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Birth of the Empires

A 4x Turn Based strategy game similar to classics like Master of Orion 2 or Birth of the Federation · By blotunga

Questions about Systemmanager and Autobuild

A topic by Mr.Chaos created Feb 12, 2017 Views: 1,161 Replies: 7
Viewing posts 1 to 6
(3 edits)

I'm a bit confused about the systemmanager at the moment. i will write what i think how it works and you can correct me, where i'm wrong. if you don't have much time to answer, just say so. then i will try to look through the souce code and make an image for myself.

Worker distribution: let's say i have a system with 20 workers where 5 are needed for food and i want 10 worker in industrie and 5 workers in research. that's a ratio of 2:1. is it necessary to put industry to a priority of 40 and research to 20 or is it enough when i enter the ratio -> industry to 2 and research to 1. (EDIT: tested it, the ratio is enough)

Use stored food: distributes the worker so, that the system doesn't starve but also doesn't accumulate thousand of food (can be a negative food production if there is plenty of food in storage) (don't seem to work when the production queue is empty)

optimize industry/safe moral loss: no idea

bombardement warning: does this warn after the first bombardement or if a bombardement can be posible (enemy ship in orbit)

min morale: the minimum morale which it tries to maintain in the system

min morale prod: the minimum morale production per turn

take on/offline: activates/deactivate building which need energy. But after what criteria?

energy consumer: the builings which will be managed by the "take on/offline" funtion?

exceptions: the builings which will not be managed by the "take on/offline" funtion?


now some questions to the autobuild. it says it builds the same buildings how the ai would do it. can i influence this somehow. For example i want to make an system my primary titaniumproductionsystem and it should build mainly titanium mines and the necessary food, industry and energybuildings. is that possible? if yes, how? Or maybe, don't build new buildings just upgrades the existing ones.


That's it for now, thanks for your time and effort.

i played a bit with the 3 functions: optimize industry, use stored food and safe moral loss and i don't think they do what they are suppossed to do. Here the save file if you want to test it out yourself. By the way, i find the buttons a bit cinfusing with disable and enable. Why not a switch or a checkbox?

Antiochia System: 9 bn population, 3K stored food. 1 farm, 2 generators, 8 industries and 8 research. industry Priority 40. upgrade to subatomic simulator.

all 3 functions disabled: workers: farm 1, industry 6, research 2. needs 3 turns to produce, looks optimized because one less worker would be 4 turns and 7 or 8 workers would still be 3 turns.

industry optimized, rest disabled: farm 1, industry 8. needs 3 turns to produced. not optimized. there seems to be a bool-value wrong

since it's obvious that the button for industry is reversed i will use enabled when it shows disabled ingame in the following examples.

safe moral loss disabled, rest enabled: farm 1, industry 6, research 2. could have put 0 worker to farm because enough food in storage but didn't.

everything enabled: farm 1, industry 7 research 1. no idea what it did here.

optimize industry disabled, rest enabled: farm 1, industry 8. still not food in storage used

use stored food enabled, rest disabled: farm 1, industry8. still not food in storage used

safe morale loss enabled, rest disabled: farm 1, industry 8

use stored food disabled, rest enabled: farm 1, industry 7, research 1. again, no idea what it is doing.


same system just worker distribution changed: industry 40 and research 40.

all 3 functions disabled: farm 1, industry 8. shouldn't this be farm 1, industry 4 and research 4, because industry and research have same priority. hmm, ok, does that when i put the priority to 39 instead of 40

optimize industry enabled, rest disabled:1/6/2, expected behaviour.

safe morale loss disabled, rest enabled: 0/6/3, expected behaviour

everything enabled: 0/7/2: no idea

optimize industry disabled, rest enabled: 1/8/0. no stored food used

use stored food enabled, rest disabled: 0/8/1. expected behaviour

safe morale loss enabled, rest disabled: 1/8/0

use stored food disabled, rest enabled: 1/7/1. no idea



ok, to sum it up:

