Planet Automation - Discussion Thread

[mergele]

-The list of possible designation is quite long and requires a lot of unnecessary and annoying time scrolling. Would it be possible to squeeze the boxes a bit to get more on the screen at once? Heck, maybe just a symbol with a tooltip or a arrow to expand into an explanation. (Similar to how jobs are handled).

-A way to use the amenity job automation without activating the building automation

In general though I would like to congratulate you on finally making automation usable and useful again.

 

[Mohreb]

UX:
I would like to be able to hide automated planets (not only sectors as is at the moment) from the outliner.
It would make handling the empire much better.

 

[Ragatokk]

just what

 

[Troyen]

Yeah, that's what I was alluding to earlier. Sometimes amenity automation disables the colonist jobs because it doesn't technically need the amenities (though in your case it replaced them with clerks - are those clerks slaves? or maybe it's because of the urban world designation?), but in so doing, it ignores the stability impact from having no employed specialists.

 

[fourteenfour]

honestly the more I play with automation the more I am both impressed by your work and the more I am wishing you guys would just throw out the whole pops as single unit system.

 

[exi123]

I havent played much with these automations, i will take a closer look at that in future plays. From my playstyle point of view it sometimes would just be enough if we would have a "smart construction queue".

I can queue up buildings and the "scq" builds the stuff when the first unemployed pop is present. With that i can also sink minerals into projects beforehand. It would also be helpful to see in the breakdown of the resources what future, already planned and queued objects will add to the upkeep.

 

[SeraphAscending]

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

Would a fourth checkbox (mutually exclusive with the other three) "Build lowest income basic resource district" be too complicated to create or communicate to the players?

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.

One thing you can fairly easily assume about the capital is that capital-only buildings are to be prioritized. There are probably very few instances people wouldn't want to build those, but i agree. A planetary modifier would be better. Not just for automation, but simply customisation (which is kind of a major appeal of the game, isn't it?).

 

[Critical Ethics]

Would a fourth checkbox (mutually exclusive with the other three) "Build lowest income basic resource district" be too complicated to create or communicate to the players?


One thing you can fairly easily assume about the capital is that capital-only buildings are to be prioritized. There are probably very few instances people wouldn't want to build those, but i agree. A planetary modifier would be better. Not just for automation, but simply customisation (which is kind of a major appeal of the game, isn't it?).

A bit tangential but I'd like if empire and sector capitals produced extra politician jobs.

 

[Lord Milutin]

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.

I completely agree with this.

Another suggestion that I want to add:
Sector automation is just confusing now with planet automation. I am not sure what does what and what has priority.
In my opinion at this point, sector automation and sector stockpile should be removed since we already have better systems for automation like planetary automation and shared stockpile.

 

[Woozywyvern]

Two things I have noticed from a few plathoughs using automation on some of my sectors (this is just using planetary designations and not enabling sector focus).

1. Buildings are upgraded as soon as possible even if the extra jobs are not needed or can't be filled.
2. It seems to build ahead quite a bit - ie it sbuilds sectors and buildings that will remain empty for a long time while the pop grows

 

[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.

 

[Mohreb]

@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?

 

[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

 

[Mohreb]

View attachment 867420

Sector automation is explained here in this tooltip.

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

So it is like an auto-pick but with fewer options? , will balanced for example work as if 1/8 planets were mineral 1/8 agricole 1/8 science... or each planet will be building "everything".
Will those respect "default" checkboxes on planet level?
The hiding is in the outliner options. Really usefull (for me) for big empires,but gets a bit finecky if you would care for 2-3 planets far away...

 

[DamnedLackOfTropicalFruit]

So it is like an auto-pick but with fewer options? , will balanced for example work as if 1/8 planets were mineral 1/8 agricole 1/8 science... or each planet will be building "everything".
Will those respect "default" checkboxes on planet level?
The hiding is in the outliner options. Really usefull (for me) for big empires,but gets a bit finecky if you would care for 2-3 planets far away...

Sector automation does exactly two things - decide what the planet designation should be, and then turn on planetary automation to handle building up the planet.

