Planet Automation - Discussion Thread

[SirBlackAxe]

Would it be possible for crime prevention automation to disable unfilled enforcer jobs when crime is at 0%, the same way it does with extra amenities jobs? That would get it to start constructing new jobs before filling the empty enforcer ones.

Even better would be if it's possible for it to know when it has too many enforcers employed, so it can add some specialist or ruler jobs and then disable them.

QoL suggestion: Display the sector stockpile in the automation settings planetview sidebar so we can access it without needing to switch away from the planet and go to the planets and sectors menu.
EDIT: And/or in the topbar, that might be even better, at least for the shared stockpile.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

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

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.

 

[tcmdan]

Another issue is that the game only notifies you when your really low on stockpile and not when your low enough that it can't do an auto build can lead it the automation failing to work but it doesn't let the player know that.
also having an additional bit of info on a planet as to why it may not be building anything would be useful for new players as its not obverious why all the time

 

[Troyen]

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!

I think that might be fine, but am wondering if it's too much to specify which deficits it can make worse. After writing my list out, I realized I'd be fine with it increasing energy/GC deficits but not alloys/strategic and am undecided on food/minerals. That's a lot of settings to have though.

Strategic spending is a little hard to deal with anyway since the peacetime net income is not going to be anywhere near the wartime net income and in 3.4 I ended up disabling building upgrades. (By the way, I'm not in-game to confirm, but does anyone know if the automation still attempts to upgrade a building to t2/t3 before building a new building in an open slot even though the upgrade is more expensive?)

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.

You can turn off the amenity management portion of the automation and it should stop doing that.

Things become very, very messy if the colony designation is set to auto or if the colony is < 5. In my case (Rogue Servitor) somehow auto designated new colonies become designated as factory worlds and start building industrial districts at population = 4.

Yeah, the auto-designation (which as Offe mentioned is really old and not touched in 3.4) really wants you to have Consumer Goods. I think someone pulled up the script and found if you have over 100 monthly alloys, the weight for Factory worlds shoots way up, but most people don't want a CG income greater or equal to their alloy income. Rogue Servitors especially have issues because you already get more CGs than you need from running organic sanctuaries.

 

[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?

 

[tcmdan]

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

I recently purged my saves as i was running out of space so only have a couple of modded saves with a megamod (which I doubt you want) but i have seen it in vanilla

 

[Critical Ethics]

It's very possible to have a habitat with no workers or a specialised planet with no workers but useless, unenabled clerks. Putting on planet automation when you still only have basic robots will ignore this and drop a robot factory down, churning out unemployable robots that can't leave without a transit hub.

Obviously this is a pretty niche scenario and I'm not sure it's worth fixing, especially since there's a checkbox to solve it right there.

Another issue is that the game only notifies you when your really low on stockpile and not when your low enough that it can't do an auto build can lead it the automation failing to work but it doesn't let the player know that.
also having an additional bit of info on a planet as to why it may not be building anything would be useful for new players as its not obverious why all the time

Displaying the total available stockpile in the empire or planet window would be pretty neat.

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

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!

Does this not also enable/disable building amenity producing buildings? If not great, I'd really like it to build/upgrade amenity buildings as required without disabling jobs or enabling clerks.

"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!

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

 

[TrotBot]

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!

Yeah that works, thank you! I will turn that off and then manually build my holotheatres, so that my utopia can be 100% stability on every world

 

[nestorius]

Hello I use the automation and only use the planetary one. I find that the sectors is just too random and isnt helpful.

My Biggest issue is.

1. I dont understand what the tick boxes for housing and slots actually do.
2. I feel that the game tends to build too many city districts and it tends to be a visious cycle. the problem is that 1 city district provides 5 housing 1 job while production districts provide 2 jobs and 2 housing. but if the ai sees I need housing then it will build a city district but then due to the extra builidng slot it will put a building in using up work space therefore it again is short of housing so it continues building city districts. I dont want them to do this if I want a mining world or an agri world I need minerals or food so I need those specific districts but by this logic they never will be built. as they only provide housing and jobs to homeless unemployed pops. I think this is a major issue.
3. I do want them to upgrade buildings but I find that they dont do it as often as they should.


Number 2 is really a major problem and I would prefer if I have a mining/generator/agri/forge/industrial/factory world to always prefer these districts to building other stuff.

basically I think and could be wrong is the algorithm goes like this.

1. Is there not enough housing? therefore build city
2. Is there not enough jobs build a building (upgrade a building?)
3. Is there not enough jobs but no slot or upgrade possible build city to create a new slot.

Basically it never builds a production district if it works like this.

I would change it to something like this for production worlds

1. if you have unemployment and homelessness build production district.
2. If you just have homelessness and its 1 - 2 then build a production district
3. if you have homelessness greater than 2 build city district
4. if you have just unemployment and no homelessness build or upgrade buildings.
5. always upgrade colony hq.

