ALPHA 43C NOW ON EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH

Excellent! This has been my major issue for a little while.

 

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Please not more micro-management assignment lord 2015 features that assume the solution to things is "Have the player directly control it and just assign it to a work crew".

Really don't need the whole premise of the game to become sitting there telling every workcrew what their daily rota is, where they can do things, what to make, when to make it, when to take a bowel movement, when to eat and little time for anything else.

I get that's the natural instinct some have because they're seeing things from a "This is just banished with some personality stuff in, right?" perspective, but nodding and ever increasingly making it to fill that expectation isn't the way to go.

"Just have it be a single assignment" very much goes against the idea of any kind of proper colonist decision making. Rather than address the few problems that are stopping colonists from making more intelligent role assignment decisions, it's instead avoiding the problem by doing away with the very core concept of the entire thing in the first place.

And because that requirement isn't getting patched up for farming, it won't be in place for other additional content so more and more ends up being needed to be "Have the player assign it to a group".... because there's no consideration that alternatives are possible any more if if couldn't be done for farming and the game becomes about 2% colonist decision making & behaviour simulation and 98% micromanagement assignment sim.

What's next? Combat shifting over to real time RTS C&C style engagements after it was found a lot of players spam rally points and try to micromanagement exact troop movements that the current system wasn't intended for, and that military decision making needed more intelligent responsiveness to identifying threats....

So rather than make the player fully aware that the whole point isn't to directly manage combat on a blow by blow level, and to address the holes in troop assessment behaviour instead lets change the intention of the system to inject a heavy real time RTS system into combat where the player just does it all themselves and call that a fix?

*grumbles*

 

Very good build. One breaker : When you build a chapel after being pestered, the resulting "For the Holy Cog" window can't be dismissed - loads of these "Pleased Worshiper" windows get generated and you can't get around it thus stopping the game.

 

Overreacting much, are we? How is having a safeguard against your colony starving that you can set and forget about a bad thing? And let's not even touch the whole last part of the spiel, except for the fact that I like to think that the devs aren't as lazy and mindless as you've portrayed them.

 

It's not a safeguard. It's a entire replacement approach.

Note it doesn't say "You now have the option to". It's "Farms are now assigned to workcrews".

You now have no choice but to assign farms to a single workcrew for them to get worked on only by that workcrew.

The previous requirements highlighted a better need for overseers to make judgement calls about what fields to work relative to their capability (workcrew size and skills). And that requirement actually exists in pretty much all jobs in the game already and likely will be a requirement of anything else the developers add into the game later on that isn't handled just by a "The player controls and assigns it directly" approach.

But rather than have that needed addition put in place, instead the entire premise has been done away with entirely and replaced with a "The player just does it and controls it all" micromanagement approach, which to me gives a very clear impression on how other similar problems will be approached in the game that are sourced from the same lack of overseer decision making.... the player will just have to control and do it.

So no, I wouldn't say it's overreacting. It's reacting to exactly what has happened with that change, whether or not it's a change in a good direction or not really depends on the player though and if they want a strong focus micromanagement sim where they handle what everyone does directly.

 

Well, since food is the first need of a colony, it requires some attention from the player to avoid starvation and/or wasted time, and that was always true, even before this change. Making it easier on the player to control his farming situation means less time and attention wasted that can be focused on the more interesting parts of the game.

 

I'm encountering gamebreaking bug in 43C:
30-60 min into the game (played 2 so far, happened in both) some colonists get stuck carrying goods with job description:
"Returning to Stockpile (to Smart)"
They interact with others but cannot move or change task and eventually starve.

 

Until anything needs to change in your colony, then it's a whole lot more focused on micromanaging things for the player and a whole lot less time able to do anything else.

Before the approach allowed for things to settle themselves with a few subtle tweaks then the system had the potential to carry on without any disruption all that was missing was the overseers making better decisions on assignments.

Now making any changes is much more of a drawn out process, especially if it's going to be designed to really encourage multiple plots to be assigned to one workcrew. And changes or reactions will only happen with direct player action... which is another way of saying there is no capability for reaction.

If something happens to a workcrew that has 3 plots assigned to them and now their capability to provide the same amount of production is reduced making it so another workcrew is either the better option or the only option for those farms, then now you've got a whole lot more you have to do to correct the situation with the alternative to not responding to the disruption to that single workcrew right that second dropping everything else being you simply won't have any (or a significantly lesser amount) food being produced.... nothing will happen at all until you arrive and manage everything directly.

There's no flexibility or safe guarding... if something disrupts that workcrew and you don't instantly notice and drop everything to solve it... those farms are fucked.

 

I do like the new Blame interaction...

