ALPHA 50C Small Things (With Outsized Effects): Part 4

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Alavaria, Apr 22, 2016.

  1. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member


    Review - black-box farm weblog post (and developer comments): The Clockwork Razor: Purging Agriculture
    Let us remember that this "cracking the system" and "obscure actions" came down to:

    • Make a LARGE farm
    • Use maize or better yet wheat/sugarcane
    • Put farm near food stockpile, and kitchen (specifically the opens) near to the same food stockpile
    • Use a lot of farmers so you produce (a lot) more than you need to build up a buffer

    ==================================================================
    Part 1

    The Early Quartet

    Carpentry Workshop
    • Specific: Building a very large carpentry
    • General Issue: A lot (like the kitchen) depends on plank production.
    • Mechanics: Larger floot print takes more resources. Taking longer to finish your carpentry building means longer until you start producing planks, which pushes everything back.
    • Explanation: It's a time issue, you are particularly ticking down to the "raw food spiral"
    • Potential Effects: Taking too long to begin making Cooked Food, which leads to the "raw food eating spiral".
    • "Signs": The carpentry is not making planks by end of day 1

    Kitchen
    • Specific: Making a (very) large Kitchen
    • General Issue: Colonists start eating raw food
    • Mechanics: Cooking (basic) food doubles the effect, and 1 cook action is a lot less work than producing 1 raw food. (ie: producing 10 cooked food is easier than 10 raw food). Once you get stuck with colonists eating raw food it becomes very difficult to get out, especially because you may be overseer heavy.
    • Potential Effects: Starvation
    • "Signs": You don't have any cooked food production 2 days after any starting food has run out. OR If you see colonists picking up raw food and eating it.


    Striking
    Not so much of an issue now, colonists don't seem to strike (they are much more stable in v50-C) especially now that the Felt Tired memory can't instantly trigger striking.


    More will follow about "tips/tricks on more obscure mechanic interactions". Because I only seem to randomly refer to them elsewhere.

    Next part is just below:
     
    Last edited: May 12, 2016
  2. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Part 2

    Have at it. It's a tip or a trick depending on how cheesy I feel it is.

    • Trick: Foreign Office Spam
    • Mechanic: FOs independently draw their missions daily
    • Effect: Efficiently use 1 overseer (with lower-class help) to obtain what you want, multiple times a day possibly.
    • Specifics:
      • Spawning a new trader immidiately once the previous one has left
      • Raising relationships to max very quickly
      • "Store" tons and tons of diplomacy points
    • Costs: Fairly minimal, you have to build foreign offices and standing desks + windows multiple times (not as large a project as making enough beds)
    • Obscurity: No idea, if anyone builds a second FO they can probably figure this out

    • Tip: Production point generation via: Planks, Glass Pane/Bottles, Lacquered Planks
    • Mechanic: 4points per Make Planks, 8 points per Make Glass Pane/Bottles, 16 points per Lacquer Planks
    • Effect: You can adjust your overseer gain speed up (wayyy up) or down (to your base level of necessary production, ie: nearly none for glass items or lacquered planks)
    • Costs: Planks you need a lot of. Mining produces plenty of sand for glass products (1 sand => 1 make glass pane + 4 make glass bottles), lacquer is cheap to buy and all standard traders can carry it
      Glass items and lacquered planks are great for selling as well
    • Obscurity: Probably rather high if you don't know what drives the production points (which affect overseer gain)
      Details of what gives what points and how many points you need are in text files (so probably you wouldn't know) and cannot be observed in game

    • Tip: Converting NCO into Overseer
    • Mechanic: Any NCO unassigned from their barracks turns into an Overseer. Including your starting NCO
    • Effect: You have an extra worker/overseer on day 1 (you can convert them back if you want)
    • Costs: Nearly nil, as you should be having a barracks really early on.
    • Obscurity: None, but most people go scouting or hunting animals really far away~~

    • Trick: The equipment workaround
    • Mechanic: Non-soldiers tend to drop weapons. Soldiers without weapons (usually) do not pick up Forbidden Weapons
    • Effect: Your soldiers are better equipped
    • Costs: Micromanaging. Oh and redcoats lose their redcoats if you use it on them (or on their NCO)
    • Obscurity: Depends? If you know about it, you probably use it. If not, you're probably just waiting for the equipment mechanics to become better.