Planetary automation only builds things matching its designation. This means if you have "balanced" sector focus, sector automation will attempt to pick designations in a "balanced" way (though it's not very good at this), and then planetary automation will develop the planets for only that designation.

Your planetary automation checkboxes aren't changed - if you set all planets to not build pop assembly, sector automation will not build pop assembly.

 

[borskwastaken]

TLDR: Automation is cool, but it needs more transparency

Watching Montu's video helped me a lot with understanding how automation works. However, I still often find myself staring at a colony for a long time trying to figure out why it's not building anything. At the moment, automation is a black box that sometimes does things, but other times does not. I think it would be great if sector automation was more transparent. For example, it could have a tooltip explaining what automation's current priorities are, what it's currently doing, and especially what's stopping it from doing so. It would be great if it stated what the automation would do once it's done with the current building queue. Giving it transparency and predictability would make it a lot easier to create strategies that rely on it.

Here's an example of planetary automation's lack of transparency being a problem. This is a colony that's not upgrading its capital despite having enough resources for that. If there was a way of figuring out why that's the case, it would be a lot easier to make it do what it's supposed to.

Also, the positive resource income restriction seems a bit arbitrary. I usually run massive energy deficits in the early game, supported by nothing but minor artifacts, which almost completely shuts down the planetary automation. Another example of that restriction being redundant is a late game empire with 122k consumer goods in storage with -1 cg/month income. Surely, such an empire should be able to afford to build one more research lab? It would be great if the player was able to disable this restriction.

 

[Dragatus]

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

I started a game where I would only micro my capital and had the rest of the planets automated. My observations so far:
- AI takes its sweet time upgrading the capital, which was most egregious for small colonies that reached 10 pops and were stuck with the subpar colonist jobs instead of getting the better politicians.
- I developed an abundance of basic resources, but I did have two rural worlds.
- AI was very slow to build labs on tech worlds.
- Several planets had two Holo-Theaters built, but only one Entertainer employed.

 

[fourteenfour]

@Offe

Couple of notes with regards to issues which appeared in another thread.

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)

The second code block deals with artificial limits on forge worlds. If this throttle is still ideal for AI controlled worlds there needs to be a check to ignore the limits if the automated world is controlled by a player. I was able to prove that the second code segment was blocking my forge world from building a new industrial district, the pops always migrated away eventually. (00_colony_types.txt)

    prio_districts = {
        district_generator
        district_hab_energy
        district_generator_uncapped
        district_rw_generator
    }

    buildings = {
        1 = {
            building = building_capital
        }


    prio_districts = {
        district_mining
        district_hab_mining
        district_mining_uncapped
    }

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

Alloy problem

    weight_modifier = {
        base = 1
        modifier = {
            add = 1
            owner = {
                OR = {
                    country_uses_consumer_goods = no
                    has_monthly_income = { resource = consumer_goods value >= 0 }
                }
            }
            OR = {
                AND = {
                    owner = {
                        has_monthly_income = { resource = alloys value < 10 }
                        years_passed <= 20
                    }
                }
                AND = {
                    owner = {
                        has_monthly_income = { resource = alloys value < 20 }
                        years_passed > 20
                        years_passed < 50
                    }
                }
                AND = {
                    owner = {
                        has_monthly_income = { resource = alloys value < 40 }
                        years_passed > 50
                        years_passed < 75
                    }
                }
                AND = {
                    owner = {
                        has_monthly_income = { resource = alloys value < 60 }
                        years_passed > 75
                    }
                }
            }
        }

 

[Reffy]

@Dragatus I had the same experience with a techworld. It's just super slow.

@fourteenfour So currently ignore industrial/forge/factory world automation? It just doesn't work unless there's a blue moon.

 

[Pancakelord]

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.

It is possible to use scripted locs in the designation name, isn't it? It should be able to modify designation strings to print as ['Capital/Sector Capital/"Blank" -'] [Designation String], letting you have both on one line (e.g. for the outliner), or insert an icon like a crown or gold star and silver star infront of the designation names, for capitals and sector capitals respectively.

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. Just move capital recognition to some hardcoded flag on the planet instead (i assume capital designation is used to actually identify the capital in code? Though sectors can change designations, and they dont have fixed 'sector capital' designations).