I think this thread touches on one minor problem with Sins.

If you are looking to build a fleet of 30 ships. You are going to have to keep going back and forth queuing up ships when the money rolls in. Potentially back and forth 15 times. If you wait for enough money to queue all 30 ships at once, you then have to wait for the 30 ships to be built which is wasted time.

This problem is Minor in Sins because we have alot of spare time to do it. Having such a model in supcom which is as fast twitch as you can get and it would be a Major problem.

However the problem is still a problem. My suggestions to solve this would be either
1) empire bar listing all planets with shipyards = makes having to go back and forth more streamline
2) have a picture of the ship you are building show up in the UI , so that you just have to click that picture to top up the queue , whereever you are.

Add your production worlds to a hotkey group.

Or, better yet, separate the queuing of items from the paying of items. E. G. instead of needing all the money "up front" you can queue and item and go into the negative -- when you have the cash for it, it starts up. Unlike research queuing, where it will jump around in the queue as needed based on research center availability, this must remain strictly in the order of first in last out -- doing otherwise makes it so that more expensive objects like cap ships and refineries will never get constructed.

And you should have the ability to set minimum treasury/cache! Otherwise you'll get trapped in your own building queue when you need someting done NOW. Or perhaps this would be done better with a way to set building priorities. It could only affect the items you checked (like the three Gauss' that you wanted immediately), the rest continues as was queued.

I was repeatedly annoyed by having to wait for queuing up something I wanted, particularly for big projects like a capital ship or a really expensive research project or planet development.

It also meant I had to stop building other things that would be naturally unconnected and going on in parallel in order to save up for my big order, such as building a frigate while the frame for my capital ship was being constructed and research for better colonization of arid planets was trudging along at its pace, steadily draining resources as the scientists and ship builders requisitioned materials.

I don't get the argument that it won't work with more than one critical resource. Battle Isle IV did this quite well with 6 different resources: water, power, fuel that when processed became power, high grade steel, steel that when processed became high grade steel, and raw mined materials that when processed became steel. If one came up short, it would naturally slow everything that required it down unless you chose to put some of the projects on hold, as they all competed for the same things. Anyway, a sudden shortage there means just the same as it is now, except that nothing is being built because you can't order anything while one is lacking. What is different about pirates knocking out your crystals causing production to slow down compared to pirates knocking out your crystals causing nothing to be queued?

I was going to suggest this feature and saw this thread, but I understand it is too late to make the change. This is unfortunate.

But the problem with this becomes:

What if something happens and you suddenly need that one tech researched fast, or really need a specific ship or structure built? Then, you have to go and unqueue everything so you can get back into positives to be able to afford to build/research what you need immediately.

And you have to admit, grand plans and schemes can change quite a bit in Sins, and quite quickly. Sticking the player into negatives will cause a lot of headaches when a sudden change to production needs to be made.

Alot of times, where i build something is as important as what and when I build it.

I'm not sure how often i could or would want to plan production that far ahead.

To add to my previous post:

A manufacturing system that continuously drains resources instead of all up-front only works if the economy system is based on continuous gain, not absolute. Basically, if you want things to drain resources as they build, the only way to do that without causing multiple other problems is to have resource gain like Supreme Commander, where absolutes don't exist and it's just rate of increase. Yes, you can point to Homeworld, but in Homeworld you only had a very limited number of things that could produce units and very few units (in comparison to Sins) to produce.

I didn't say I was ron, I said you can. I wouldn't even build five shipyards to start with. Odds are two would be more than enough on a one star map unless it were truly huge. I usually build them five or six at a time early on. Of course once I hit my fleet cap they tend to get queued up in rather large volumes, but that's what happens when you run out of things to spend money on and tend to play with as self sustaining a fleet as you possibly can while only fighting battles that are pretty sure to be won. I'm a chicken.

I see the use of build as you go, I just don't see a burning need for it in such a minimal game for production. It's sparing you seconds of time for probably just as much spent thinking about how much money you're actually spending on this or that and can you actually afford to go piss away some more improving this or that planet without delaying your fleet. There's really no good way to do it when potential income is always going to be a small fraction of potential construction costs.

Then you learn the dis advantage of planning to far ahead.

Actually, as someone else pointed out, the ability to "jump the queue" for specific items would work really well -- e. g. ctrl+order makes it sit in a second, higher priority queue that will always precede the lower queue.

So then you would have an elaborate system that would let you queue up whatever you need and build as you have money.. that half the people won't use because doing so would screw you over for immediate problems



That still won't solve it immediately. Sure it puts it at the top of the queue, but you still have to wait to get resources to build it, and to build it immediately you'd need to cancel all your currently building stuff to recoup resources. Yeah with the TEC most things are cheap enough and unless it's something like crystal usually it's just seconds. But what of the other races?