    • Tip: Make sure NCO has the longest-range weapon
    • Mechanic: Due to targetting AI, if your NCO has a shorter range weapon and get closer to the enemy, there's an increased chance they will be targeted and shot
    • Effect: Reduces the chance of NCO loss
    • Costs: See above, it's using this workaround
    • Obscurity: More than the above

    • Tip: Mines only need 1 Mineshaft Module
    • Mechanic: Multiple workers can use a single mineshaft (for whatever reason)
    • Effect: Saves costs
    • Costs: Negative
    • Obscurity: If you build a few modules, you'll notice that all the workers just pile into one

    • Tip: Build specialized buildings for high-density sleeping
    • Mechanics:
      • Designated housing (Lower-Class Bunkhouse, Middle-Class House) are significantly cheaper per tile than workshops like Carpentry/Kitchen
      • Building larger workshops (eg: Carpentry/Kitchen) in order to put cots in them also slows you down
      • Also, most of the time cramming in beds into workshops is not as high-density is possible
      • The way decor works. If all cots are in one buildng, it's easy to get them all to Wonderful quality. Less so if the cots are across 4 buildings
    • Effect: Spending more and earlier than you need to
    • Costs: See above
    • Obscurity:

    • Trick: Place a farm on top of a stockpile. Apparently you can even stack farms on top of farms as well.
    • Mechanic: No idea. Sometimes the game lets you place down farms on top of buildings and stockpiles. It might have to do with saving and loading?
    • Effect: Greatly reduce the hauling needed to get raw food into the stockpile (I think colonists will basically pick it up and put it down again in some cases)
    • Costs: None. Except it looks odd to see your maize overgrowing your food stockpile...
    • Obscurity: Never seen it mentioned anywhere.

    • Trick: Forage bandit tents. While neutral or friendly with them
    • Mechanic: Foraging bandit tents does not make them hostile if they weren't already. Recommend sending military to check first, though
    • Effect: You can get items such as the Jazeil Rifle, Revolvers etc for "free"
    • Costs: It's a long walk, both for the foragers and hauling. No guarantee that colonists will take it back in a timely fashion.
    • Obscurity: I think most people will try to outshoot the bandits before foraging the tents. Though if you forage when not having weapons, that can get you up to speed faster than trying to make your own (you can't make Rifles either)

    • Tip: Decor up
    • Mechanic: Decor makes people happier if they work or sleep in a better building. +1 quality per decor, quality maxes out at +6
    • Effect: Happier people. Focus on the sleeping building first, but then improving workshops means your overseers in them work a lot and are very stable
    • Costs: +1 bricabrac per +1 decor (or purchase it, go for Carpets mentioned in Part 3)
    • Obscurity: People seem to decorate a bit. But they don't take it to the limit, usually it's somewhere between Uncomfortable (-2) and Comfortable (+2). But going to +6 continues to benefit you.
     
    Last edited: May 2, 2016
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  3. Hallucigenia

    Hallucigenia Member

    It seems like a lot of problems (especially re: food, hauling, etc.) would be made easier if colonists just walked a little bit faster!
     
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  4. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Heh.

    One will, uh, have to reaccess building slightly. Slightly. Use carpets/rugs.
     
    Last edited: May 2, 2016
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  5. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Part 3

    • Tip: Minesweeping
    • Mechanic: The game prints out exactly the shares of output when a mineshaft module is placed
    • Effect: No need for naturalists, at least to survery golden pips
    • Costs: None but your time. You don't have to build the mine, or have a mineshaft, just "plan" it, get the information then cancel the building
    • Obscurity: Depends, not really important as most times golden pips have surface nodes anyway, plus mining ores isn't that great anymore


    • Tip: Reassign lower-class to overseers doing "Gather Building Materials" for a large project
    • Mechanic: Only one workgroup can build a structure at a time. 5 people will gather the things needed faster than 1
    • Effect: Can build large buildings faster (provided you have the materials)
    • Costs: Micromanaging.
    • Obscurity: Seems most people split up their lower-class among various overseers. Large buildings thus take longer than necessary. (Same goes for flattening)


    • Trick: "Stacking" wall decor
    • Mechanic: Wall decor is attached to (interior) walls. If there's a corner you can put in say 2 wall shrines. Add a square to your building (which has walls on 3 sides now) and you can cram in 3
    • Effect: Fit in a lot more decor. This also works on Blackboards for your Lab
    • Costs:
    • Obscurity: Not sure yet, see if people carefully leave corners clear to decor cram (but then you have carpets...)

