Planet Automation - Discussion Thread

[Offe]

Hello it is me, fellow Human Offe.

This year we've made some significant updates on the Planet Automation system. Having lurked around a bit here on the forums I get the impression many players are still very hesitant to use it.

I would therefore welcome everyone to take the opportunity to provide concrete feedback on which parts you think work well and which parts could use improvements, or things that were simply confusing. Screenshots and especially save games are incredibly helpful to fix bugs for edge-case scenarios where planetary automation queues something highly illogical.

Thanks!

Edit: For people who haven't tried it yet and is looking for a guide on how it works here is a recent video from Montu Plays

Solid suggestions so far:
- Checkbox setting for ignoring empire wide deficits when constructing new buildings, will build if it can afford regardless of monthly deficit
- Take into account empire wide construction queue when looking at monthly income, specifically a big issue when cloning vats is researched, can crash monthly food situation
- Ignore pop unemployment check when constructing some buildings like energy grids
- Enforcer job micro the same way as amenities
- Fringe world designation should build the district associated with the resource with the current lowest income per month
- A way to enable/disable all modules with one click

UX considerations:
- Extremely hard to understand why the automation system is NOT building something
- Likewise hard to know why it is building something or what will be built next
- Designation checkboxes can be ordered in automation priority order to make it much more clear in which priority the automation will construct something
- Suggestion: Orange symbol in outliner (and planet view) explaining what automation wanted to build but why it failed (too low monthly energy income etc)

Stockpile system:
- Lots of suggestion to rework/remove it somehow
- Warning for low stockpiled resource is not sensitive enough

 

[Offe]

(I could say a lot about colony type auto-designation, though, which is tangentially related. I've almost entirely rewritten the weight_modifiers in 00_colony_types.txt to make it work better.)

The colony auto designation was left unchanged with the rework to planet automation, it is not awesome no I agree. For now I would recommend to set the designation your self and then enable the automation.

Planet automation being able to auto resettle pops by paying the cost is an interesting idea!

 

[Offe]

• I think if I manually disable a job, automation won't restore it.

It will both enable and disable amenity jobs if they get too low or too high, but it will not touch any other jobs

"I'd really like the automation to factor in stockpiled resources somehow."

I think one idea we can do is to add another automation option which is basically enabling/disabling the resource deficit failsafe. At least this way players will have the choice if they want the automation system to keep building and creating larger deficits or not!

 

[Offe]

After unlocking clone vats, automation will queue a clone vat everywhere it can, and only realise after the first one is finished that it could only afford that one. The others will still finish, leaving you with massive food deficits that the player needs to resolve.

This is definitely fixable, good suggestion

 

[Offe]

It tends to go ham on upgrading every building it can, no matter what the colony actually needs or (in the case of you conquering a planet and not immediately removing redundant buildings) is designated for.

Can you give any examples? Upgrades should only be done if there is unemployment and it needs to make more jobs

 

[Offe]

OK, so, feedback so far.

One planet I automated already had a holotheater, but not only did automation disable one entertainer, but proceeded to build an additional holotheater that nobody was employed in....

Yes I noticed this as well, there is coming a bug fix specifically for this issue in the next patch

 

[Offe]

Ok, I've got some odd behaviour for you:

View attachment 866346

I have a monthly shortfall of food, and minerals are my second largest monthly surplus after alloys. But planet automation has decided to build the single possible mining district on my rural colony, instead of an agricultural district.

I'd disabled a farmer job on my capital on the technician jobs on the colony in order to get planet automation to build here (since I want to spend from the sector stockpile instead of using up my minerals), which worked, but the choice of district doesn't make sense to me.

Removing the mining district from the queue and changing the designation to agri-world does get me the farming district I wanted, though.

Rural world designation will build energy -> mining -> farming -> energy -> mining -> farming
Currently the script does not take into account monthly income. What do we want here, construct the district with the lowest amount of monthly income?

 

[Offe]

Edit: also, for utopian societies it would be nice to have a checkbox for "never disable amenity jobs". I just don't want that at all, I want hedonism lol.

Hmm, you can open the automation settings and CTRL-click to disable amenity micromangement for all planets and then SHIFT-click to set is default "off" for all new colonies. Is this different from what you wanted? Sorry if I missunderstood!

 

[Offe]

if a pop can't take any job (such a robot pre droids on a alloy world) they will block jobs from being made even if a second pop that can take a job is also unemployed

Hmm this is new to me, I would have sworn that this was working. Do you have any save game?

 

[Offe]

And maybe a third option for yes go into deficit but not if the "12 months remaining" alert is on?

makes sense

 

[Offe]

Kind of. If any basic resource has 0 or less monthly income I'd want a rural world to construct the district with the lowest income, but if they're all positive I don't necessarily want to build more agriculture if food is lowest. Food usually has no uses besides upkeep and colony ships, and without any reason to save up a stockpile for large expenditures there's a limit to how much of a surplus I'm interested in having. There are basically a couple different tiers of 'how much food surplus do I want' depending on your empire:
...

