BETA 52C: POUNDED INTO THE DIRT BY APPARENTLY EXTREME UPKEEP REQUIREMENT NUMBERS

Only one colonist per node when mining... if the work crew has more than just an overseer, the job needs to have more than one node to utilize al workers. Same with chopping trees and other such tasks.

 

Does that also fix the crash when loading standard saves?

 

I am sure they used to wait for the mine shaft to be free then mine - you could see one worker exit with the ore and another disappear. Was useful when the mine was very far from the camp.

 

He is speaking of surface nodes, though.

 

I had a worker get mauled by an auroch and killed. She still had a valid character screen though, and nobody buried her. Someone did get upset by seeing her dead body though.

 

Correct. I had several nodes queued to be mined, but the workers just hung around and did nothing.

I did see about ten minutes later though that a different workcrew who had a bunch of filters selected was mining just fine. Puzzling.

 

How the system works is that a job consist of one or more tasks. The job as a whole can only be owned by a single overseer who then assigns each of the individual tasks to a worker part of their workcrew.

This means if you border select 25 surface stone nodes and click "Mine Surface Nodes", that will generate 1 job with 25 tasks. And only one workcrew consisting of up to 4 workers (plus the overseer) can ever be working that job at one time, resulting in only x surface nodes being mined at any given point with x being the number of workers assigned to that workcrew.

If however you border selected 13 of those nodes and clicked "Mine surface Nodes" and then border selected the other 12 after and did the same again, you'd now have 2 different jobs. One consisting of 13 tasks and the other 12 tasks, and this means that two workcrews could each take up one of the jobs and you'll get the nodes mined faster.

Doesn't matter if you have 60 odd other colonists doing nothing else, if they aren't part of the workcrew that has taken up the job, they will ignore anything to do with it.

Also once a overseer has taken up a job, all workers involved in the workcrew will be unable to do anything but things within the scope of that job.

They'll still do socialisation and other non-work behaviours of course, but they won't do any other pending orders that aren't part of the single job the overseer has assigned to their crew. So if you have a workcrew of 5 colonist and a job that involves chopping 1 tree, you'll have 1 person in the workcrew start chopping, then end up with another 4 colonists hanging around them doing nothing, as there is nothing else for them to do as part of the job, but they're unable to work on more than one job at a time.

That's why part of the juggling act is to manage between singular jobs made up of lots of tasks that can only be done by 1 workcrew at a time but means you always know you'll have spare workcrews for other things. And splitting up something into multiple individual jobs so that more than 1 work crew can be doing something, but running the risk of all your workcrews being tied up doing one activity, and not another.



All activities seem to follow this rule, even construction works the same. If a overseer decides they're going to build a cabinet in a carpentry and that's the only pending construction in that building, then all the other workers in the workcrew will be unable to do any construction anywhere else as their current actionable job is "Tend to the construction needs of the carpentry".

Or if the overseer is building a Kitchen, then other workers in his crew won't be able to go out and build decor or place production modules in other buildings, as the entire crews current activity will be "Tend to the construction needs of the Kitchen".

 

I had my military overseer die and his minion took over as overseer. The only problem is that now I have a lower class worker who thinks he's an overseer, but that can't take a workcrew of his own or level up any stats.

 

That... that explains so much. When I normally create mining/forestry jobs I usually do it one by one unless there's a big clump. I think in my earlier example I had selected individual nodes for mining instead of group selecting them.

I'm pretty sure I've seen workcrews assigned to workshops do multiple things at once though. For instance, someone in the crew could be making a wood product, and someone else would be organizing the stockpile.

There's gotta be a way to make the system you described more transparent too. I thought all jobs went into a big list, and then the overseers were smart enough to divvy out the work among their peons based upon the filters.

Frankly, I'm not even sure that the extra complexity is worth it for non-workshop jobs. It's just another layer of subtlety and micromanagement that needs to be performed and understood.

 

Yes, because hauling is special.

 

This is why I kind of said in an earlier post...we need a work crew assigned to fix things...kind of like the cooks cook, carpenters carpent? , military shoot stuff...if they don't have stuff to repair and there is construct building or clear/flatten terrain in the queue make them do that . Our very own Clockwork Empires Janitorial/Maintenance Service...

 

tl;dr - my impressions on the major changes in 52C. Upkeep Chests feel too punishing in the early game. Increased lumber and resources consumption slows the pace of the game too much. The addition costs of Upkeep also reduce the amount of viable biomes as potential colony locations.

Having played 52C for several hours, in various biomes, I'll say that I appreciate the intent of the Upkeep Trunks, but I think their implementation needs refinement; I understand Upkeep is intended to represent the overhead associated with keeping everything running, but the pressing need for lumber in the early game, together with the current system in place for immigration, means establishing a colony is now extremely slow. Upkeep Trunks are currently a thing that must be continually built at all times, as a first priority, and they represent an addition 25-50% increase in basic, early game resources.

Another factor affecting the pace of the game is biome selection, specifically the abundance of lumber: prior to the current revision, most biomes with a moderate abundance of trees could be considered 'average' difficulty. Sparse biomes like the tundra or desert were something of a 'hard mode' for players looking for a challenge. I feel like the balance there has shifted - now, even moderately forested biomes like the swamp and and temperate forest are pretty hard, with heavily forested biomes like the boreal forest representing the new normal (i.e. a rare biome where growth is not hindered by lack of trees).

 

Just to judge from the Steam forums and comments here, I think the general feeling is that this first pass at Upkeep is a bit too punishing. I'm sure you guys will iterate intelligently.

One small additional bit of feedback: although I like having the 'office management view' buttons, it's no longer possible to open both the Work Crew menu and a workshop interface, which was my preferred way of picking crews to assign to a workshop. I miss that.

 

Oooooh!

 

Probably getting my hopes up, but any chance it might relate to this?

As that would be all kinds of awesome if it were to happen.

*crosses fingers*