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

[HappyCerberus]

I think the problem happens after a certain size of the colony.

One extreme example was the situation where I had a producer not producing, because it's internal stock was full, however this was not being picked up by drones, because the adjacent storage depo was full (even though the entire rest of the depos were almost empty).

 

[SillySMS]

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.

This is unrelated but thank you for pointing out that you can disable storage of specific resources on universal depots... though for me the concern is fuel (so I don't get dozens of other resource units wiped out in an electrostatic dust storm because there was 1 unit of fuel).

Overall, I'd agree with btonasse: the real issue isn't with the drone AI, it's with figuring out what resources need to go where, for which it would be really helpful to be able to set either min/max target resource levels or even something as simple as a source/sink paradigm.

For example, if I stashed hundreds of concrete next to the place I'll soon be building a wonder, I sure as heck don't want shuttles taking concrete from there to a dome construction project: I want it to be taken from where I'm producing new concrete.

 

[zenstrive]

As for now, I think I am hoping the passageways coming on the next update can alleviate this food distribution problems somewhat since you can theoritically create a farm dome, a work dome, recreation dome, and residence dome later Mohole.

 

[Bronzewing]

It doesn't help that from what I've seen shuttles seem to give a very low priority to moving food, I've had a mega dome with 30+ starving colonists and the shuttles still seem to be more interested in moving concrete. It'd be nice if you could, like with universal depots, dictate what they carry so you could maybe have one shuttle depot whos job is JUST moviing food around.

 

[Tweakee]

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.

That setup isn't going to work.

Food is time sensitive. You can't have time-sensitive goods produced at a different hub than the one that needs it. Even if the drones behaved exactly how you wanted, they'd be too slow for the small stock that the grocer and diner keep.

One key to laying out the colony is putting production and consumer as close to each other as possible, especially for goods that will be consumed forever. I'll always put enough farms in each hub to feed that hub. Similarly, I make sure a hub with shuttles or a polymer factory has its own fuel refinery. And so on. It also helps to put them physically near each other when possible, as drones will take fuel directly from the refinery to the shuttles if it's a close trip.

Drones aren't built for trans-hub supply, and shuttles are only good for temporary supply. For permanent supply chains, you want to keep it all within the same hub to avoid headaches.

The one exception is when you overlap hubs and have them share a common goods storage area. Then all domes serviced by that storage area act like they're within the range of each hub.

 

[zenstrive]

And even that overlapped good storage depot sometimes not getting materials distribution. But yeah, for now, fabricators dome must be close to food domes. You can't get a single small dome to extract that metal deposits on the edge of the map.

 

[btonasse]

That setup isn't going to work.

Food is time sensitive. You can't have time-sensitive goods produced at a different hub than the one that needs it. Even if the drones behaved exactly how you wanted, they'd be too slow for the small stock that the grocer and diner keep.

One key to laying out the colony is putting production and consumer as close to each other as possible, especially for goods that will be consumed forever. I'll always put enough farms in each hub to feed that hub. Similarly, I make sure a hub with shuttles or a polymer factory has its own fuel refinery. And so on. It also helps to put them physically near each other when possible, as drones will take fuel directly from the refinery to the shuttles if it's a close trip.

Drones aren't built for trans-hub supply, and shuttles are only good for temporary supply. For permanent supply chains, you want to keep it all within the same hub to avoid headaches.

The one exception is when you overlap hubs and have them share a common goods storage area. Then all domes serviced by that storage area act like they're within the range of each hub.

I'm sorry, but the map is much bigger than the catching area of two slightly overlapping hubs, and sometimes you land in an area without a crucial resource (say, rare metals) and the first deposit you find is quite far from your initial settlement. Yes, I could build farms there too, but when I already have an absurd excess of food this is just silly. The game shouldn't limit colony design based on the limitations of the transport system, but on actual and sensible game design choices. And it will be hard to convince me that not being able to consistently transport resources over long distances is a sensible design choice. It doesn't make any sense to have excess food and still be forced to produce more food because long range transportation is unfeasible.

Besides, it's true that food is a time sensitive resource. It won't get there in time - we know that. But this wouldn't happen if we could fill far away depots earlier than when shortages happen, and that's exactly what we've been discussing here. I mean, that's the whole purpose of stockpiling. "Keep it for now to use later"

I mean, what would adding actual functionality to a bare-bones "create transport route" button detract from the game? And a little more control over depot behavior?

