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[bobucles]

The per day consumption of supplies is not a very useful metric. The value can shift by orders of magnitude and can obfuscate how much damage a fleet actually has. A supply/month rating makes sense for a number of reasons:

- Most supply metrics already go by the month. Supply costs for ships are per month, and the base cost of deployment is 1 month of supplies.

- Most ships can fully repair in 10-30 days. If a critical battle leaves you in the red, it becomes immediately visible and is not a surprise like when you're burning 70/day for any random duration between 1 day or 2 weeks. (The only ships that have less than 3% recovery rate are logistic capitals, taking 37 days to reach 75% CR.)

- The number of supplies to load up becomes much more intuitive. If your fleet burns 3 supplies/day, how many do you actually need to stockpile? 50, 100, 150? A novice player may think that is enough supplies, but it's really nowhere near enough. If you know your fleet is burning 90 supplies/month, it makes much more sense to store 200-500 supplies.

- If you have less than 1 month worth of supplies, you are in big trouble. Even if you're trading in the core worlds, it makes sense to have more than 1 month of supplies pretty much always.

[Daynen]

My only suggestion on showing supply consumption is that it stay consistent.  In the ship descriptions we see consumption per month, but while flying it's per day.  It means you either have to do some x30/30 math once in awhile or just intuit how much you need based on experience.  I would be fine with just seeing consumption per day across the board since most travel times are also displayed in a per day format.

[bobucles]

It means you either have to do some x30/30 math once in awhile or just intuit how much you need based on experience.

You can never really know how many supplies your fleet needs. For example I have a jumbo fleet that burns 13 supplies/day. What should I pack? Well, for starters that 13/day comes out to roughly 400 supplies per month. Why did I need to pull out a calculator for that? Transverse jump burns 54 supplies. Hitting a storm can burn 10 supplies, or 30, or 70 supplies. It depends on what ship gets hit. A little bit of storm surfing can easily bring me up to 50/day consumption. Getting whacked by a neutron beam can cost over 150 supplies/day, and that's with the 50% talent. And then there's battle. Sometimes it's desired, sometimes trouble finds you.

If I pack 800 supplies, it can last anywhere from 2 months to 2 weeks. So the UI showing expenses "today" doesn't make any sense. The expenses that kill you are the ones that last a week or a month, so the UI should display them. That's what a per/month indicator will do.

[intrinsic_parity]

Are you suggesting that overall supply consumption is displayed in different units (which seems pointless to me), or that instead, the player should be told the monthly upkeep separately from information about CR recovery and repairs?

I think that overall supply consumption is sort of useless, regardless of what units you give it in. You really want to know the monthly upkeep, and then also metrics like 'total supplies to repair' and 'average CR' separately. I think separating the long term and short term expenses is more helpful for understanding what is going on.

[bobucles]

Are you suggesting that overall supply consumption is displayed in different units

Pretty much. Monthly consumption shows more information, it shows better information, and it presents it in a way that gives players a better intuitive understanding of their supply status. Daily upkeep is just useless.

[intrinsic_parity]

Are you suggesting that overall supply consumption is displayed in different units

Pretty much. Monthly consumption shows more information, it shows better information, and it presents it in a way that gives players a better intuitive understanding of their supply status. Daily upkeep is just useless.

I don't agree with that. I think giving the rate of supply consumption in supplies/month would make certain problems worse if it included supply cost from repairs/CR recovery. You'd get extremely large number showing up that have little bearing on how many supplies you're actually going to spend. If your repairs last a week, but you extrapolate your current rate of supply consumption out a month, you're going to see a much larger number than how many supplies you actually burn. 100 supplies/day becomes ~3000 supplies/month. That number is meaningless though because you only burn 100 supplies/day for 4 days and then supply consumption goes down as your repairs complete. The time scale in supplies/time should be less than the length of events that occur which affect supply expenditure, otherwise you get very misleading numbers.

Like you said, there's way to many unforeseeable factors for the player to actually calculate supply expenditure for a month, so all supplies/time gives you is information about how many supplies you're burning right now relative to how many you normally burn. It essentially tells you 'hey you're burning through a lot more supplies than normal right now, and you might need to do something about'. If you want to work out what normal supply consumption is, you can look at the tool tip and see the supply upkeep in supplies/time. Then you can multiply by a length of time to know how many supplies you will burn in that length of time (like 3 months of something). The units of time there make no difference at all.

Maybe what you're asking for is an 'estimated number of supplies consumed over the next month starting now' rather than a current rate of consumption. But that's just upkeep (supplies/time*(1 month)) + supplies to repair (assuming it takes less than a month to repair), so why not give upkeep and supplies to repair separately? That's much more useful IMO. All that information already exists in the UI actually. Upkeep is in the supply consumption tooltip (just multiply by 30 to get the supplies consumed per month if you care about that for some reason) and total supplies to repair is on the fleet screen. I would like it if all that was more prominently displayed, particularly supplies to repair.

[TaLaR]

Why so obsess with per-month values? Nothing except income/spending calculations actually happens by month.

My rule of thumb is just to have minimum of 100 days of maintenance worth of supplies when departing. More if I expect heavy combat.