  • if a resource is distributed with fill all, it will at first put as much worker in that building as posible and then distributes the remaining.
  • if there are several building with an priority 0 < x < 40, than it will sort these according to the correct ratio.
  • use stored food works only if there are free places in builings with a priority > 0
  • the button for optimize industry is reversed
  • safe morale loss, seems to screw up the other functions
thats how i observed it works. if this is not the intended behaviour, you should rework this in the next updates.

and as a feature request, a function which disables worker in industry if there is nothing in the production queue

Developer (1 edit)

Now I'm really pissed about itch.io not saving my draft. I've lost twice my lengthy answer...
You're mostly right in your observations, with some additions.
Safe morale loss basically adds and extra worker to industry in order to prevent production stalling in case the industry production was decreased due to loss of morale. Unfortunately it's poorly documented on the user side, I might have to extend the tutorial on this.
Optimize Industry used to be called Maximize Industry, thought that's not 100% accurate either. Renaming it though I might have inadvertently reversed the meaning. What it does is that when it's enabled and the current building has more than 1 turn left then instead of distributing industry workers so that they are just enough to finish in the estimated number of turns, it will use the maximum of workers. When it's the buildings last turn, regardless of this option it will use just enough workers to finish (otherwise the extra work is simply wasted).
If the priority of something is 0 it won't get workers unless the workers really have nothing to do. Thus the use stored food option works as intended. Also if a resources store if full it will decrement its workers even if it's set to "Fill All".
If you don't have anything in the industry queue, it will still fill up the industry workers according to priorities, because that production is converted into credits. So that is also intended.
As for the buttons instead of checkboxes, on small screens checkboxes are harder to hit (at least the default ones from libgdx). Also I already had this logic on the setup screen where you start the game so I kept it the same. Basically if the buttons says "enable", the feature is disabled and vice-versa.

If you have more questions/suggestions, feel free to ask.

Hey dev!,hopefully you are still working on your game,here's my problems : 

I want to cancel out my alliance with a major race,but theres no option that does so,while in minor races you can cancel out their membership to your race,i want to break my alliance with a major race but don't want to go to war with them,as it seems that a war declaration is your only choice in here  

Trade routes,yes,this bothers me,in my situation,System A ( my system ) cannot make a trade route to system b ( other race's system ),but for some reason system C ( also my system ),can somewhat create a trade route with system b.Both system A and system C are near system B,both have enough populations for trade routes,both are also still not full of usable trade routes  

There are still more issues in the game that i could use some tips or answers,but i wont tell them for awhile until i know you respond to this post,so that i wouldnt be hoping that much to get a reply.

Developer

Unfortunately I don't have much time for BotE, haven't had for the last 3 years, but I do fix bugs occasionally.

Yes, you can't cancel an Alliance, I think it's intentional from the original design (I only picked up development a few years ago).

As for the trade routes issue, only a save might solve the mystery, drop me an email with it to boteandroid@gmail.com , and write me the exact instructions on how to reproduce it, hopefully I'll have time in the next few weeks to look into it.

Ok thanks for the answer. Still one question. How is the priority of engery needed buildings? i hope defensive Systems have the highest priority.

To the one with the option of putting the industry priority to 0 if there is no production. i know that it produces credits and is intended, that's why this was a feature request. Because there are planets i only want the production to work to upgrade my mines or other important builings. But if the industry optimization works like you described, than this should be possible. i will do some further experiments.

ok. the optimize industry doesn't work like you described. this option does not put additional workers in the industry if it can't produce it in one turn.

my duranium mine planet 17/25 industry and 20/37 Duranium. put an building in the queue which need 2 turn with 17 industry workers. activate optimize industry. reduce the industry to 9/25 and increse the duranium to 24/37 and 4 to food. yes used store food was enabled. if it would try to maximize it, it could have put an additional worker in it, because with 18 workers the same building needs just 1 turn.

Just saw that there is a subforum for this version on the bote-forum. will go there the next time i have a question.