Distant Worlds 2 – Tips for Those Having Fuel Issues

Fuel Tips

Here are some tips that should help:

1. Reactor types matter – You can look at reactor stats on the tech screen. Many players probably go for Quantum reactors over fusion because of their high output, but notice the Caslon:Fuel ration. For Quantum its 5:1. This is horrifically inefficient, and practically guarantees your ships will run out of fuel when traversing any significant distance. Fusion on the other hand is the opposite, lower output but a much better conversion ratio. As a general rule use fusion for ships, quantum for stations.
2. Mining stations – You can put a large mining engine on mining stations, pretty much everyone already knows this. But it probably doesn’t occur to people that you can put a smaller mining engine on said station in addition to this. Or that you can add multiple small mining engines. There is the reason why “large mining station” hulls have so much space but not enough non-support modules.
3. Fuel Tanker design – First, the obvious that if you want fuel tankers dedicated to supplying only one specific fleet, it needs to be in that fleet. Aside from that, design matters. For fuel tankers its cargo holds that matter. They transfer fuel via Caslon stored in their cargo holds, NOT fuel in their own tanks. Give them one or two fuel tanks, and as many cargo holds as you can squeeze in there alongside other necessity modules.
4. Predicting bad AI – If you sign a trade agreement with an empire that is far away from you, your freighters will try and trade with it regardless of whether or not they can actually reach it with their current fuel supply. Try to give them as many fuel tanks as possible to help with this if you must use trade agreements.
5. If you are trying to supply a location that, for whatever reason, your freighters are NOT adequately supplying (Ghost fleet base), you can always make a troop transport design with a cargo hold and small mining engine. You can manually mine whatever you need from wherever, just be sure to pay attention to the ship, because it will try and offload at a location automatically once its cargo hold is full (you can redirect it somewhere else).