Ability to set production speed via slider

Not really. You can use priority setting.

Resources (both metal and energy) get spent in 3 priority queues: high, normal and low.

First, any caretaker, con or commander set to high (as well as units that consume energy to regen shield, cloak...) takes what it needs from high priority. If any resource remains, all that takes from medium take what they need. If anything remains, all that is set to low takes what they need. If anything remains, it goes to excess (which is good for energy, but bad for metal).

If at any point one of the priority queues draw more resources than are availalbe, they split available resources (by I think total resources / total build power) and the lower priority queues get NOTHING.

I guess what I'm trying to say is if you want something to be completed first, you can have the cons/caretakers set to high priority and they will always work at maximum capacity.



I changed the default caretaker behavior in my client. It has low priority. That way, any con/unit that needs resources takes them over caretakers instead of splitting resources. This allows cons to build something asap, but still share among at least factories so unit production doesn't go full stop.

I have thought a slider for distribution of resources between eco and army would be nice. This is a primary strategic decision of long term vs short term, and may change throughout the game.

A global slider for economy vs. military sounds ok, but how does it work in practice? Military is built as a constant rate while economy is built in bursts. Constructors walking between mexes is going to introduce peaks and troughs. It's probably good to build fusions and geos at high priority, faster than your average economic expenditure throughout the game. So, I just I think the decision:tedium ratio in the economy is too high for (at least) one of the following to not be true of any implementation:

• The economic slider is so simple that players have to fiddle with it more often than they were fiddling with constructors and priorities, all to implement the same decisions. Rather than telling your constructors to expand in an area on high priority, you will need to tell them to expand and fiddle with the slider. Rather than just set a fusion to high priority, you will need to set high priority and fiddle with the slider.
• The economic slider is so complicated (eg setting resources aside to deal with fluctuations) that players don't understand it, so they can't really be said to be using it to make decisions. When players delegate control to unit AI, they need to know what the resulting commands will be, or else they're just playing a game of prodding the AI until they win instead of playing the underlying game.

If your factory has 4 nanos near it (for a total of 50 buildpower) then putting 3 nanos on Wait is roughly equivalent to setting that factory to 40% production. You could make a widget that displays a purely UI-side slider over each fac that just pauses adjacent helping cons (with step size depending on how many cons there are).

This has a granularity of 1 unit so it can't actually make a 12m/s commander build at 4 but maybe at such low densities you can implement things quite optimally want with priorities anyway.