I will say that the stockpile loop SEEMS to be restricted to soldiers. (I posted a crash/bug thread with uploads over in the appropriate place about 2 minutes ago...
It appears to affect my militia more than anyone else. You can see it in progress more clearly if you toggle on hauling for my militia only and disable it on everyone else.
Some overseers in workshops now showing a silver progress bar. Other showing the yellow/gold one like in 43A. Edit: Ah-ha! I see! Gold/yellow = Inept skill in that activity. Platinum/Silver = Middling skill in that activity.
Well, so far I've lost 1 NCO and 2 overseers to hunting 2 giant beetles. One hit from a single giant beetle and their morale immediately drops to a quarter, they then mindlessly run around in meaningless directions stopping occasionally to let the giant beetle hit them again. They could just run back to the safety of the colony and their militia mates would join the fight.... but no, that would make too much sense. So instead they run off into the wilderness, stop. Turn around and run back to where they started. Stop. Run into the wilderness in the other direction. Stop. Run back to where they started. Repeat until they die. Assign new overseer to the barracks and hand them the same militia. Overseer goes to hunt the giant beetle, gets a shot off, gets hit, morale immediately breaks, repeat the sequence. By the third overseer, they had each managed to get one shot off enough to kill the first giant beetle. Then the victor ran off to shoot the 2nd, promptly died to the same loop behaviour. Gave up bothering with the colony after that. Whatever happened to the proper "flee to civilisation" behaviour that was added just a few months into Early Access starting to fix that annoying borderline game breaking mindless flee behaviour?
Oh, i know what this is! They pick up the lump of malachite and immediately assume they have an equipment mismatch. I'm going to just turn off hauling on the military then. They should be defending your colony anyway.
This is still there, but morale calculations are way too punishing right now and none of this is balanced at all. Once I finish my now-starting decision tree rewrite, we'll have a better framework for cleaning up military logic and making them somewhat more intelligent about whatever the hell they're doing. The case you're describing seems to be a case where they run randomly out of civilization (because when you're in civilization, you just run to a random point), stop, then run back to civilization, then go back again. That's an easy fix and I should have thought of it before. TL;DR: great military things are cooking.
Not sure what the radius around the colony classes as civilisation, but the colonists were what I would consider out in the wilderness and running away from the colony, though it wasn't all that far from the borders.
Nice The things that make military a pain for me the most right now is having to repeat each rally command 4 times (I usually have 4 milita crews at all times). It's a bit tedious. Getting them to go where I want them to go is a bit frustrating at times. I also have to remember to turn off all their break shifts when I want to perform some military operation so that they don't decide to go to sleep in the middle of a bandit camp charge. Also, I wish they would reload after firing their gun, instead of before firing it. Whenever I charge hostiles, I have to wait for them to reload first, then shoot. This means they run up to an enemy and stop for 2 seconds to reload while they get shot in the face. It would be nice if they had already loaded their gun beforehand.
" aurochs (n.) 1766, misapplication to the European bison (Bos bison) of a word that actually refers to a species of wild ox (Bos ursus) that went extinct 17c., from German Aurochs, from Old High German urohso, from uro "aurochs" (cognate with Old English ur, Old Norse ürr), which is of unknown origin, + ohso "ox" (see ox). Latin urus and Greek ouros are Germanic loan-words." http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=aurochs&allowed_in_frame=0 Cool!
That's good on both counts, thanks. A secondary issue is that the completion of a module doesn't seem to event to the workshop panel if it's open, so the orders stay disabled even though the prerequisites are built until the panel is closed & reopened.
When I change a work crew's orders whilst there still working on something else, that animation stops though they do finish their current jobs.
Before you do this, could you make it so colonists that are hunting will automatically butcher things even with hauling disabled? As at the moment the only time I ever see automatic butchering working as it should is when the workcrew doing the hunting has hauling enabled. With hauling disabled they just leave the body sat there.
Hauling is not associated with the butcher job as-such. Generally the case is that the hunter can find a more important job or target OR they search for their queued butcher job slightly after the animal dies. Hauling is a job set to a rather low priority so a hauler will look for more important jobs, whether hauling or not, and tend to accept them before other workers. So the hauler snaps up the butchery job (higher value than hauling) and locks the job target before the hunter can even think about their queued butcher job. ... Which ... isn't the coolest. I can think of a way to ensure that butchering always follows a kill (unless interrupted by something really, really important), so I'll log myself a ticket to implement it. OC-4069.
The only time this has happened to me is if I get invaded by giant beetles. I want my guys to kill everything first, then butcher. I don't want them to kill beetle -> stroll over and butcher (while the other beetles eat my crops) --> kill beetle -> stroll over and butcher (while the other beetles eat my crops) etc.
Oh .. don't turn off hauling for soldiers .. keeps them fit. With 2 full squads, they have little to do 90% of the time. That said, I seem to be getting invasions after 3-4 days. Usually wipes me out pretty well.
What would be nice is if we could specify in a job a utility bonus for a specific 'recommended' job once the first job was finished. So we could say that after finishing a butcher job, Return Goods to Stockpile might get a +200 utility or something like that. This bonus would go away once a different job was chosen or the recommended second job was finished, so entities would never have more than one recommendation outstanding at a time.