Shuttles need better prioritization. (starvation)

[BoogieMan]

I forgot to turn off my fancy new wonder dome after it was completed and people started moving it. It is very far from the primary population center. However, it did have a food stockpile. And had for the last several sols. However, even while the new migrants begin to starve, my fleet of shuttles is not transporting any food (or fuel, but not the issue) so I had to drive in a supply of food with a rover from across the map.

I assume they CAN transport food even though I have personally never witnessed it. But something they clearly don't do well is manage priorities. Domes with shortages, especially food, should have very high priority.

 

[icon41gimp]

You need to have a grocer or diner to create a food demand that the transportation system can fulfill. While colonists will eat unprepared food I don't believe their presence alone creates demand for unprocessed food.

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

It doesn't actually matter. Shuttles have this habit of not giving things realistic priorities, like completely abandoning food transportation to have every single craft in the colony deliver building materials when you're planning expansion. Unless you have a decent number (maybe 12-24) any large shift in demand for resources will disrupt their normal routes. Major expansions with larger domes will often tie up your entire shuttle fleet long enough for starvation to set in unless you have 40+ of them and their hubs right next to the supply depot... and that's not even when the expansion is happening across the map.

 

[harishrajan96]

You need to have a grocer or diner to create a food demand

One of my playthroughs i had a diner but still the shuttle never prioritise food.

 

[SoftwareSamurai]

I think we need to be able to prioritize all shuttle operations. I would do something like this:
1. Transport colonists.
2. Supply food to depots with less than N units until X units are there.
3. <Insert whatever transportation priority you'd like to set>

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

I think the shuttles either have specific prioritization for each resource (with food being low) or prioritizing based off quantity demanded. You can see this whenever a sudden spike in demand for two different resources in two different locations crops up simultaneously: the shuttles will take care of the higher numeric demand first, then switch over to other tasks again. As a few people have noted, it's theoretically better to rely on transports or a relay-style transportation via drone hubs... Except that Transport Rovers don't recharge automatically and lose their route when they're ordered to charge and drone hubs just kind of trickle resources through beyond a certain point since they insist on leaving a minimum amount at each depot (maybe 20 food at every stop) which means you have a large amount of unused food scattered around the map randomly. Typically, the only way to deal with shuttle prioritization issues directly is a larger fleet of them. This, naturally, means you need an insane number of fuel refineries, a massive store of fuel, and space to build the hubs, a highly inefficient process unless you need a mass migration between two domes or want some idle in case colonists need to go across the map.

 

[Zinegata]

Except that Transport Rovers don't recharge automatically and lose their route when they're ordered to charge and drone hubs just kind of trickle resources through beyond a certain point since they insist on leaving a minimum amount at each depot (maybe 20 food at every stop) which means you have a large amount of unused food scattered around the map randomly.

They do if you put a power cable near the depot and set them to unload on the power cable beside the depot. They will recharge periodically while transporting. The problem lies more with how they tend to suck depots completely dry faster than the extractors and produce new stuff for them.

 

[spannbeton]

We rather need better depots with customizable limits and priorities. Something that Anno 1602 got right with its trade system 10 years ago. And the devs even mentioned they had import and export depots in the game but scrapped them.

Yeah i guess it might become more "spreadsheaty" like banished but at least it would have some complexity and could get a colony to work properly.

By simply just making the default values good enough casual players wouldnt even have to worry about it.

 

[KDubya]

Turn off resources that you don't need/want stored on your Universal storages spread across the map. I turn fuel off on all of them and food off on any that are not next to a dome.

No fuel will keep them from blowing up from meteors and dust devils. No food will keep your shuttles from spreading your food all across the map.

I try and put a farm inside every dome. Might not be efficient but it adds comfort and greatly reduces logistical strain on food delivery. No mass starvation events when a three sol great dust storm grounds your shuttle fleet.

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

Another tactic is to have contingencies: In one game when I realized the flaws of relying on shuttles I came to the conclusion that if I wanted a specialized agricultural dome for all my food production, I'd need to have a few Transport Rovers nearby to take over in the event there was a dust storm or fuel shortage; since the vast majority of my food stores would be in one area, it'd be hard to deplete everything and I could just send a rover loaded with food every day or so. I never actually managed to implement the plan, however, since one of the mysteries destroyed that colony and I never had a reason to set up that system afterwards.

 

[EsoEs]

While shuttle priorities could be better when it comes to Food specifically, its best practice to bring over a pile of food with your transport to any new domes you make.

 

[SoftwareSamurai]

While shuttle priorities could be better when it comes to Food specifically, its best practice to bring over a pile of food with your transport to any new domes you make.

When you have just a few domes, that's fine. But after you get many domes up and running, having to micro-manage the transports to move the food around gets far too time consuming. When I have to micro-manage a unit, I'm probably going to miss some other important thing that's happening elsewhere.