REV 39A NOW IN EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH

*immediately runs off to play Clockwork Empires*

*edit* I made a thing!

 

Wow, on day two I had a group of bandits, a school of fish people, and a unit of hostile Mecharepublicains all appear within a span of five seconds of each other. Things are sure getting interesting!

 

Are the factions you're hostile with randomized? I was being attacked by Stahlmarkians in my playthrough while the Novorusians were my allies.


Edit: Also, the Fishpeople sent an envoy to my colony, however all it did was stand around. Are they supposed to do anything?

 

Awesome. Did that fish king guy get mad at a tree and hit it with a club?

 

At this point every update is improving the game by leaps and bounds. It's so much more engaging! Keep up the good work!

 

They're a dedicated lot, those who worship at the altar of Celestial Order; set out a chapel for construction, complete with altar to build. Almost immediately, criminal vicar went to the ghost module, in the unconstructed building he couldn't possibly have been assigned to, and began Preaching In Chapel...

 

I've been getting some odd names this version, is it intentional?
Cecil Grytphype-Thynne spring to mind, for one. Fine lad, really, except the name. Oh and all that "joining a cult" business.

Also, I guess maybe the Novurusian aren't as diciplined as Clockwork soldiers? You'll sometimes find conscripts and NCO's (Commisars?) melee attacking each other after spawning. They sort themselves out after a few hits, leaving only the blood on the ground before walking of. It happened when people spawned to Visit the Colony. If you click the little event notificer quickly, you can catch them trading a few hits before the simulation sorts out that they're allies? Maybe its a spacing issue where they spawn on top of each other and fall back to "Melee attack adjacent entity"?

Edit: It also happened randomly! Here's a picture of the conscript stabbing his superior. In the throat. With a bayonet. The superior has the same "Melee attack adjacent target".

It, uh... It doesn't do him a lot of good.

 

Also, here's an interesting little thing.

In order to test the new mines, I build one a little bit away from the colony. A group of Stalmarkhians (with fancy hats) spawned to attack, walked across the map and through the colony. They were attacked most of the way once the soldiers saw them, but kept "Walking Purposefully" towards the mine at the very outskirt of the colony. Once they actually arrived, then they started shooting the two colonists nearby.

So to sum:

Novyrussians are so ill-diciplined they murder their own superiors, whereas Stalmarkhians will walk through withering fussilades, losing 3 of their own, while mainting perfect fire dicipline among the ranks. They only open fire at the designated target (a barely constructed mine with little actual value but, I guess maybe it was enchroaching on claimed soil or something)

I'm not entirely sure which force I fear the most here.

(edit: Also, the Novyrussians walked off, sans dead NCO, and probably encountered something deadly because shortly after they went out of sight I got a little "You have fought off VII Pekhota of the Novorus Imperia!".

Yeah; that's going to be a diplomatic incident any day now)

(edit-edit: Here's a log. )

 

Right, so I want this game on Linux even more now. Gaslamp has recruited The Goons!!!

(For any confused Cousins over the water, Hercules Grytpype-Thynne was a character on The Goon Show, a long-running surrealist BBC radio comedy from the 1950s, which enjoys a dedicated following continuing to this day.)

 

Itunes > music > internet > comedy > abacus.fm
Comedy gold

That is all.

 

If I recall, he was having a shouting match with a Militia fellow just offscreen.

 

Further thoughts after tonight's session...

• Could we either stop auto-assigning lower class civ migrants to work crews, or provide a UI element to prevent a crew/squad from receiving such assignments? (It would be nice to not have to keep cleaning out vicar/naturalist led crews...)
• When a building is designed and the nearby objects are auto-designated for removal, could like jobs be collected? So rather than twenty Chop Tree jobs, the list gets one Chop Trees job with 20 targets. (Though not sure how this will go with the new job area highlighting...)
• Crews can often have more available people than tasks in their current job (particularly with auto-designate jobs, building construction, Clear Terrain from flattening, node mining, etc). If a worker asks the blackboard for a task on the crew's current job, but there isn't anything to do for it that someone else isn't already doing, could they be told to haul/stack instead if their crew settings allow hauling tasks? (Or burial duties, or clear terrain, or other such uncategorised tasks.) As well as getting more done, this could reduce the appearance of there being lazy workers (where the lazy trait isn't present... ).

 

Please tell me there's a Count Moriarty who can spawn in the upper class to keep Hercules company!

 

One of the issues with collecting "Like jobs" into one job automatically is that for the most part its actually subtly in-effecient compared to having many more smaller jobs. You're generally limited to how many lower class workers you have with the newest updates and work-crews can only work one job at a time. A larger job with 20 entities takes way longer than 20 smaller jobs, because the larger one will have a maximum work-force responding of one workcrew (4 people? 5?), whereas 20 smaller jobs have a roof of... however many total workcrews you actually have.

I've tended towards always getting larger amounts of single work-crews recently with correspondingly fewer lower class workers (perhaps by random accident), so any form of "combine like tasks" optimization would actually end up making things less usable.

However, once you hit a larger bit of workers per workcrew, it might be really cool to have a "Combine all jobs of like type in this area to one job" thing you can click? It would mean not having to cancel a large segment of smaller jobs in case you just want one crew to mine, because you could consolidate them into one. I don't know if coding that is difficult with the system as is, but I imagine a drag-and-click with "Consolidate jobs" would fit easily into the radial menu as is.

 

Actually, I don't consider it to be an inefficiency; I'm not suggesting all similar tasks always glom together . The tasks in question are triggered by the player trying to do something else -- construct a building -- of which the task is essentially a co-requisite (can happen simultaneously, but doesn't need to be done first).

Given the choice between having such tasks absorb ten work crews or one (depending on how the utility is calculated, of course) I'd rather have one stuck on it while the remaining nine are getting other things done.

 

YES!!!!!

 

So, I placed a stockpile and the game crashed. Hope you guys can narrow it down

 

The Tropico series of games incorporates this feature in a way that should be lifted wholesale.