The Food is Plentiful, The Drones are Lazy, The Colonists Are Hungry

[zenstrive]

It's baffling to me that not all of the drones and shuttles actually try to fill up any food depots that are on their ranges, despite farms are stopped due to full storage.
This resulting in questionable hungry colonists due to empty food depots located near domes that are not filled to the brim, despite three hubs away the food depots are full and the farms are fully stuffed.
Really, drones algorithm needs fixing in filling up depots. Always try to fill any depots they encounter.

 

[richvh]

The drones are overworked in this sort of case. Adding more drones to the drone hubs can help alleviate this.

In my current game, I was having recurrent starvation in one dome, and the drone hub between it and the farm dome had only 5 drones. I got it up to around 30, and the problem went away.

 

[zenstrive]

I have 25 drones enslaved to each hub minimum. Some have like 60. Should be enough.

 

[MarQan]

Drone AI needs upgrades for sure, there are issues with them where the "need more drones" and "part of the challenge" reasoning doesn't apply either.
The drones are just wasting time. This is 100 times worse for the shuttles.

Even if more drones would fix zenstrive's problem the drone AI still needs fixing.
Mostly because these problems have even higher impact at the beginning when you really can't afford more drones.

 

[MontharKragan]

In my latest game I kept having this same problem, despite having only 4 small domes fairly close together, plenty of drones for each hub and 4 shuttle hubs with 6 shuttles each. This is with depots in the overlap between drone hubs. Every time I'd check, it's the same dome with the problem and the two drone hubs that can service that dome have most of their drones just sitting around doing nothing. Meanwhile the domes on each side of the starving dome had near full food depots.

 

[zenstrive]

This needs fixing. It's hilariously tragic that with 15 000 unit of food in stock there are 15 starving colonists...

 

[Diedel]

It seems that depots only get 2 units delivered until the drones and shuttles stop. There really need to be a way to changed that as it is making it nearly impossible to have goods distribute evenly, only current demand triggers a delivery and that often takes to long. The only way i found so far is having many depots at a spot. The same weird thing seems to happen with rocket loading/unloading. The unloading is done by "all" drones and it seems they are also all loading the fuel, but the rare resources are loaded by only 2, really strange.

 

[zenstrive]

The pattern for filling up depots are quite strange, CMIIW.
If one dome has farms, the food depots two drone hubs wide near it will be filled. The food depots near third drone hubs subsequently from any food producing dome will not be filled to full. This can be detrimental to that faraway dome that is five drone hubs away.
Now that RC transports also prone to stop their routes if the food depots are full on their destination...you definitely need to take a good look at that retirement, isolated dome you make.

 

[Promethian]

The problem is that the service buildings have too small of an amount of food they keep on themselves. Its only like 5 food. In a large enough dome that can get consumed in an instant and then all the people looking are suddenly starving. The thing is, as soon as they are no longer full they put out a call for food to be delivered and the drones/shuttles will do it. If they stored more food on hand they would make calls for food to be delivered before starvation happens.

Edit: Realized after I posted this. Its probably intended and we are supposed to make more food service buildings to match the higher demand.

 

[zenstrive]

the capacity of the food service buildings should be different problems than the food depots filling. Food depots need to be always try to be filled.
Suggestion: if one depot is already at 120/180 and there are drones filling it still, and the neighbouring depot is only less than 60/180, the drones need to fill the neighbouring depot to 120/180, and so on. A constant movement of drones, a human-survival ensuring chain of food delivery.

 

[Promethian]

the capacity of the food service buildings should be different problems than the food depots filling. Food depots need to be always try to be filled.
Suggestion: if one depot is already at 120/180 and there are drones filling it still, and the neighbouring depot is only less than 60/180, the drones need to fill the neighbouring depot to 120/180, and so on. A constant movement of drones, a human-survival ensuring chain of food delivery.

Yes, depots should do better. However service buildings make a call for food every time their storage isn't full. This makes something happen. So the solution is to make more food services. The question is then "Is this working as intended?" If yes, then the problem is we are doing it wrong and can do it right by making more service buildings.

 

[zenstrive]

Yes, if the service buildings are the only place colonists come to feed.
They also will come to food depots for food, CMIIW. So....depots should always at least half full to ensure in case of the diners shut off for some reasons, colonists can still have food.

 

[Tweakee]

I had this issue with one run, and I found the following has helped prevent it from recurring:

1) Make sure the drone load is not Heavy. Food needs to be supplied quickly, and busy drones can't do it fast enough.

2) Make sure each dome has a food depot right next to it. This way, even one free drone can fully resupply food quickly. I put most of my supplies at the intersection between two drone hub's coverages, so that supplies can be used in twice the area without shuttles, so I had to make an exception for food.

