ALPHA 42A NOW IN EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH

Some of my early initial impressions of A42A (uh, Alpha 42a):

• I like the snazzy new welcome screen, is that thing procedurally generated?
• modules do indeed seem to get built slightly faster
• stacking like object is much more aggressive, I'm finding this is permitting much smaller stockpiles than I'm used to
• on the same note, it may no longer be useful to separate food / non-food stockpiles, which I've been doing forever
• new desires - my only NCO wants to be a Scientist, good luck, buddy
• bandit notification now indicate what current bandit policy is, nice
• wow, that chapel is much more costly to build (stone AND brick)
• chilli peppers wither very quickly, and are nearly impossible to harvest - my test case was a tiny 3x3 plot that held only 2 chilli pepper plants, and even then, I was only able to harvest a bushel of chillis once, with a spoilage rate of approximately 90%!
• bricks are still sneaking into stockpiles designated food only'

 

Love when that happens. The last piece of the puzzle.

 

The catharsis is real lol. Glad I could help

 

Hmmm don't recall any mention of the work crew window changes and the reasons behind things like lack of worker assignment control to each workcrew or the removal of display filters, but my memory is kind of iffy so could be I've just forgotten about that discussion.

I do try to do searches to see if I missed one post or another especially as I only became a regular here a couple of weeks ago, but a search of my previous posts in threads about the workcrew window changes don't show any developer reply

Unless it was posted over on the Steam forum? Which would explain why nothing comes up as searching Steam forums is a giant PITA due to the fact it doesn't even display results chronologically and doesn't believe in combining terms for more accurate search result.

But if there is a post somewhere that expands on the workcrew window changes, why the removal of worker assignment was done and other things like filter removal and such. Then apologies, will try and dig a bit more to try find it.

 

@Daniel Thanks for that very detailed reply, it's answered a lot of speculative questions about the future role for the lower class and middle class and helps gauge what to expect from future expansion of those roles.

In light of the intentions from a design stand point, it would seem that even the manual assignment of workers from a pool may itself be rather counter productive for establishing the desired impressions on colonists roles in the grand scheme of things, as it suggests that part of the players role should entail some degree of focus on managing workers into different groups on a individual level where as this doesn't seem to be the case.

Just tossing a bare bones idea that may be totally aiming in the wrong direction of what you guys may have in mind but, some kind of emergent behaviour for worker assignment based on colony policy decisions in relation to overseer conduct may actually play into things better. So based on a overseers status within the colony they get more or less of the available manpower available to them.

If you were to make it colony policy to discourage cult behaviour, any overseer who then decides to go against that policy and forms a cult is considered lower in status and their assignment of 'workers of proper standing' is reduced, so workers with traits deemed more reflective of being a upstanding citizen get assigned to other workcrews not run by a cultist.

This then leaves the cultist led workcrew with the lower dredges of the work force as such having higher chance to end up with workers with less desirable traits.

With the opposite being equally true, if you make decisions and establish policies that lean more toward ideas such as independent anti-empire rule, then overseers that are patriotic or otherwise have tendencies that lean toward pro-empire dealings end up in lower standing, and the qualities that represent a "Model citizen" for worker allocation is shifted respectively.


Yes it would appear on the surface to remove a significant part of 'micromanagement control' compared to current where you can still flag a crew to focus just on farming and flood them with all the early colony workers.

But if there are decisions introduced that serve to contribute to some notion of colony interests (farming vs production vs trade vs stability vs growth and so forth). Then the end result would be a series of behaviours and interactions that more truly reflect the formation of a society that is reacting to the players will be it positively or negatively opposed, and then how those reactions breed further reactions in a ever more complex web. Whilst still allowing the player the avenues to react and try to balance out undesirable behaviour.


End result would be you get something that simulates to some degree a society that has variable views on what are positive and negative qualities based to some degree on player assigned rules. Those middle class colonists deemed to have positive attributes raise up in society and find themselves generally more happy and well treated, and workers with positively regarded traits end up in improved work environments.

Those deemed to have negative attributes drop to the lower levels in society and find themselves more depressed and mistreated, feeling oppressed because who they are and for their ideologies and more likely to end up working alongside those that feel similar.

Workers end up being less a focus unit for management, but rather a influencing force that factors into overseer behaviour and contributes to their tipping points.