I mean you are right, but we are going pretty far into very complex rules for what to build when. One of the biggest problems that we want to solve is that it is already too hard to understand and that we want to give the player as much control as possible.

I think an easier way of making the same concept would be to perhaps have additional checkboxes for fringe world designations such as:
Build Minerals [X]
Build Energy [ ]
Build Food [X]

I would prefer to have more "dumb" logic with more control left to the player if possible as it makes it much easier to understand

 

[Offe]

An interesting idea for the automation would be If you could set resource income targets on a per planet, per sector and potentially even empire wide level. This way you'd have a finer level of control over what is being prioritized. Would also be neat flavor wise, as it could give you the feeling of actually commanding your empire with the click of a button and then seeing it react.

This is how enemy AI empire manages its economy. Setting empire wide targets for their economy. It is basically the opposite of planet automation, it's a planet vs empire type automation.

 

[Offe]

Why does the automation feature seem to have a much smaller priority compared to other empire management features?

I've only been around on Stellaris for less than a year so I weren't there when the feature was first made, if I would speculate I would guess that the feature was made as an afterthought to try and combat the huge amount of micromanagement required in mid and lategame (pure speculation).

Here is a rough sketch what I meant actually (only about the planet summary view but automation should be highlighted at other places as well)

View attachment 866673

I like your sketch, I agree with all your points regarding unintuative and hidden feature. Making big changes to UIs require 2D art and UX work/approval so it becomes a much more involved process where I can not simply work on it myself but have to engage the rest of the team, taking time from other tasks.

 

[Offe]

The only other quick thing I'd suggest is allowing us to set a designation for our capital. I've never really understood why we can't do that and it prevents us from automating it in the way we can with other planets.

I wish this too, imo the capital designation modifier could be moved to a planetary modifier instead, like the prosperous unifcation modifier but permanent, and then you could choose the designation for your capital as well. As it is right now it is basically impossible to make an automation for the capital as it is impossible to know what the player wants.

 

[Offe]

Once designation is set, accessing the building list should indicate which buildings are part of that designation set. This could be done with a border color or icon in the building detail box.

Yeah good idea, another possibly easier idea would be that the designation tooltip would show what can be automatically built in a tooltip if you have the automation enabled. But yes agree that somehow you would get a breakdown of what can possibly be built.

 

[Offe]

@Offe what is the difference between the planet and sector automations and how do they interact?
Also is there a reason automated sectors can be hidden(in the outliner) and automated planets can not?

Sector automation is explained here in this tooltip.

Oh I didn't even know you could hide automated sectors

 

[Offe]

Not all designation types have the same option with regards on when to build the capital. Why is that? I used the energy and mining designations but its haphazard at best with the rest. (00_mining_automation.txt and 00_generator_automation.txt)

1 = {
building = building_capital
available = {
always = yes
}
}

I am fairly sure this does absolutely nothing, the automation system will go from top to bottom and try to build the first possible building, but it is never possible to build another capital building. It is a leftover from the old script.

Where is that second block of script from? It is from outside the planet automation script somewhere?

 

[Offe]

It's definitely possible to use conditional effects (eg. +[10 * X]% output if Ascension Tier X), too. A simple "If is homeworld/capital, then [effects]" which could be inserted in to every/any designation, combined with the above it would let you do away with the capital designation entirely

The problem is not how to solve it technically in the game, it is more that this is what has been decided it should be like. I can't change how the capital planet works mechanically without game design approval just because it would make the planet automation system work better unfortunately

 

[Offe]

Ah I see. Could you do the inverse, then, and add a planet decision to the capital "Specialise capital", adding a planet modifier [e.g. like the high gravity world planet modifier] mirroring the modifiers, then have automation code do the following

• If Not capital
  • do normal stuff.
• If capital,
  • look for specialisation planet modifier.
    • If none found do normal stuff.
    • If found pick from appropriate action per list:
      • Modifier type = designation type.

Its clunky, in that it forces a player to go digging in the decisions menu.
A more elegant solution would be to fire a popup when turning automation on on the capital for the first time (with the option to change it from planet decisions menu), that lets you set its "specialisation planet modifier" and go from there, per above.

Yeah it would be possible to work around it somehow. However, I will ask again if we can come to some agreement on how to solve this issue with our designers once I find some time to sit down and implement all the changes from this thread, hopefully we can come to some compromise that isn't a workaround

 

[Offe]

Yeah I haven't seen any specific issues with factory/forge worlds, perhaps he was using sector automation and not planet automation, trying to get it to automatically assign the forge world designation. As been mentioned before that system is very out of date.