I don't think this is working right. I assigned two farms to the same work crew; as expected only one got worked... but by day three it was a completely different work crew doing the farming.

Edit: Also, if this is the approach we're going to have for farming assignments, I'd ask that the farming panel allow us to assign work crews that are already assigned to a workshop. eg. My carpentry workshop has a quota of 12 planks, if they have met it then they go work the field of green bamboo that supplies them; then when there's a plank deficit they work in the workshop until it is met, then go back to farming.

While I don't mind this idea, OC-4068 may cause problems with it (though my tests thus far haven't definitively confirmed it): with a farm producing ample maize, create two standing orders, one for basic food and one for basic drink. As the basic food will never detect it has met minimum supply quota, nothing ever gets brewed. (With separate workshops, production was unbounded and a race to see who locked the ingredients first. Now, one looks like it blocks the other.)

Further Edit: Well, either Overseers are now able to improvise, or Basil Marshdraw is exhibiting a new type of madness... ...He also attempted to do paperwork on the loading bay doors... perpendicular to the flat surface.

 

***"Returning to Stockpile (to Smart)"***
I also received this. Along with others, get to that.
started by doing scouting trip around map only to find my nco has this tendency to run to rally point, run back to village, then run back to rally point, several times and yes he had his gun
found to my dismay, gripe #1, where the heck is the resources???
finally found 1 iron spot way south, and one zinc spot way north, and was later after naturalist did his thing that I found an actual area that I could build my colony. Good waste, 5 days, tore everything down and moved.
Think this is when my script error of item something happened cause from this point I was lucky if more then 1 soldier of 10 would go get a log
then just as my starving population was starting to get a crop rotation, here comes a dozen soldiers from out of the blue and wiped me out. Mind you by this time I had 2 barracks, crews fully red-coated. They were nothing, 4 got smoked before they got a single shot off. only thing that saved me was the 5 colonists way out gathering clay, and the enemy soldiers wandering off in a different direction.
As for farming... I'm not feeling the "assign" thing very well. was just fine having 2 to 3 work crews specializing in "just farm" however many plots I had. The way this is, you can't assign 2 work crews to be responsible for the same patch. Like if I want 3 crops of wheat, and have 2 crews, before they would mostly rotate around. (want to gripe more here about the actual function of farmer's, but maybe later)
I guess I could be more agreeable to the new farming system if the "assigned" crew's first responsibility was it's patch of land instead of deciding "oh he said chop 50 trees, let's go do that first"....... you still need to disable any other function like before if you want crews to be effective farmers.
so as I was Finally getting my first things done in the metalshop, and just getting land ready for mine's, I let everything attempt to catch up when I got the "place something" error. I was like well how about I disable and re-enable each thing that's allowed in stockpile.... good good error error oops. hmmm how about... ok I will remove stockpiles and place some new ones.... error error error,,, oops. Ok,,, drop item something blah blah.... There she is, holding the planks and looking off in the distance in a hopeless trance.... Well, Use Bigger Hammer.... Frontier justice!
20 colonists are now permanently locked in a full on beatdown of this poor soul, but she must have the ultimate power up stone armor suit from zues himself! she still stands!!!

 

Can confirm this as well. For me they're always carrying bricks when that happens, but that might be a coincidence. It's quite game breaking until I find a way to release these poor souls from their endless trip to carry bricks.

 

Encountering the Returning to Stockpile (to Smart) here as well. I can't remember what it happened with the first time, but this second time it was with wood planks. A militia had picked up some planks from one stockpile to carry them to another and just stood where he picked them up at from that point on. It also seems like it's taking some of the colonists longer between sitting at Idle after finishing one job and moving on to the next, but it isn't happening with all of them so I've been assuming this had everything to do with moods and such.

 

Here's a game with the stockpile bug for you...

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4bxMjEzI-oKdjFWVmhuc2cybXc

The only other thing I saw was the issue of crews assigned to farms not having other tasks shut off.

 

I feel your pain. I encountered a horrible problem myself this week that after 2 or three hours hunting around turned out to be caused by a missing whitespace character in a yaml file.

For the record, I think the new farming system is probably the right approach. I've personally not found a better way of managing farming crews other than very carefully ensuring all of them have the same number of labours,
which if anything, is more micro managey. This way farms are managed effectly in the same manner as buildings, which for UI I would think will be a much nicer experience.

So can we expect the next revision in the next few days?

 

Bricks seem to do it for me.

 

So we've got 2 things here:
1- Colonists seeing bricks as food and trying to move them to food stockpile
2- the retuning to stockpile bug

It seems colonists get stuck everytime a stockpile filter is set and they try to move goods from one stockpile to the correctly assigned one.