 

[MylilPwny]

I agree that it is annoying to sit on a large amount of food and then see starvation coming up and make problems in that dome. However, i am fine with this and i would prefer it to stay like this. The idea here is that when i build several domes near eachother, it gives me the benefit of having a dome that mainly produce food and because it is near, no domes will suffer starvation if you have produced enough of it. But problem comes when i decide to make a new dome, far away, to get those pesky rare metals, and since it is rare metals i want, i only want geologists to go there and collect, not making farms and micro enough botanists to man them. Here is where i ENJOY the game design. I want it to stay this way too. My solution is to use the transport vehicle and create a trade route to said dome. This solves my issues. Since this dome is more of a temporary thing, until i harvested all the resources, i enjoy to micro the transport to deal with it. If devs "fix" it, it only makes it easier, now we need to use the tools we are given, and they work well too, so why change it, other than removing yet another task the player should do?

Edit: The "fix" should be to let us choose the amount of whatever resource we want our transport to bring on the traderoute. Now, we can only take 1 resource and we cannot decide how much, that is something that needs attention imho.

 

[btonasse]

It's interesting to hear of a different point of view. Thanks for sharing.

I do hope, though, that the majority won't agree with this, because adding extra tasks just for the sake of adding them doesn't make much sense to me. Specially when it means constantly micromanaging dozens of rovers in a large colony.

 

[SillySMS]

While I personally don't heavily mind micromanaging my transport rovers, I can very easily see where it would get tiresome... and it would probably get even worse if I didn't have a farm in every dome to take advantage of the biome engineering tech (+comfort for farms in a dome).

You don't choose where the resources are, particularly on some of the higher-difficulty maps, and then there are multiple reasons to have specialized domes that aren't necessarily near resource production centers.

Food? To maximize water utilization, you want a dome with a water reclamation system and a bunch of farms surrounding it... and if you have rare metals being extracted 6 sectors away from regular metals, which is 4 sectors away from your initial landing site whose deposits were depleted and thus turned into an industrial dome, well... then you need long-range resource transport.

 

[Tweakee]

I'm sorry, but the map is much bigger than the catching area of two slightly overlapping hubs, and sometimes you land in an area without a crucial resource (say, rare metals) and the first deposit you find is quite far from your initial settlement. Yes, I could build farms there too, but when I already have an absurd excess of food this is just silly. The game shouldn't limit colony design based on the limitations of the transport system, but on actual and sensible game design choices. And it will be hard to convince me that not being able to consistently transport resources over long distances is a sensible design choice. It doesn't make any sense to have excess food and still be forced to produce more food because long range transportation is unfeasible.

Besides, it's true that food is a time sensitive resource. It won't get there in time - we know that. But this wouldn't happen if we could fill far away depots earlier than when shortages happen, and that's exactly what we've been discussing here. I mean, that's the whole purpose of stockpiling. "Keep it for now to use later"

I mean, what would adding actual functionality to a bare-bones "create transport route" button detract from the game? And a little more control over depot behavior?

I would ask why you have so much extra food in an area that doesn't need it?

This is a unique "city builder" game in that you can grow food -anywhere-. Your food also never spoils. Your people also don't care a bit about variety. Transport limitations are really the only challenge to your food supply.

You should only be building a megafarm in an area that needs mega food. It seems to me like the simplest solution to your situation is to build a small farm dome near the metal, and build a research (or school, or retirement) dome near the megafarm.

I get the requests for more robust transport controls, but personally, I'm just rolling with it and adapting to the game instead of waiting to see if a few patches from now the game will adapt to me.

 

[zeliscar]

Yes, megafarms currently don't work. People without drone hub access to those farms/storage will still starve, no matter how many shuttles you have. In my "get 200 vegans" playthrough I constantly had 1500 people starving, nevermind dust storms lol.

Maybe a solution to this could be to give storages priority like the buildings have, or the ability to set a minimum amount you want stored there. For example if I set the food storage to minimum 30 food, the shuttles would start delivering as soon as it goes below 30, rather than when it hits 0.

 

[Promethian]

Maybe a solution to this could be to give storages priority like the buildings have, or the ability to set a minimum amount you want stored there. For example if I set the food storage to minimum 30 food, the shuttles would start delivering as soon as it goes below 30, rather than when it hits 0.

I love this idea.

 

[btonasse]

I would ask why you have so much extra food in an area that doesn't need it?

Because having a surplus doesn't mean that the area doesn't need those resources. The original settlement area is still expanding, and a surplus is a necessary step to prepare for this expansion. Unfortunately, there was no rare metals anymore in this particular area, so I had to go look for it elsewhere.