Maybe am missing something in the above but basically thats something like the automation I would do.

 

[johnty5]

Particularly agree with the points about having an empire with a lot of non-auto-migrating slaves/robots causing various problems with the automation.

I like the suggestion above of somehow being able to use the stockpile/automation system to (at a cost?) force-migrate those pops. As it stands, a player's various automations grind to a halt and only restart when they go through their planets and manually move their robots/slaves to where the jobs are - which I feel undermines the reasons why automation is in the game in the first place. (TBH, I'd just let everything auto-migrate as I'm not sure what the gameplay reason is for excluding them from auto-migration - but that's another discussion).

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.

 

[TrotBot]

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?

yeah i think it would be best if rural planets took into account what needs growth most. usually minerals, unless we're catalytic.

 

[johnty5]

yeah i think it would be best if rural planets took into account what needs growth most. usually minerals, unless we're catalytic.

I feel like this would cause problems. The rural designation is meant to give you a mix of energy, minerals and food - otherwise, why not use the energy, mineral or food-specific designations.

A rural designation that dynamically reacts to current empire production could throw off your economy long term by creating a load of rural planets that overwhelming focus on one thing and continue to do so long after your empire’s economy has changed shape.

 

[TrotBot]

I feel like this would cause problems. The rural designation is meant to give you a mix of energy, minerals and food - otherwise, why not use the energy, mineral or food-specific designations.

A rural designation that dynamically reacts to current empire production could throw off your economy long term by creating a load of rural planets that overwhelming focus on one thing and continue to do so long after your empire’s economy has changed shape.

i'm not saying "pick this OVER this". i'm saying, if you're already building, energy, minerals, and food, start with the one i'm lowest on then add the others.

 

[johnty5]

i'm not saying "pick this OVER this". i'm saying, if you're already building, energy, minerals, and food, start with the one i'm lowest on then add the others.

Ah - sorry, I see.

 

[DamnedLackOfTropicalFruit]

basically I think and could be wrong is the algorithm goes like this.

1. Is there not enough housing? therefore build city
2. Is there not enough jobs build a building (upgrade a building?)
3. Is there not enough jobs but no slot or upgrade possible build city to create a new slot.

The algorithm works a bit more like this:

1. Is there enough housing? If no, build a city district.
2. Do I have free building slots? If no, build a city district.
3. Do I have enough jobs? If no, decide on what to build:
   1. If I have lots of districts and not many buildings, build or upgrade a building.
   2. If I have not many districts, build a district.

Are you playing a species with the negative housing trait?
What might be happening is that the automation builds a bunch of city districts for other reasons, which employ clerks that use up the housing. Then, when it needs to create jobs it decides to make a building, because it thinks it has enough districts. Since buildings don't have housing, this encourages automation to build more city districts to meet housing needs, and the end result is a bajillion clerks and hydroponics farms instead of agri-districts.

This would be fixed if the automation wasn't trying to build a fixed ratio of buildings and districts, and instead just built what it needs. As a workaround, you can force-unemploy your clerks, and automation will build the jobs for the designation to employ them properly.

 

[fourteenfour]

Question first then suggestions.

So is this how the AI builds? Does it use energy only?

I will start up a new game just to try it. Never realized how simple it can be. Do we see the building costs if just using energy or is that hidden?

Suggestions.

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. It might go further to have a toggle icon that you can click that can disable a building at the planet level or empire level. Think red light, yellow light, and green light. Where red is no automation can build it and yellow for that planet cannot build it. One reason for this is that I would like to build population assembly buildings like spawning pools but I may never want to allow automation to ever build cloning vats.

Another building screen feature would be to force all colonies to build a specific building if they are qualified to do so.

edit : I found the pop up on low resources.

However the resource pool needs to show the full value instead of rounding to the nearest one thousand.

 

[DamnedLackOfTropicalFruit]

So is this how the AI builds? Does it use energy only?

[...] Do we see the building costs if just using energy or is that hidden?

This is an entirely different system to the AI economic management, and the AI uses minerals like normal.
While the AI balances its economy by putting stuff wherever, planetary automation will strictly follow the designation and try not to crash your economy too hard.

The "energy building cost" is just the building's normal cost, paid for entirely using the resources in the pool, which can be energy. For example, if a building takes 400 minerals and 75 volatile motes to build, planetary automation can build it using 475 energy.

Also there's an orange notification if planetary automation has less than 300 (?) resources. Unfortunately, this isn't enough to build some stuff, so sometimes it can get stuck at 320 resources if it doesn't want to build anything it can afford.

 

[Dark_wing]

Two a bit more far reaching suggestions:

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.

Player configurable planet templates would also be neat. A "planet designer" would allow the player to say "This is how an ideal energy world should look like" and the Planet Automation AI would try to match that as well as possible.