Why does it take so long for my droids to repair a factory?

[scaper12123]

Twice now I've lost my campaign because my droids decided that literally doing anything else took priority over repairing the electronics factory that sort of keeps their systems running. Evidently it's been allowed to break down before even though it's on maximum priority only in both of these cases it's killed my run because everything else needs electronics and everything else shuts down after that.

I have the damn thing within range of the droids and it says they're comming to repair it, yet it takes forever for them to do so. What gives?

 

[jpinard]

I've never had that happen, and I've never lost a campaign lol.

There are a few things that come to mind however. First, is there even the slightest possibility you didn't have the resources necessary to fix it? That's happened to me a few times I got confused thinking I had plenty of x, only to discover I had everything else but that.

Next, is if power plants were going down and they were sucking up those resources ahead of the factory. They might take priority.

Third, if it was out of power, off, or no workers the droids will ignore it.

 

[scaper12123]

I've never had that happen, and I've never lost a campaign lol.

There are a few things that come to mind however. First, is there even the slightest possibility you didn't have the resources necessary to fix it? That's happened to me a few times I got confused thinking I had plenty of x, only to discover I had everything else but that.

Next, is if power plants were going down and they were sucking up those resources ahead of the factory. They might take priority.

Third, if it was out of power, off, or no workers the droids will ignore it.

In the cases where it was fixed up, I always had the resources to spare and it still took them a long time to get around to it. The first cases where I didn't have enough were when I queued up some buildings in a new dome I was building way off in the distance; I had them set to low priority so repairing the factory would take precedence. The second I just turned those things off and it still ran out of electronics!

 

[EEE_boy]

You probably need more drones

 

[scaper12123]

You probably need more drones

I had at least thirty drones working that area, but that could be a possibility I suppose. I doubt it though since the hub claimed it was under low working load. The factory was well within the hub's range, too.

 

[SillySMS]

Did you have 3 units of electronics in range of a hub that was also in range of the factory? Having 500 units of electronics doesn't help if they're out of reach of drones in range of the factory.

 

[scaper12123]

Did you have 3 units of electronics in range of a hub that was also in range of the factory? Having 500 units of electronics doesn't help if they're out of reach of drones in range of the factory.

I know I had three units of electronics because I was staring at the factory as the number of electronics I had was slowly ticking down and I was thinking "fucking please prioritize the thing that's at maximum priority." I recall having turned off all of the buildings that required electronics to construct, as well. That's another issue I believe I've addressed.

 

[SillySMS]

I know I had three units of electronics because I was staring at the factory as the number of electronics I had was slowly ticking down and I was thinking "fucking please prioritize the thing that's at maximum priority." I recall having turned off all of the buildings that required electronics to construct, as well. That's another issue I believe I've addressed.

Where. Exactly. Within range of the factory or not? If there weren't 3 units within range, then you're at the mercy of either shuttles or drone sneakernet, of which the second can be very inefficient.

 

[boies00]

I had the same issues until I realized that drones or shuttles won't stock or bring anything if I only use universal depots. Once I put all specialized depots side by side near my domes the stuff needed to repair factories and machine will be brought in very quickly.

 

[yezhanquan]

I had the same issues until I realized that drones or shuttles won't stock or bring anything if I only use universal depots. Once I put all specialized depots side by side near my domes the stuff needed to repair factories and machine will be brought in very quickly.

Shouldn't this be considered a bug?

 

[Whitecold]

Shouldn't this be considered a bug?

I was just fine with only using universal depots. Drones take stuff from them, and shuttles service them.
Specialised ones are preferred though, so if you have lots of universal depots at the end of nowhere, these get filled up, and the depots in range run out of resources. Using a single resource one means the drones will try to fill it up more, meaning you more likely have the resources in range.
In the end 3 electronic are just not enough to currently reliably ensure the factory gets fixed. You need a larger stock, unless you have everything in range of a single drone hub.

 

[Jdogg88]

I had at least thirty drones working that area, but that could be a possibility I suppose. I doubt it though since the hub claimed it was under low working load. The factory was well within the hub's range, too.

Click the hub watch the drones. I do a lot of reallocating of my drones. Many of times the hub will say low lid having 20-30 drones on several hubs and when you watch the drones none are sitting they are non stop doing something instead of a pile just sitting when they could be fixing something.

 

[scaper12123]

I had the same issues until I realized that drones or shuttles won't stock or bring anything if I only use universal depots.

Really? I've not quite had that same issue. I've kept a universal depot next to all of my domes and they generally keep everything in stock, except of course for this example here. Heck, the shuttles seem to do an exemplary job keeping the depos stocked where needed. But at the same time I keep a unified storage area for all of my main stockpiles so maybe that's a contributing factor.

 

[Tweakee]

I learned this the hard way: you need to hold back a buffer of supplies, especially ones like electronics that you need to make more of itself. Once I build the factory, I consider at least 10 electronics to be off-limits for building, to cover repairs. Later on, when I have 3+ factories, I may get more aggressive, but the risk of putting yourself into a death spiral is rarely worth the reward of one more building.

Also, as others have noted, you either need to have electronics near the factory, or a really healthy shuttle system.

Lastly, one thing to remember with priorities is that with only 3, it's easy to end up with half your colony set to high, which can leave a lot of competition for supplies. It's important to leave as much at medium prio as possible, and slide some stuff down to low so that only the really critical stuff ends up at high.

Probably my biggest challenge in this game was figuring out why things went awry. Once I learned how to recognize and correct supply issues, I ended up with a colony that ran so smoothly it was just -boring-. Satisfying though.

 

[zenstrive]

There should be a mechanism for buildings to stock a required materials for their maintenance filled after they are maintained, providing stock is available. This way you can prevent cascading failures causing by one broken electronic factory

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

Part of the issue can be chalked up to a quirk I've noticed in the new storage buildings if you're using them a lot: for some reason, they like to horde resources and only dispense them when there's no other source of them in the area, which is made worse by the fact that the drones won't actually pull from a storage that's in that state even if it has plenty in the accessible part of the storage if they can grab it elsewhere.