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Ability to set production speed via slider

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2 years ago
Normal build speed builds at 12m/s. I want it to only build this unit as 4 m/s. Click on factory > slide bar somewhere to set max m/s usable by factory.

Useful?
+0 / -0
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.
+5 / -0


2 years ago
I can imagine uses for a slider, but I don't see enough to warrant adding it. Sliders are pretty bad UI in general. Usually you should be caring about the order in which things complete, rather than manually looking at ratios between units.
+2 / -0
2 years ago
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.
+0 / -0
2 years ago
At the fac/unit layer. Priority settings work well. Once a project is started, it should be finished quickly as a unfinished project is only waisted resources.
+0 / -0
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.



+1 / -0

2 years ago
If factories had buildpower sliders I would probably actually use them. For example when a cloaker, I like to have a force of slings at all times, and these are autogrouped for easy rallying to the front. Generally I put a factory on loop because then I don't forget to queue more. However it often results in too many slings that die in droves, and wasted money. I could mix in an expensive unit and slow down the slings, but I might not be interested in using money that way. I could make the factory low priority, but often that would mean no units at all (as I might be spending money on other large projects). So my use case would be to create a slow but steady supply of inexpensive units.

Alternatively, it would be interesting to order that there be at least X-number of a given unit on the map. Not sure what that interface would look like.
+0 / -0

2 years ago
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.
+0 / -0

2 years ago
Probably its just me and my modest battlefield performance, and lobsterpot habit, but I rarely build nanos around my factories. I sometimes build an extra plate. Usually I have lots of nanos (aka caretakers) up front. If I excess the metal for a while, I assume the team eats it. However the normal situation that I observe is that I am out of metal without needing nanos by the factory.

Not that I think that argues against you very much.

An alternative to a slider could be a priority mode that is "slow and steady", i.e. medium priority but half build power. The risk might be making things confusing.
+0 / -0