Wear, hours and dockings

Ships in The Shipping Tycoon do not age in years. They age in hours under way and in port calls — one call being one arrival and one departure — because that is how ships actually age, and because it makes the way you run a vessel matter as much as how long you have owned it.

The practical consequence: two identical ships bought on the same day can be in completely different condition a month later, and the one that hopped between coastal berths all month is the tired one.

Hours and calls

A long voyage accumulates hours and one call. A short voyage accumulates few hours and one call. Since the call is the punishing part for the hardware — mooring, cargo gear, thrusters, the hull working in shallow approaches — a coaster making a call a day wears out faster than an ultra-large ship making a handful a month, even though the big ship covers far more distance.

The game weights the two according to what the ship is. Coasters and feeders are built for frequent calls and suffer less from them than a deep-sea vessel would; an ultra-large ship run on short coastal legs is being used against its design and the wear reflects that.

Wear

Wear is the running condition of an individual ship, and it rises with every voyage. High wear does not make a ship unprofitable in a subtle way — it makes it unusable: past a threshold the ship is stopped until it has been serviced, and no departure will be accepted.

You will see this coming. Wear is shown per ship in the fleet list, and planning a stop before the ship stops itself is considerably cheaper than discovering the ceiling on a busy week.

The yard

There are two kinds of visit.

A maintenance stop resets wear. It is the routine one: the ship goes alongside for a while and comes back fit to sail. Budget for these; they are part of the cost of operating, not an emergency.

What it costs follows three things, and none of them is what you paid for the ship:

The size of the ship. An ultra-large vessel is a bigger job than a coaster, and it is billed like one.
How worn it is. A stop at 30% wear costs half what a stop at 60% costs. There is nothing to do on a ship that has just left the yard, and it is free.
How long you left it. Above 70% wear the price rises by 2% for every further point. Deferring a stop costs more, not less — which is why running a ship to the ceiling is a decision and not a saving.

Older hulls carry a surcharge on top of all three. The premise of the whole fleet page is that cheap old ships are cheap to buy and expensive to run, and the yard bill is where you feel it: a worn-out 1980s hull costs more per sailing in maintenance than a modern vessel does, despite costing a fraction as much to buy.

A dry-docking is the heavy one. It resets wear and takes hours off the hull's effective age, which is the only way to make an old ship young again. It costs accordingly and it takes the ship out of service for considerably longer. Whether it beats selling the ship and buying a newer one is a genuine calculation, and it depends on what the ship is worth on the sale-and-purchase market at the time.

Yard visits take real time, and in a scheduled week that time is sailings. You can let the auto maintenance-stop rule catch a worn ship whenever the threshold you set is crossed — same price, but whatever was in the timetable right then is missed — or you can plan the stop into the week grid yourself, in a natural gap, and lose nothing. The rule is the safety net; the planned service block is the craft. A repair yard of your own shortens every visit.

The maintenance factor

Here is the part that catches people out. Your maintenance costs do not depend only on the ship being maintained — they depend on how varied your fleet is.

Every additional ship class you operate raises the maintenance cost of everything you own. Every additional model within a class raises it too, by less. The reason is the same one that drives real lines to order sister ships: separate spare parts, separate tooling, separate engineer training, separate manuals.

So the company that buys whatever the market offers this week pays a premium on its entire fleet, forever. The company that picks a class and stays inside it pays the least. The factor is capped — variety does not become ruinous — but it is large enough that a mixed fleet needs to be earning something for the trouble.

This is why the fleet page shows your classes and models as a number rather than burying it. It is a cost you can only see by looking at the whole fleet at once.

Preferred suppliers

You can name a preferred yard and get a discount on both newbuilds and maintenance in exchange for committing to them for a period. It is a straightforward trade: a real saving now against a loss of flexibility later, and the flexibility matters most exactly when something goes wrong.

Practical notes

Plan maintenance stops; do not react to them. The cheapest moment is earlier than it feels, and the price curve above 70% wear is steeper than it looks.
A coastal ship's real cost is in port calls, so a schedule of very short legs is more expensive than the bunker bill suggests.
Before buying a ship from a new class, work out what it does to the maintenance factor on everything you already own.
A dry-docking on a much-loved old ship is sometimes sentiment. Check the sale-and-purchase market first.