Planet Automation - Discussion Thread

[Offe]

@Offe 00_colony_types.txt inside the folder colony_types

For my test on my homeworld I unemployed my forge jobs to push me under the income threshold. The very next month my separate forge world started to build a new industrial district. I did experiment with selling alloys to force my rate to 0 or even negative but it only appears to evaluate production amounts.

I suspect the rules in 00_colony_types.txt is interfering with other aspects of automation. Whenever I find coding based upon the year of the game I get very worried.

Now someone did state this only affects the assigned designation however it just is too much of coincidence. When I crossed year 50 (or 51) I unemployed forge workers as my income was manually pushed beyond 40 and my forge world again started building. Now I did not test what would happen if I had two forge worlds.

I think perhaps you may get some left over automation behavior if you enable sector automation but disable the planet automation itself. I found some left over script in the sector automation the other day. I thought I had removed all the sector automation scripts but it seems I had missed some.

 

[Offe]

The last one is sth i noticed when all my storages start overflowing and all the designation districts are filled. Then rather then building up free non-designation districts left on the planets the automation seems to accept bigger amounts of unemployment, especially robots which then are given a role as "servants". Still triggers unemployment events.

Planet Automation constructing things outside of the designation was one of the biggest complaints with the old system. Where you would make a mining world but then when mining districts were filled it would then fill any type of district and also make a bunch of random buildings producing tech/unity etc.

Currently the idea behind it is that the pops will simply auto migrate away when it is no longer possible to continue building according to the designation. Also the fringe world designation will fill all the base resource district slots eventually.

This should probably be a setting as well, "build outside of designation as last resort", exactly how it would work is very unclear though. The best way right now is to change the designation into something else to make it continue building, for example, setting it to a research world after all the mineral districts have been built

 

[Offe]

i do not use sector automation. I never will. I created a fresh game. I stocked the reserve as shown in the Montu video. set the planets as I came along and the planet type I had problems with was the forge worlds. they do not build if my income exceeded the amounts I found in that colony file.

I will have to recreate another game later when I have the time and upload it.

If you can upload a save game where this happens it would be great!

 

[Offe]

I don't know if this is possible to do in an elegant way so I understand if it can't be in the game, but I wish I could set amenity behaviour beyond "touch"/"don't touch". It currently is set to absolute minimum amenities. It automatically disables as many amenity jobs as possible till you're down to 1 amenities. But I play for roleplay, and I'm giving people utopian abundant living standards. So I have to disable auto amenities and build my own theatres. What if you could set it to low, medium, high, and unlimited amenities? The ai would not build multiple holotheatres, but it would leave the amenities uncapped and not worry about "too many".

I have made a simple system to allow/forbid jobs via scripting, currently i am using it for crime mangement / micro, but i plan to remove the current amenity management and replace it with the new scripted system. It would then be possible for people to mod the system in order to expand it with different settings. For example, you could then script 3 different toggleable settings for low/medium/high amenity target. But for the non-modded vanilla version of the game I think it may be a bit much to provide 3 different amenity settings

 

[Offe]

could we maybe just automate the different levels? slave societies (except pleasure seekers) are definitely low amenity leaning, democracies medium, and utopian abundance societies high?

With the current limitations of the implementation it would have to be three separate checkboxes. It would be cool to add some way of having a slider or textbox to enter a value instead of having only a checkbox. Definitely a good idea, not sure how hard it would be to implement though

 

[Offe]

I noticed a bug. Sometimes (not quite sure when) the automation "forgets" that it disabled an entertainer job and will try to build a holotheater job before it realises that it can reenable the entertainer.

I often noticed this when i was also in the planet view, so it may have something to do with me doing something also in the planet view (like manually building a district or a building). Or sometimes disabling and reenabling the automation.

This issue has been fixed but it will take a while before it comes into the live version of the game!

 

[Offe]

No. I know exactly what you mean, this is not the problem whatsoever.

That's why I said unemployment issues - it's *not* reacting, despite 10 years of 10 unemployed pops on more worlds than not. There should be construction queued everywhere, instead it's only 1 planet, if that.

It won't build anything if the pops can not work those jobs (e.g. slaves or such) or if it' not possible to build something according to the designation. For example, if it is set to mining designation and it is not possible to build more mining then it will stop construction even if it is possible to build something else like generator districts. Do you think it is because of this? Otherwise a save game would help

 

[Offe]

I don't know if it's the same bug, but playing on 3.5.2 I've noticed automation disabling amenities jobs and ending up with unemployment. Despite there being unemployed pops the automation doesn't build anything. I'm guessing it's because it's counting the disabled jobs as available, and thus expects the unemployed to take them?

This was as a rogue servitor if that makes a difference

hmmm you mean it was disabling the bio trophy job itself? that isn't supposed to happen so that would definitely be a bug

 

[Offe]

May already exist this option, but I haven´t been able to find it.

I have been testing automating all I can my planets and one thing that upsets me is that i am not able to put my colonies in automatic mode as default, so I have to pay attention when my new colonies are settled so I have to do this manually.

At the mid and end game this can be a bit tedious , so it would be great if as with the checkbox that can put the default automatic modules in your new words, you can also put automation as a default.


Thank you for working in automation!!

new colonies in a sector that has sector automation on will automatically have planet automation turned on as well!

 

[Offe]

I find it a bit strange how unification stations are automated:
It seems to build up a bunch of Leisure Districts, only to disable all jobs from it afterwards.
The precise setting was: all checked except the "Rare Resources" and "Pop Assambly", and no sector automation neither in a Void dweller, megacorp empire.

yeah looks like this might be the case, will look into it

 

[Offe]

You know, I might use it—if turning it on immediately after colonizing didn't cause the AI to eliminate colonist jobs, causing the colony to disappear in 100 days.

I fixed this, it is coming in some future patch, can't remember exactly which one but soon TM

 

[Offe]

Had some free time, figured I'd try see if I could get the amenity automation bug in vanilla.
I think I got it? I got something.
View attachment 886015
Asgard Prime has been on these automation settings for a couple years - I manually built a robot plant, and automation made a city district for housing. Automation is working fine - other planets are updating their amenity jobs and building things as expected.
Except none of the maintenance drone jobs on this colony have been closed, despite it only needing one.

In this example, automation wakes up about 6 months after the save is resumed and starts closing the jobs as expected, though in other (modded) games I've seen amenity automation do nothing for much longer periods, including with pops working the excess amenity jobs.

Hopefully this is useful.

Hello

It only disables jobs if you go over the target threshold for amenities. So while it is true that you have 4 open amenity jobs, as soon as it goes into 2/5 and the surplus of amenities become too large it should start forbidding the jobs down to 1/5 again

 

[Offe]

So, question on the design front:

- Colonist jobs are turned off if there are too many Amenities.
- Colonist jobs only exist for the span of time when the Colony designation gives a large quantity of bonus Amenities.
- Colonist jobs are always turned off.
- Colonist jobs only exist for the span of time in which they are forced to be turned off.

Why have these jobs at all?

Why not make default jobs which can be used by the player and the AI?

I don't really have any say in this matter unfortunately