ALPHA 43C NOW ON EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Nicholas, Oct 16, 2015.

  1. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    Alpha 43C is now up for your weekend pleasure!

    Consolidated Alpha 43C Changelog


    Major changes:

    • Farms are now assigned to work crews. A work crew can work on, and operate, multiple farms.
    • Pubs are now more efficient and give better feedback
    • services buildings (pub, barber, chapel) will automatically shift workcrew hours to be better able to service workcrews on default schedule.
    • Building icons will be grayed out if you do not possess the materials to build them. Tooltips will display what is needed.
    • the Kitchen and Brewery have been merged
    Full changelog:
    Farms are now assigned to work crews. A work crew can work on, and operate, multiple farms.
    added "Colonists want a chapel" event
    added wall-mounted aurochs/beetle heads to decor
    Lower class Immigration event has been entirely rewritten! Expect more variety.
    balance: eating cooked food now totally resets hunger (so you don't have to climb out of a huge hunger deficit as soon as you start cooking food)
    added tooltip text to farm crop information icons
    custom character name length now limited to avoid Problems
    the Pub UI now shows number of pints available
    buildings now have grayed out icons if player doesn't have minimum construction requirements, tooltips with red text indicate what is needed.
    disabled farming filter buttons to reflect new assignment control for farms.
    graveyards now have tooltips, as do farms without a selected crop
    Barbers, Vicars and Publicans now have "service hours" automatically assigned when they are assigned to the corresponding building, in order to allow better service for clients.

    balance: sleep time reduced by 25% to make nights more Interesting
    balance: rebalanced relative utility of a number of "social" jobs
    balance: characters now get 3 shifts off by default instead of 2 (to give them more time for non-work actions)
    balance: characters get upset for overwork at 1 fewer subsequent workshifts to reflect the rebalancing of workshifts
    balance: pumpkin is now a mechanically distinct crop from corn and has its own stats
    balance: lower class immigration now happens 20% more often
    balance: Foreign Invasion event is now less soul-crushing (ministry will send landmines, allies will send troops)
    balance: merged Brewery into Kitchen

    FIXED: issues w/ "Colonists denounce cowardice" event
    FIXED: will no longer receive memories for "murdering" animals (unless vegan)
    FIXED: colonists overview occupation text
    FIXED: scripterror when colonists denounce cowardice vs. bandits
    FIXED: logs from chopped down coconut palms now properly set as owned by player
    FIXED: doubly doubled entry for Bushel of Orange Cup Fungus would appear when it was foraged
     
  2. LSky

    LSky Member

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

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    It's not quite in the final farm, er form yet. Right now a work crew assigned to multiple farms will still work one farm at a time. They will - by the end of this weekend - work all farms independently; i.e. if they have two farms under their purview (one opium, one cabbage) they will "Perform Farming" as a big assignment, and tasks related to the farms in their care will be moved into that assignment. So for right now, I suggest one farm one work crew.
     
  4. Tikigod

    Tikigod Member

    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*
     
    Last edited: Oct 17, 2015
  5. Bluebird

    Bluebird Member

    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.
     
  6. Vaal

    Vaal Member

    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.
     
  7. Tikigod

    Tikigod Member

    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.
     
    Last edited: Oct 17, 2015
  8. Vaal

    Vaal Member

    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.
     
  9. 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.
     
  10. Tikigod

    Tikigod Member

    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.
     
    Last edited: Oct 17, 2015
  11. Wolg

    Wolg Member

    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. :confused:

    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... 2015-10-17_00003.jpg ...He also attempted to do paperwork on the loading bay doors... perpendicular to the flat surface.
     
    Last edited: Oct 17, 2015
    Tikigod likes this.
  12. Sethiusdraven

    Sethiusdraven Member

    ***"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!!!
     

    Attached Files:

  13. LSky

    LSky Member

    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.
     
  14. 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.
     
  15. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    I'll take any save games with the "Returning to Stockpile" bug in them, please.
     
  16. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    Okay, a little on the reasoning behind this.

    Jobs in CE are assigned first-come-first-serve; if my team has no assignment, I look for the job I can do with the most utility, and I pick it, and its assignment, up. If I have a farm with a "till soil" job, I will pick that farm up and will till it, regardless of anything else. If I picked *another* farm to work on on the previous day (due to, say, the new farm I picked on Day 2 being closer to where I slept than my old farm on Day 1), I now worked Farm 1 on Day 1 on the first day and Farm 2 on Day 2 on the second day. Hence, when it comes time to harvest my crops or tend them, I won't be doing that because I'll be tilling the soil on the other farm. CE's assignment model assumes "once you start an assignment, you keep working on the assignment until it's done" (otherwise it descends into a weird nightmare of schizoid everybody-switching-teams-all-the-time-and-the-work-crews-are-useless.)

    The problem we were encountering, fairly universally, was a player creating multiple farms, and then the farm teams invariably picking a bad combination of things to work on:

    - a player has one farm crew, and two farms. The farming team starts planting everything in farm 2, while farm 1's crops die or never get dealt with;
    - a player has two farm crews, and two farms. The big work crew that should be making food is assigned to the smaller farm, and everybody dies while the enormous farming team makes a whole bunch of opium; we die stoned but hungry.
    - a player has two farming crews and three farms; all hell basically breaks loose.

    So how do you realistically fix this? The first problem is that farm 1's crops don't have "tend crops" jobs yet, and we can't start putting them in the evaluation step until those jobs exist. The solution, make sure that they will always go into the assignment that the farm crew is working on (i.e. you have a global "I am going to farm" assignment, and any farms attached to that work crew dump their "till me! harvest me!" in there. That's coming.) The second problem, figuring out which of the better two work teams should do the job, requires the addition of something we don't have to the job scheduler. In that system, after everybody worked out what their most useful N jobs were, where N is some value like "10", everybody tries to find the most optimum arrangement of all work crews to all their top-10 jobs so that everybody's utility is maximized. In computer science, we call this the job shop scheduling problem:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_shop_scheduling

    We'd be one of the nasty "additional forms" of the problem, which involves things like mixed-integer constraint programming and other horrible things where I simply do not want to tread. Even *then*, that assumes that both farming work crews ask for work on the same frame, or some small window of frames; otherwise, if farm crew B is still asleep, small farm crew A wakes up and immediately takes over the farm. I also considered letting a larger farm crew bump a smaller one off of a farm, or some other way of forcing a switch that doesn't require a job shop scheduler, but they run into wierd edge cases very easily where people end up constantly switching between farms and nothing gets done either.

    (The new round of bad stockpiling madness seems to be a typo, which came out of rewriting the entire requirement loading system. *sigh*)
     
  17. TurboTodd

    TurboTodd Member

  18. mailersmate

    mailersmate Member

    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?
     
  19. LSky

    LSky Member

    Bricks seem to do it for me.
     

    Attached Files:

  20. 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.
     

    Attached Files: