How to queue construction action

[Eldrane]

Is there any way to tell my construction ship to start building an outpost "when" i've accumulated enough influence to start?
Rather than have to keep looking at the top bar to see how much influence I have and then remember to go back to my ship to begin construction?
I'm probably missing something obvious...

[Ryika]

No, unfortunately that's not possible.

[Eldrane]

Why? It seems such an obvious requirement?

[Meewec]

because it spends the resources when you order the construction

[Professor H. Farnsworth]

None other than paying attention to completion.
You can, however, re-organize your Outliner (the little cogwheel).

[Ryika]

Originally posted by Eldrane:

Why? It seems such an obvious requirement?

Because nothing in Stallaris works like that. You can't queue stuff unless you already have the resources, and then it immediately removes the resources from your pool, so you generally should not queue stuff, unless you have tons of resources lying around anyway.

Quite annoying at times, yes - especially with the new outpost system where you have to build an outpost and only when that outpost is done, you can select the constructor again to give it the order to build te stations in that system. But that's how it works.

[tempest.of.emptiness]

Originally posted by Eldrane:

Why? It seems such an obvious requirement?

Because if you could queue one construction ship to build an outpost as soon as you could afford it, then you would also be able to queue a second construction ship to build an outpost as soon as you could afford it. If you did that, which one would build first? The obvious choice is for them to build outposts in the order that you queued them...but then that means the game has to remember which order you queued them. Then they would have to deal with the question of how many orders you can't afford you'll be allowed to queue (10? 100? 1000?) and also how the game will behave when you reach the limit (will it warn you, or just ignore the order?). Also, if you can queue up spending of influence for outposts before you have it, why not also being able to queue edict spending? And why just influence? Surely it should be possible to queue orders to spend energy and minerals to build or upgrade buildings, or build ships. All those orders would have to be remembered by the game, increasing memory requirements and processing requirements, and the player would needs some way to sort through all those future orders to get some idea of when things will actually happen - which would require a UI addition to allow the user to interact with that information.

Or you could be limited to spending resources only once you have them, which would save a lot of work and make the game run more smoothly.

Edit: Added specific quote to the start of this post so that there is no ambiguity regarding where my response is directed.

[makromate]

Yes, to have a queue for influence spending would be good idea.

[Ryika]

Originally posted by tempest.of.emptiness:

Because if you could queue one construction ship to build an outpost as soon as you could afford it, then you would also be able to queue a second construction ship to build an outpost as soon as you could afford it. If you did that, which one would build first? The obvious choice is for them to build outposts in the order that you queued them...but then that means the game has to remember which order you queued them. Then they would have to deal with the question of how many orders you can't afford you'll be allowed to queue (10? 100? 1000?) and also how the game will behave when you reach the limit (will it warn you, or just ignore the order?). Also, if you can queue up spending of influence for outposts before you have it, why not also being able to queue edict spending? And why just influence? Surely it should be possible to queue orders to spend energy and minerals to build or upgrade buildings, or build ships. All those orders would have to be remembered by the game, increasing memory requirements and processing requirements, and the player would needs some way to sort through all those future orders to get some idea of when things will actually happen - which would require a UI addition to allow the user to interact with that information.

Or you could be limited to spending resources only once you have them, which would save a lot of work and make the game run more smoothly.

Those are silly arguments.

Making the game remember in which order stuff was queued doesn't cost any amount of noticable processing power, it's literally just a few numbers - that's like you're standing in an empty hall that's millions of kilometers wide and high and worrying that if you call your friend to come over the place could get crowded. You could queue thousands of orders and nothing would happen to the game processing capacity.

Aside from that, letting the game decide which ship does the order is not an issue at all. A much simpler solution than the one you went with would be to just check the ships in the order they were built, or in other words, checking them by their index-number in the database. That's how that sort of stuff works anyway, the game periodically checks all entities to figure out if they're still doing fine, and if there are two ships waiting to do the same order, as soon as the order can be done, the first ship that is checked in the update cycle will simply do the job. Before the next ship is even checked, the order is already being worked on, so that other ship would immediately move to the next order. Stellaris even already uses that system, wich Science ships for example. If you send two ships to survey the same system, one of them arrives at the planet, starts surveying, and the other ship notices: "Oh, nothing to do for me here." - and moves to the next planet.

[Entropy0]

Setting aside the fact that this would probably require some serious reworking on the backend and some additional UI for viewing and organizing the queues - I don't think there are any games out there that let you spend resources you don't yet have…

[Ryika]

Originally posted by Entropy0:

Setting aside the fact that this would probably require some serious reworking on the backend and some additional UI for viewing and organizing the queues - I don't think there are any games out there that let you spend resources you don't yet have…

The Warlords Battlecry Series does! :3

Actually, Stellaris does as well. You can queue a ship upgrade, and it will do it once you have the resources for it.

[kbmodigity]

The only thing you can queue for when you dont have the materials to do it yet that I have seen is ship upgrades. Once you have enough minerals for the upgrade it will then take it out of your inventory. Kind of odd that it only works for ships and not station defense platform upgrades.

[kbmodigity]

Originally posted by Ryika:

Actually, Stellaris does as well. You can queue a ship upgrade, and it will do it once you have the resources for it.

Wow,, beat me to it by like 2 seconds,,lol

[tempest.of.emptiness]

Originally posted by Ryika:

Those are silly arguments.

Making the game remember in which order stuff was queued doesn't cost any amount of noticable processing power, it's literally just a few numbers - that's like you're standing in an empty hall that's millions of kilometers wide and high and worrying that if you call your friend to come over the place could get crowded. You could queue thousands of orders and nothing would happen to the game processing capacity.

That hall you are standing in is where all the tasks Stellaris is already processes take place. You know, those tasks that in the late game take so much processing power that the game's performance suffers (to a degree that varies from computer to computer). At the start of a game, adding the ability to queue spending would have little impact, but eventually it would make a bad problem catastrophically worse. The hall is "empty" when you call your friends to come over, but it is going to be filled to overflowing without them and if they show up too then it will only be worse.

Originally posted by Ryika:

Aside from that, letting the game decide which ship does the order is not an issue at all. A much simpler solution than the one you went with would be to just check the ships in the order they were built, or in other words, checking them by their index-number in the database. That's how that sort of stuff works anyway, the game periodically checks all entities to figure out if they're still doing fine, and if there are two ships waiting to do the same order, as soon as the order can be done, the first ship that is checked in the update cycle will simply do the job. Before the next ship is even checked, the order is already being worked on, so that other ship would immediately move to the next order. Stellaris even already uses that system, wich Science ships for example. If you send two ships to survey the same system, one of them arrives at the planet, starts surveying, and the other ship notices: "Oh, nothing to do for me here." - and moves to the next planet.

This does not address the example I was talking about, and unfortuntately does not solve the problem either. You are talking about a situation where two orders to do the same task have been given, and the game resolves which one will be processed and which will be ignored. The end result is one task requested and one task performed, and really there's no wrong choice of which ship performs the task so how the game picks one is unimportant. My example was where two different orders have been given which must compete for the same resources. Neither order will be ignored, but one must be chosen to happen first and the other must be chosen (or defaulted) to wait. Which one starts first and which one must wait can be important to the player.

They could use the method you suggested, which is that the first ship (or building or whatever) in the index order would grab the resources and start the task first, and any other ships waiting on tasks would continue to wait. This is a terrible method of handling this situation which causes problems that would be frustrating for players. Two examples:

A) Imagine a situation in which there is a brief period where resources are unavailable, followed by resources accumulating at a pace which allows all the queued orders to be started before any of them finish. (You might have a mineral income of zero, and then you make a deal to trade your excess energy per month for minerals per month and so your minerals per month increases significantly.) Before resources are available you queue ship D to do task 1, ship B to do task 2, ship C to do task 3, and ship A to do task 4. (The index order of the ships is A,B,C,D. ) Once resources begin to flow in the tasks are initiated in this order:
Ship A begins task 4
Ship B begins task 2
Ship C begins task 3
Ship D begins task 1
Note that the player, because they don't have access to the index order of those ships, has no way of predicting the order those task will begin. There may be some situations where the players doesn't care what order those tasks are started in, in which case this odd order would be fine. Most of the time the player is going to want those tasks to be started in a certain order, and is going to queue them in that order. The player is going to be disappointed when they queue 1,2,3,4 and instead get 4,2,3,1.

B) Imagine a situation in which the time to complete a task is less than the time to accumulate the resources necessary to start a new task. You queue ship A to do task 1, ship B to do task 2, ship A to do task 3, ship C to do task 4, ship A to do task 5, and ship A to do task 6. This is the order the tasks will complete:
Ship A does task 1
Ship A does task 3
Ship A does task 5
Ship A does task 6
Ship B does task 2
Ship C does task 4
Again, most of the time the player is going to want tasks to be done in a certain order, and is going to queue them in that order. Allowing the player to request 1,2,3,4,5,6 and instead giving them 1,3,5,6,2,4 is just a bad design. Also note that, in an extreme case of this situation, the player may continue to queue orders for these ships but only ship A will ever perform any task (because it grabs resources before any other ship gets the option).