I mean, I get what you're saying. Of course you can work around it and adapt. Like you said, just build another farm dome next to the mining dome. But that's not the point. This is just a workaround - and a very inefficient one at that. Domes cost resources to build and maintain and precious manpower to run, and being forced to be inefficient just because resource transportation doesn't work in a sensible way is not exactly what I would call a nice base building gaming experience. It's not like we're asking for a totally new and alien feature to be implemented. Resource management is at the core of this game, and transportation is a big part of it. So much so that of the three rovers you can build, one is dedicated to transportation and even has a "create transport route" button. It just doesn't work in its current state unless you babysit it constantly.

 

[zenstrive]

I agree that it is annoying to sit on a large amount of food and then see starvation coming up and make problems in that dome. However, i am fine with this and i would prefer it to stay like this. The idea here is that when i build several domes near eachother, it gives me the benefit of having a dome that mainly produce food and because it is near, no domes will suffer starvation if you have produced enough of it. But problem comes when i decide to make a new dome, far away, to get those pesky rare metals, and since it is rare metals i want, i only want geologists to go there and collect, not making farms and micro enough botanists to man them. Here is where i ENJOY the game design. I want it to stay this way too. My solution is to use the transport vehicle and create a trade route to said dome. This solves my issues. Since this dome is more of a temporary thing, until i harvested all the resources, i enjoy to micro the transport to deal with it. If devs "fix" it, it only makes it easier, now we need to use the tools we are given, and they work well too, so why change it, other than removing yet another task the player should do?

Edit: The "fix" should be to let us choose the amount of whatever resource we want our transport to bring on the traderoute. Now, we can only take 1 resource and we cannot decide how much, that is something that needs attention imho.

If only the RC transports actually abide to the routes without fail and keep on taking and putting resources as pointed and just wait until there are resources to be taken instead of forgetting their routes.

And speaking of having fun with transportings, having to navigate through tons of pinned icons on screen's bottom is not fun. If only there is a better management system. Endless series from Amplitude is top notch regarding this management.

 

[SillySMS]

I would ask why you have so much extra food in an area that doesn't need it?

This is a unique "city builder" game in that you can grow food -anywhere-. Your food also never spoils. Your people also don't care a bit about variety. Transport limitations are really the only challenge to your food supply.

You should only be building a megafarm in an area that needs mega food. It seems to me like the simplest solution to your situation is to build a small farm dome near the metal, and build a research (or school, or retirement) dome near the megafarm.

I get the requests for more robust transport controls, but personally, I'm just rolling with it and adapting to the game instead of waiting to see if a few patches from now the game will adapt to me.

Multiple reasons, some of which have been mentioned.

Economies of scale is one reason. One very efficient way to grow food is to have a mega dome with 5 apartment blocks, a handful of service buildings, a water reclamation system, and then just a giant block of farms. Sure, you could replicate that in miniature at multiple hubs with small/medium domes... but then you have to build a water reclamation system at each such dome, plus have duplicate and potentially underutilized service buildings, etc.

Another reason is that on some maps, you just need to be really spread out to access certain resources, particularly rare metals. Maps are inconvenient like that.

 

[Tweakee]

Multiple reasons, some of which have been mentioned.

Economies of scale is one reason. One very efficient way to grow food is to have a mega dome with 5 apartment blocks, a handful of service buildings, a water reclamation system, and then just a giant block of farms. Sure, you could replicate that in miniature at multiple hubs with small/medium domes... but then you have to build a water reclamation system at each such dome, plus have duplicate and potentially underutilized service buildings, etc.

Another reason is that on some maps, you just need to be really spread out to access certain resources, particularly rare metals. Maps are inconvenient like that.

Oh, I totally get building a mega-farm dome... but you don't have to actually build the entire dome at once. I frequently build out the bare bones of a dome (one residence, basic comfort, and one workplace), then add more as my colony grows and needs it. Just because you have a dome that can hold 25 buildings doesn't mean you have to build all 25 immediately.

If your megadome area only needs two farms today, just build 2 farms and the residences and comfort to support them, and leave the rest bare until needed. An added side benefit will be a bunch of colonists available to work elsewhere.

I mean, sure, I would hope in reality that a Martian colony would be better at transporting food and other goods. But I'd also expect in reality for food to spoil, and for people to not be satisfied by eating fruit for every meal of their entire lives. Sometimes the abstractions help us, and sometimes they challenge us.

But to be clear, I'm all for improvements to the transport rover and the storage system. I don't think they're broken, but they're also definitely not perfect.

 

[Proxy85]

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.

I like alot of these ideas. I wonder why micromanagement is treated like a dirty word around here anyway. This is a survival city builder, classically these types of games are based around micromanagement, or at the very least the kind of initial set-up meticulousness like these ideas.

 

[jpinard]

Your people also don't care a bit about variety.

Yea this is a mind boggler. Lots of other games (in fact the very competition Haimamont should be looking at), have a demand for food variety or your people suffer morale penalties.