[TiberQ]

and total supplies to repair is on the fleet screen. I would like it if all that was more prominently displayed, particularly supplies to repair.

that would be a nice thing to add to the left bottom corner, popping up in the ''short list'' after a battle. Separate from the regular supply's needed for routine upkeep.
Maybe even make it clickable to suspend fleet repairs (along whit an shown hotkey like u have G in perform survey).

That being said running out of supply's / fuel is part (of fun) of the game at the moment.

Going this route would also suggest for a red blink on fuel supply's when u are running low''ish in relation to your fuel / supply's range (to either core worlds your worlds and outposts). Where it is now shown on map +fuel range.

Fully on Topic tho, a switch or setting to day / month would should and will still vary greatly in current settings. How often would one update a monthly supply number when repairing from battle? So if in the future Alex would make something like this a separation between regular use and repair use would be helpfull for the ''better'' overview, being it day or monthly.

[bobucles]

I think giving the rate of supply consumption in supplies/month would make certain problems worse if it included supply cost from repairs/CR recovery.

How would that be worse? Ship upkeep is the LEAST significant aspect of supply consumption. The vast majority of supplies go into space hazards and battle, and those clearly consume more than a day's worth of supplies. So why should the least significant aspect of supply consumption be shown?

That number is meaningless though because you only burn 100 supplies/day for 4 days and then supply consumption goes down as your repairs complete.

But that's wrong. If you're consuming 400 supplies in 4 days and have 3.3 upkeep otherwise, that's 500 supplies over the course of a month. It's just a front loaded consumption, but remains accurate regardless. The total required supplies for repairs is implicit to the design, it does not make sense any other way. The current cost/day actually creates a similar issue, but the day is so short that the granularity of the display doesn't matter. But then again it doesn't display useful information to begin with, so useless but wrong information doesn't hurt anyone.

so why not give upkeep and supplies to repair separately?

Because it's not useful. Supply consumption takes place as a whole. Any individual piece does not tell the player how many supplies they use or need.

[intrinsic_parity]

so why not give upkeep and supplies to repair separately?

Because it's not useful. Supply consumption takes place as a whole. Any individual piece does not tell the player how many supplies they use or need.

How is separate information not useful? Having the estimate split into the different sources of consumption is much more informative for a player trying to improve their fleet. If your upkeep is high and you're having to turn back from expeditions too early, you might try to remove ships from your fleet, or add efficiency overhaul or get rid of increased maintenance ships or something. If you're losing a lot of supplies in combat, you might try to improve your fleet composition to take less damage, or deploy less ships. If you're losing a lot on storms, you can add solar shielding or more carefully avoid storms. Specific information is always going to tell you more, and you can always just add them together to get total supply consumption . There's literally only upsides to having the information separate. Like you said earlier, you're never going to actually know how many supplies you need, so I think its much more valuable to get a sense of how many supplies go to different things. The total is almost certainly wrong because you will encounter unexpected circumstances, but the parts will give you a good sense of how much fights cost and how much storms cost which you can use to estimate how many supplies you need for events that haven't happened yet.

I also think it makes way more sense to tell the player about repairs/CR recovery as what they are: a one time supply expenditure not a monthly expenditure. You're not burning 400 supplies/month, you're burning 400 supplies once, over the course of this week. The game currently explains that by telling you that your current rate of supply consumption is elevated, but just telling you that you're going to burn x supplies to repair your ships seems much better to me.

Ship upkeep is the LEAST significant aspect of supply consumption.

My typical mid-late game fleets burn 8-12 supplies per day in upkeep (so 240-360 supplies over a month), typical battles burn 200-500 supplies and a single storm costs ~50 supplies (with a fairly big margin of error). I also have the choice of avoiding storms which saves the storm cost and increases total upkeep by taking longer. If I consider the supplies I get back from salvage after a battle, combat is usually net positive on supplies, and I often look for easy pirate fights to recoup supplies on long expeditions. Upkeep is definitely a very significant portion of my supply consumption, probably something like 40-50% of overall supply cost. But if I am exploring and not fighting, upkeep becomes my main expenditure. In the mid game, it is often what forces me to turn back from exploring.

[Astyanax]

The per day consumption of supplies is not a very useful metric.

Totally agree!  Supply use/month might be something that can be shown on the Fleet screen, along with other vital Fleet info.


But I'm thinking Supply debt being shown would immensely help a new player judge how many supplies they're going to need in the near term.

For example, a player would know the following (bolded items aren't currently in the UI):
Supplies held: 350
Supply debt (supplies needed to reach max status): 375
Rate of supply use: -117.1/day
Fleet % hull: 67%
Time to max status: 6.2 days

Hopefully, a new player would see that the debt is more than the supplies they are holding, and they should suspend repairs and/or hasten to get more supplies. The rate of supply use can be rather volatile, so it tends to cause panic for the uninitiated.


EDIT- Put another way, a player can directly compare supply debt to supplies held.  Currently, a player has to compare rate of supply use to supplies held, which isn't a very good comparison since the rate frequently changes.

[DatonKallandor]

Supply Debt is a stat that's accessible to the player (it's in the fleet screen) - putting it on the main screen might be a good idea yeah.