ALPHA 44B NOW IN EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH

This is why I love this community

OK I certainly don't have an in depth analysis or anything, but did have a few thoughts. (like others, I basically cannot maintain a cooked food supply except under exceptional circumstances)

• I really don't see a solution to the problem in messing too much with how raw food is handled, unless you are prepared to allow players to use the millita to defend the stock piles from the colonists (which honestly I think would be cool, but your mileage may vary).
• Is it worth putting cooking modules in the houses? This way colonists continue to take raw food as now, but benefit from cooked meals and the kitchen then becomes a resource collection reducer because kitchen cooked food can be eaten at the stock pile and not taken elsewhere (and requires less capital). I bring this up because it would solve the basic problem that the kitchen is virtually a single critical failure point at the moment, Eating at home is less efficient overall but less prone to over sensitivity to current events. It would also make houses in general more meaningful.
  
• It may make sense to treat the kitchen more like a canning factory, building on the last point. I.E make the kitchen a food mulitpler again and reply on distributed ovens to actually cook food.

Also, I'm not certain when this happened, but the new style green markers as much appreciated.

 

I didn't play 44B yet, but I will say that up to now, using idle military manpower was one of the ways I optimized my colony productivity. I'll probably take a hit to that, and off the top of my head, my solution would probably to de-milita 2/3rds of my army during peacetime so that they can do more constructive tasks like hauling. (Cuz there's a lot of stuff to be hauled).

This reminds me of Stronghold, where making military units designated them as military only, but that didn't necessarily ruin your economy because the manpower resource wasn't necessarily a zero-sum game. The lost opportunity cost of the lost labor due to making an otherwise productive Clockwork Empires citizen a soldier will need to be addressed, I think.

I don't really have problems with food either. I mean, it takes about 25% of my labor force just to feed my colony, but it works. We shall see what happens to me in 44B

That's one of the reasons behind my partiality to the "food multiplier" thing, but I still understand your reasoning why you are wary of it.

 

I'm not 100% sure but I get the impression that modules themselves don't really 'do' anything.

Keeping in mind this is almost all entirely speculative:

I think it's the workshop 'as a building' that actually handles all the job creation that colonists interact with to know to take x and interact with y to perform the job the workshop threw out there, then once the job is done the workshop gets poked and handles the creation of the output item.

In which case for other buildings to perform the same tasks, they would also need to be workshops so that they have the capacity to know how to create and handle said jobs.
If you just stick a oven in a home, it wouldn't permit cooking as the logic that drives it all and actual does the work resides in the structure, not the module... to make it work homes would need to be turned into workshops and then assigned the 'cook basic food' order as a option... but that then requires the player to go to homes and manually assign 'cook basic food' orders to each home.... and by being a workshop likely means losing the means to support various other behaviour beyond the scope of a workshop.


And again... almost all entirely speculative:

Where as offices come across as being a container from which any kind of distinct set of scripted behaviour can be plugged in, with some UI elements then whacked on so the player can actually trigger one set of scripted behaviour or another.... so until any office can do anything other than sit there going "I'm a office!", the individual batches of scripted behaviour need to be created and then hooked up to drive whatever workcrew is assigned to the office to do something interesting.

Which if that's the case would mean making behaviour for anything to do with offices essentially involves creating brand new behaviour for each action desired, where as workshops inherent a whole load of core behaviour simply by being a workshop (With the downside being anything that's a workshop also inherits the constraints of being a workshop as well) .

 

Saved games not loading!
Tried 7 of my most recent saved games and all I get after 5 minutes of frozen screen and pressing te mouse is "Clockwork Empires has become unresponsive".

Tried reinstalling the games 4 times now and still the same thing. This is terrible!!!

 

Interesting, I just logged a bug earlier today with the same thing happening... I wonder, did you have ghosts roaming around your colony just before that happened? Perhaps it would be prudent to send the devs a couple of the saves that won't load.

Did you also get a 'clockwork empires' crash dialog box? There might be a dmp in the clockwork save directory.

 

Would these be saves from the same version?

Or are you trying to load saves from a previous version?

If the latter, then crashes are expected behaviour.

 

Had a crash today. here is link to a large console file packed.. https://www.dropbox.com/s/hrlr24f8f7mirl7/console.rar?dl=0

Hunger is still a bit of a problem satisfying whit cooked foods..