3) Make sure diners and grocers are set to high priority. Better to have a concrete extractor go unserviced than have people miss meals.

4) Don't build the bigger domes, unless I'm going to have only smart homes and a small population. It's easy to overpopulate bigger domes to the point that it takes two of each service building to keep people happy, but you lose most of the benefits of a bigger dome if you have to use twice the space for services. Hopefully at some point they'll add improved versions of buildings that can handle more people, as currently it seems best to stop at medium or oval domes.

 

[zenstrive]

Currently on my freestyling playthrough:

1. Most of the drones are lazying in the martian sun
2. I have two food depots on each drone hubs, ensuring one depot is served by three hubs.
3. I think I tried this. Still the same hunger game.
4. What's the fun in that

 

[HappyCerberus]

I would really like to understand what the resource distribution algorithm is. My current approach is having a universal depot next to each hub. This works reasonably well, since drones will try to even the resources between these depots, although that does not seem to reliably work with distant hubs.

 

[SillySMS]

Thing is, that behavior can be problematic in some cases as well. Why have drones wasting time shuffling food to a universal depot at a concrete extraction center when they could be refueling a rocket? What I like to call drone sneakernet can be a problem if you just set the max supply levels high; I'd rather just continue to use RC transports.

What I could see is a "send material to here" or "take material from here" button added to depots. That could help address some of the limitations in the current drone/shuttle AI that currently have to be filled by RC transports.

 

[Bronzewing]

Well this sort of issue is familiar if you've played Tropico games. Drones = mars Teamsters.
Oh and if you click on the icon for basic resources on a universal depot you can disable food, so it'll store everything else, but not food.
You may also want to disable fuel from them because otherwise if a meteorite hits the depot the fuel will blow up and destroy everything else on the depot.

 

[HappyCerberus]

So what is the solution then? I still don't understand what is the transportation algorithm. I have buildings lacking resources because the resources are not in range, but they are not in range just because the drones are not transporting them for some weird reason.

 

[Xeorm]

I would really like to understand what the resource distribution algorithm is. My current approach is having a universal depot next to each hub. This works reasonably well, since drones will try to even the resources between these depots, although that does not seem to reliably work with distant hubs.

My understanding is that drones try to satisfy orders as a queue based on priority. For food in particular, a grocer is missing food, so a request is generated for food. A drone will then deliver from a depot in range if possible. If no depot is in range, then either a shuttle or another drone that shares range with a depot that does have food will deliver to a depot in range. And this can continue if you're, say, 3 depots away.

Key point in that is depots don't predict food changes. The grocer won't request food until after it has run out. If you have a food depot nearby, that won't be filled unless there's a need for food, and so on. Furthermore if drones are busy (aka, under a heavy workload) that means they have more requests than available drone capacity. Similar with shuttles. If you're ever maxed out on logistics, that implies you need more. The goal is light usage, with medium being a warning.

As well, setting up transport routes with rovers is probably something of a necessity if you have a large imbalance between resources required and where it's produced if more than a few hops away.

 

[btonasse]

Well, as the OP already mentioned, it's not necessarily a drone workload issue. I have the same problem in my current game. All hubs between the starving dome and the farms have tons of idle drones, and the intermediary depots have 1 or 2 units of food MAX. The only depots that have reasonable amounts of food are the ones in range of the food producers.

"Oh, but you can use shuttles". No, you can't rely on them. They don't fly during dust storms and only activate when a service building calls for a certain resource.

"Oh, so you can use rovers". You could, but you would need to constantly move them around, which quickly becomes impractical and annoying in larger colonies. Why? Because the "set transport route" feature is almost useless. It's only real use is to gather metal from all around the map, not to create actual routes. You can't set how much resources you take at a time. You have to take everything until it's empty or the destination is full. And when that happens the rover just stops - and it can take a long time until you realize it stopped. Also you can't set up a route for more than one resource, nor can you make the rover pick and unload different resources in both it's starting point and destination. All these things that you would expect from a transport route you cannot do without managing it closely and constantly. Transport rovers really need some love from the devs here.

Yes, the drone AI needs tweaking, but I think the best solution for this is just to allow more customization in the depots. It's not enough just to build depots and forbid certain resources from universal depots. Depots could also have priorities and/or the possibility to set minimum/maximum amounts of each resource and/or the possibility of linking depots, effectively creating a supply chain that your drones would try to fulfill. One could argue that this adds more micromanagement to the game, but I think it would actually have the opposite effect, since the player would just make the initial setup and then forget about it.