    • Trick: Carpets & Rugs
    • Mechanic: You can make these (4 bricabrac for 1, which is +4 decor) but really, summon the Novorus trader repeatedly and just buy them. Super cheap for +4 decor
    • Effect: These go on a floor and can go under modules. Perfect for a crammed house, for example.
    • Costs: You should prepare something to trade, as it is still expensive (just not as expensive as other ways to get decor)
    • Obscurity: We shall see

    • Trick: Repeatedly do a mission.
    • Mechanic: The game apparently doesn't immidiately block out the mission button (Foreign Office), meaning you can run a mission a few times and go into negative points, by clicking rapidly.
      If you then switch factions, the negative points are lost.
    • Effect: Really-really run missions. Don't use on summon traders though. (You can multiple bombing run I guess)
    • Costs: Negative cost, as you can run something many times and just remove the negative mission points.
    • Obscurity: Never heard ot his one, it seems like a bug
     
  6. dbaumgart

    dbaumgart Art Director Staff Member

    Fixed this for next version; added a check to see if the mission has been executed before executing it. Trick is, I guess, you could indeed shove multiple interaction messages into the office script in the period of one script tick (100ms) and it'd accept them all as valid. Cheeky!

    Alright, will fix this one too. I remember why I entirely unlocked the module - was due to all the walking miners were doing counting as lockdown time. But if I lock it only for the period in which the miner is mining, it should be fine.
     
  7. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Can you fix the miners wandering around with Drop Item jobs with their ore? Whenever I forget to mod it back after a new version I look and hey they're littering the ground.
     
  8. Rentahamster

    Rentahamster Member

    I feel like it works better as it is now. 5 mineshafts per mine is too much space taken up for its utility, IMO.

    Yes, this one in particular is really annoying. Thanks :)
     
  9. dbaumgart

    dbaumgart Art Director Staff Member

    The build-in automatic drop range is hard-coded and cannot be changed from scripts, so I can't do it.

    What is it exactly that you're modding here?
     
  10. Rentahamster

    Rentahamster Member

    He's talking about this:

     
  11. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    When you quoted that post the quotes -inside it- with the details about what to change are gone. Here, let me just redo it to be sure...

    Change to:

    Changing those three bolded lines should do it, as a result they should never have the Drop Item job.

    It also follows the convention for other jobs like Make Planks (ie: requires a Drop Location, but then fills input for Drop Location only after colonist is holding the output item)
     
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  12. dbaumgart

    dbaumgart Art Director Staff Member

    Cool, works like a charm!
     
    Rentahamster likes this.
  13. Mikel

    Mikel Waiting On Paperwork From The Ministry. Forever.

    This thread makes me start singing a blink-182 song every time I see the title
     
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  14. Alavaria

    Alavaria Member

    Part 4

    • Tip: Leave stuff lying around outside your colony
    • Mechanic: Bandit AI priorities
    • Effect: Bandits seem to run for an item, pick it up and leave (if not caught and shot). Sometimes they will be distracted by picking up stuff, even when being shot. You just need to randomly chop trees or mine surface nodes around your colony, Even if you don't care to actually use those resources.
    • Costs: Obviously colonist time. But you might get useful resources.
    • Obscurity: I've seen cases where people get raided by bandits but bandits never show up, it's likely this. I doubt anyone does it deliberately though.

    • Trick: (ver 50-C) Just ignore sleeping until you're ready (ie: indefinitely if you want).
    • Mechanic: The new emotion system just happens to let you get away with just leaving them to sleep on floors.
    • Effect: Basically, you should set up everything "else" first. Then work on the house about the time you're grinding through Foreign Office (relationships) and Lab (research)
    • Obscurity: Who knows, we'll have to see. People generally rush to get beds due to the way things worked before 50-C so this one is new

    • Tip: Refined Food owns
    • Mechanic: Turning 4 raw food (3 are basic cookable and 1 is brewable) into 24 Quality Food is amazingly labor saving as farming is very labor intensive
    • Effect: You can probably feed 100 people only 100% Quality Food with only 5 farmers and 5 cooks
    • Cost: You need to max Republique relationship, and I don't think they're articularly good for anything else
    • Obscurity: People have tried feeding larger colonies with this, though if you know about it, you can beeline to it via concentrated foreign office work

    • Tip: Foreign Office => Summon Trader
    • Mechanic: If you want something a trader (especially a special trader, eg: Novorus raw materials) you can keep calling them in until you get what you want
    • Effect: You can rely on traders with this method, it isn't perfect but it is definitely better than say, walking across map to get stone.
    • Cost: Foreign Office points. Not too much though.
    • Obscurity: A lot of people who run out of stuff like stone start chasing it around the map instead of summoning the novorus raw material trader. Stone is cheap to buy!