If you make decisions that lean towards pro-empire feelings and 7 of your 8 overseers can be equated to have some degree of pro-empire traits (or rather they are not directly identifiable as having anti-empire traits), then you end up with 1 pissed off overseer who is downcast in society and 7 happier overseers who get a larger share of the pie.

But if you then accept bandits, or receive colonists with anti-empire leaning traits, they will be naturally be regarded as more undesirable and have a much higher chance of ending up with that single downcast overseer, giving them a more significant presence in your colony and escalating the chance of them being a significant problem factor if they do kick off as that action will chain react to their workers... the boss is like us and is kicking off, we're being mistreated too... riot spirial!

So as the player do you stick to your policies and hope that group of undesirables can be contained? Or do you react, change policies and try to reach a more compromising stand point at the risk of your other colonists then getting angrier when the perks of being higher status is removed?

 

Tried reassigning new overseers with specific traits to their respective workhouses. However, the overseer they replace then just goes idle with the current job in the workgroup dropdown shown as their prior task. In their own profile it says idle. No amount of prompting makes them do anything.

 

Got a bunch of colonists stuck in a loop at my food stockpile. It might have something to do with the backlog of burial duties that aren't being fulfilled for some reason. When I hovered my mouse over some of the stuck colonists, their job actions seemed to loop quickly between hauling and burying, and they kept changing tools.

 

Here's a saved game from Alpha 42a. Jungle Biome, 19 days, 31 colonists. Windows 10. On the off chance you need something for analysis. I noticed no bugs in that time, but there was one odd thing - selecting sites where I was quarrying stone, sometime they're named 'The Old Joinery', and sometimes they have no name, weird

I don't know exactly how long this session was, but it was over an hour, at least.



Generally speaking, farming has become more labour-intensive, which means more workers are required to farm successfully, which means the colony feels like it's growing more slowly as a whole, compared to previous versions.

 

As far as the plebs being unhappy, having a mechanic that lowered unrest by "X" amount of points per soldier in the settlement would have been a good way to counteract the disintegration of the colony because of unhappiness.

Calling in a squad of soldiers via the prestige option could have been a temporary fix for unrest, giving the player a few days to set things right.
Let's face it, the soldiers would not only be there to protect the colony, but to maintain order.

 

Welp, it happened again. Fifteen to twenty minutes into the game my computer crashed. Didn't even get a CE dmp file this time around. After it happened I immediately updated my video card driver but I'm not ready to risk another crash to see if it worked. In point of fact, I played Cities: Skyline for hours prior to updating it so it seems like the problem is indeed how CE interacts with my system.

If you want me to provide you with a system crash log, walk me through obtaining the relevant files and I'll be happy to oblige.

In any case, I think I'll be taking a long break from Clockwork Empires now.

 

One scenario worth checking: had an overseer pick up a module construction job. She went to grab some planks, but another colonist moved the stack she was going to... then she picked up a plank from empty ground.

(I suspect this is actually behaving correctly, in terms of not conjuring resources out of thin air, but I didn't see what the plank stacks' counts were when it happened.)

I think I fixed this locally by modifying the "Shoo Animal Away" job (jobs.xml line 4675), setting the not_tag attribute on require_gameobject to "corpse,vermin".

 

Wow, building large buildings takes a long time.

 

This would probably be a good time to start letting multiple people in a work crew assemble a building, instead of just one person. It would look better, too.

It's been a while since I looked at the scripts for buildings, but IIRC it works on a timer system. If that were changed to a numerical score goal they have to reach, and the work added to the score over time, it would be relatively simple to write an assisting job that would let the other people in the work crew also add points to the score.

 

• Are favour-granted temporary colonists supposed to count towards the population-based reward thresholds?
• Contrary to the icons in the workshop panel, colonists in temperate can use maize to brew beer.
• Got "expected type string for parameter 2 sending system message odinRendererCharacterForceDropItemMessage", around the time a convict crew departed. (Unfortunately I forgot and relaunched the game before preserving the console, ack.)

 

• bandits that attempt desertion, but you turn them down, can sometimes make their way into your range and be killed, but the bodies aren't buryable.
• some building materials aren't cleared (visual only?) when a building or module is completed.
• there are times when several individuals have "return goods to stockpile" but stand in place and they continue work only after a module is completed (stockpile locking?).