 8-15 fuel/LY

[shoi]

IMHO the only annoying thing is that AI fleets can't run out of fuel/supplies/crew/money.

Agreed, but like someone else mentioned it was probably a design choice for the sake of performance

[Cosmitz]

It does seem unfair, but if it helps, it was much worse.

In short, always try to keep liquidity and enough supplies on hand. If you want a rough estimate, try 1/3'd of your total cargo space to be sure. Also don't deploy your entire fleet for a battle if you can win it with just three ships instead of 12. Each ship you throw up in battle loses Combat Rating just for getting sent in, let alone anything else that may happen to it, and that combat rating needs supplies to get it back up.

Also, don't constantly mothball/unmothball ships, getting that CR back up can cost a LOT.

Also-also, repairing for max CR at a station using supplies is the /quickest/ way to get maximum CR and figure out how your supply status looks.

[SapphireSage]

Like Cosmitz says up above, as long as you have a couple of decent sized freighters for your fleet about a third to half of your total cargo in supplies will last you a good long time, and if you're traveling back and think you might run out, then suspend repairs on whatever ships you can or even mothball some if you have the cargo/fuel/crew room to spare without the mothballed ship. (Keep in mind mothballed ships still consume fuel regularly, prevent E-Burn and T-Jumps, and will drop the ship's CR to 0% though, but will not suffer malfunctions nor consume supplies). Non-mothballed ships that are at around 0% CR with suspended repairs/no supplies will suffer hull damage, but if they get low then activating repairs will prevent further damage aside from environmental things like storms.