You have to wait for it to build naturally anyway. If it is at the front of the queue, all your income would be funneled into whatever is at the front of the queue. So if your income rate is greater than your build rate then it will still build just as fast.

And I am not sure what you meant in a earlier post when you said this:



Perhaps you could elaborate on this a little? Any resource gathering in a REAL time game has a resource income RATE. In SupCom you can increase that rate infinitely where as in Sins you can't (we discussed this in another thread) but both SupCom and Sins have a specific resource income rate at any particular point in the game. What are the issues with funneling that income rate into the item being built at the front of the queue? I am sure there are technical ones but I don't see anything but positives in terms of game play mechanics and freeing up the player to plan his/her build strategy as far (or near) into the future as he/she wishes.

No, because you would not cancel building whatever is building already, and what you need built immediately would simply be next in line. So, resources would still be spent building what was already in the pipe, and you would have to wait to gather enough to start the next build. If you needed it immediately, you would have to cancel what was already in the pipe, both for time and resources.



While Sins has resource income rates, building/researching still deals in absolutes. You can have an income of 100 crystal/minute, but you still can't research that tech unless you have x amount of crystal. What I was saying is that in order to have a system where you can continuously queue and where resources are spent as the building progresses, the best resource gain system to implement would be like the one in Supreme Commander, where absolutes don't exist. You don't need x metal or x energy to build something, you just need to balance income rate and expenditure rate.

Let's toss another game in the mix: Homeworld. There, you had absolutes in resources where everything cost x amount, but production spent resources as it went along. So, if you didn't have enough you could still start building, it would just halt eventually until you got some more. This led to complete halts in production, and if you needed something built or researched quickly, you had to cancel everything already mid-production so that you would have resources to build. In Supreme Commander, nothing halts completely. If your expenditure rate is greater than your income, at worst it slows down, but you can still build.

Does that make better sense?

Granted, in Sins you don't need to wait for harvesters to return to your HQ or whatever to get your resources (in the beginning), but the rate of gain is so negligible to expenditure rate that even though you gain metal/crystal continuously, for all practical purposes you might as well have a complete stall. In late game, when all the asteroids are depleted, you *do* actually have to wait for refinery ships to dock for your metal and crystal, and then the problem becomes pretty much exactly like Homeworld. Your whole production line stalls, and if you need something immediate, you have to cancel what was in the middle of production to recoup enough resources.

In Suppreme Commander, if you really need something fast, at worst you pause construction of other things. You don't have to cancel. Just stop your engineer from spending on one structure, decrease the expenditure rate so that you're not slowing production of the other thing, and then go back to finishing. You don't have to cancel anything to recoup any x number of resources.

Hopefully this clarifies it

EDIT: Furthermore, we don't even know exactly how the other 2 races gain their resources. The Vasari are supposed to use planet suckers for resource gathering, who knows if they even build asteroid mines for a constant rate of increase, like the TEC.

Yes that does help. Thank you. I now understand what you meant by "absolute".

The way I interpret this request by the OP is to make it so that Sins does not follow an "absolute" build model. So you could actually queue up the building without having all the resources to build it. However, all your resource income and your resources in storage would only be consumed by whatever is at the front of the queue.

You are right when you say that SupCom is different in this regard. It dilutes its resource income and storage across whatever you are building at any point in time. This implementation does suffer from the stall problem you describe. However, if resources were only consumed by what is being built at the front of the queue then stalls are no longer possible.

Finally, one last comment.



This has been addressed by a few different posters simply by allowing the items in the queue to be re-ordered.

Not quite true, since you can still run out of resources building whatever is at the front of the queue, and the whole production line stops This is the basic distinction I'm trying to make. In Sins, if this were to happen, you would need to cancel current production to recoup resources to enable you to continue producing something else. In Supreme Commander, you need only to pause current production to decrease the expenditure rate, you don't need to have any actual resources returned. Supreme Commander's resource model ends up working a whole lot better in this regard



Yes, but, I was only addressing Ron's idea in my original reply that led to that

I don't envision it as being used to queue up stuff hours ahead -- its a way to bypass the "pay up front!" sillyness currently in use. You know, the "wait 5 seconds for that last tick of crystal" BS that drives us all nuts

True, getting rid of that would be nice, though it really doesn't happen too often once the game gets off the ground. It's really just in the beginning when you don't have much to do that you're sitting and counting resources. Once the game gets rolling, it's a lot more common to notice you forgot to build stuff and are sitting on a pile of resources, than actually waiting for them to trickle in

But re-doing the system so it drains resources continuously and allows for queues would introduce other problems, even if it would fix this one

You can "build" ships before they are researched, why not before you have money for them as well. Continuous build not make sense, pay as you go not worth the effort. Being able to queue into the negative on the other hand will be obvious, already has the code for halting production when requirements aren't met, and wouldn't be so irritating to figure out with such a small income rate compared to your possible expenditures.

And single handedly stalls all your production, leaving you to figure out what you're building where if you need immediate resources for something

Which queuing helps eliminate so you are rarely hoarding any resources. You are right though that you can't find enough places to spend all your resources later in the game but I feel that this is very late in the game. And as we start honing our skills and get to know the game better, I am sure we will find more efficient ways to use that res. Further, if we do find that we just can't find ways to spend all our resources fairly early in the game, I think it would mean that the economy needed tweaking. I don't think this is the case though.



It is still not clear to me what these other problems are that you are referring to. Can you provide an example or walk us through a problem scenario so we can give some feedback and have a discussion about it? I think there may be a misunderstanding as to the type of queuing system that is being proposed.



I don't see where there is a "stall" in this scenario. It seems we may have a different definition of the term or at least a misunderstanding of the implementation being suggested. Just because you don't have the resources to build something, doesn't constitute a stall in my mind. It just means that you have to wait until any progress on that build will appear. We are simply saying that it is silly for a human player to have to manually do the waiting instead of the computer doing it via a queue.

This is precisely what a 'stall' is And what the problem is. Here's the scenario for you:

Let's assume, for whatever reason, you want a capital ship built immediately (the only thing the TEC has that's expensive enough to demonstrate). You need 3000 credits, 400 metal, 250 crystal. Let's say crystal is scarce, so you're currently producing Cobalts at several shipyards (at 55 metal each) and you're building enough that at any given time you have 0 metal to spare (it's used as soon as it's acquired). At the same time, you have a few things queued on research (low on metal requirements, high on crystal), so that you also have 0 crystal to spare at any given time. Let's also assume you have enough trade stations going that credits aren't much of an issue (although with the cobalts/researching, it probably would be). Anyway, now you need a capital. You have no metal and no crystal in reserve.

If you add it to the top of the queue, it overburdens your income even more since it tries to split production with the stuff you already have going. Since you need the ship pretty much right away, obviously you can't afford to wait for it to crawl along like a turtle. And to get it built right away, you need to recoup whatever resources were already used up by all your ships/research mid-production by cancelling everything partially built and researched, as well as halt any other production so that only the capital ship will use the resources so you get it built as fast as you need it built.

And that is the major problem if you add a drain-resources-as-you-go build system but keep the same resource system.

To further clarify what I'm saying: I'm not arguing for or against having the drain-as-you-go system. I personally think that it has some advantages that the current system doesn't, but it also has some drawbacks that the current doesn't and overall is no better or worse than what we currently have, only different. But if production/research was changed to drain-as-you-go, I am saying that the current resource system would be more of a hinderance considering how much and how many places can keep manufacturing going, and a resource system similar to Supreme Commander's that deals only in rates of increase/decrease would support it much better.

Annatarr, what you appear to be overlooking is that the queue system would be a tool: tools can be misused, and if youd o so you hurt yourself. Yes, the player should really be careful with using it, as overuse would screw him, but no thats not a flaw in the system. A player can choose not to use this tool, after all.

What's the point of spending development time on a tool that would not be used much/to its fullest because it's so easy to break it? I suppose if drain rates were put into the info cards and income rates were more visible it would be easier not to screw yourself. But what do you do when all your asteroids are depleted and basically your only income comes from refinery ships?



So, basically, you're proposing to exchange the slight inconvenience of sometimes having nothing to do while waiting for enough resources to build/research something for another system that would take extra development time, be much more delicate and easy to screw up in and one that would more than likely cause headaches bigger than having to wait a few seconds here and there?

You can say it's up to the players to manage it, but you should know as well as anyone that these stalls *will* inevitably happen to everyone. For me, I'd much rather spend a few seconds twiddling my thumbs waiting than frantically selecting every shipyard I have to cancel all the production queues, then opening the research screen and cancelling all of that so I can get something built

Considering that the crystal and metal resources extracted from a rock are now infinite, it seems insane to have the "Waithawkeyedforthebuttontochangetherightcolor" System. However I am completely sympathetic that at this stage of development it's probably infeasible to overhaul the resource system, although I do think its a massive shame. Perhaps someone might be able to mod it in, although it probably would be a hard ask.

Well, actually no it isn't. Perhaps one of these days I will have the energy to write up an in depth scenario for you and hopefully for the devs to read. I think it would work great and not have any of the negatives you mentioned here. The scenario you outlined isn't what is on most people's minds. At least it is not what I was thinking.



Not in the system I am thinking of and I believe most of the other posters here too. There is no splitting of production, just a way to queue production so the player does not have to hover over an icon until it goes enabled once enough res is available.