The only way to avoid these problems is to keep track of what order the player queues future spending and perform that spending in that order, which then causes the added performance load I was talking about.

[Ryika]

Originally posted by tempest.of.emptiness:

That hall you are standing in is where all the tasks Stellaris is already processes take place. You know, those tasks that in the late game take so much processing power that the game's performance suffers (to a degree that varies from computer to computer). At the start of a game, adding the ability to queue spending would have little impact, but eventually it would make a bad problem catastrophically worse. The hall is "empty" when you call your friends to come over, but it is going to be filled to overflowing without them and if they show up too then it will only be worse.

Your friend will not have a significant impact on the crowing of the place either way. If the place is already crowded, he'll just add a tiny, tiny, tiiiiny bit of additional crowding, completely meaningless. Of course additional crowding should be prevented if it does not provide any function (code optimization), but to use it as an argument against a feature that would be really helpful is still ridiculous and nonsensical.

Originally posted by tempest.of.emptiness:

This does not address the example I was talking about, and unfortuntately does not solve the problem either. You are talking about a situation where two orders to do the same task have been given, and the game resolves which one will be processed and which will be ignored. The end result is one task requested and one task performed, and really there's no wrong choice of which ship performs the task so how the game picks one is unimportant. My example was where two different orders have been given which must compete for the same resources. Neither order will be ignored, but one must be chosen to happen first and the other must be chosen (or defaulted) to wait. Which one starts first and which one must wait can be important to the player.

They could use the method you suggested, which is that the first ship (or building or whatever) in the index order would grab the resources and start the task first, and any other ships waiting on tasks would continue to wait. This is a terrible method of handling this situation which causes problems that would be frustrating for players. Two examples:

A) Imagine a situation in which there is a brief period where resources are unavailable, followed by resources accumulating at a pace which allows all the queued orders to be started before any of them finish. (You might have a mineral income of zero, and then you make a deal to trade your excess energy per month for minerals per month and so your minerals per month increases significantly.) Before resources are available you queue ship D to do task 1, ship B to do task 2, ship C to do task 3, and ship A to do task 4. (The index order of the ships is A,B,C,D. ) Once resources begin to flow in the tasks are initiated in this order:
Ship A begins task 4
Ship B begins task 2
Ship C begins task 3
Ship D begins task 1
Note that the player, because they don't have access to the index order of those ships, has no way of predicting the order those task will begin. There may be some situations where the players doesn't care what order those tasks are started in, in which case this odd order would be fine. Most of the time the player is going to want those tasks to be started in a certain order, and is going to queue them in that order. The player is going to be disappointed when they queue 1,2,3,4 and instead get 4,2,3,1.

B) Imagine a situation in which the time to complete a task is less than the time to accumulate the resources necessary to start a new task. You queue ship A to do task 1, ship B to do task 2, ship A to do task 3, ship C to do task 4, ship A to do task 5, and ship A to do task 6. This is the order the tasks will complete:
Ship A does task 1
Ship A does task 3
Ship A does task 5
Ship A does task 6
Ship B does task 2
Ship C does task 4
Again, most of the time the player is going to want tasks to be done in a certain order, and is going to queue them in that order. Allowing the player to request 1,2,3,4,5,6 and instead giving them 1,3,5,6,2,4 is just a bad design. Also note that, in an extreme case of this situation, the player may continue to queue orders for these ships but only ship A will ever perform any task (because it grabs resources before any other ship gets the option).

The only way to avoid these problems is to keep track of what order the player queues future spending and perform that spending in that order, which then causes the added performance load I was talking about.

All of this is completely meaningless. A player can still choose to manually micromanage everything in the early game where it matters, he is not forced to queue a ton of stuff and then hope that it's done in the right order. Hell, if he wants to, he can do everything manually all game long, just as right now, you can choose to survey the galaxy completely manually - or click a button, accept that it's going to be done somewhat inefficiently and be able to forget about it.

Queuing is similar to automatic surveying, a request mostly for later parts of the game, where such tiny differences simply don't matter anymore. I want those 5 systems over there, and stations in them, so click, click, click, click, click... done. I don't care whether it's done inefficiently when I am floating 30k minerals anyway, the only problem might be influence investment, but it's not difficult to think of solutions for that either, be it careful queuing or an actual programming solution that prevents acquisition of systems that you're not bordering yet.

Overall, you're being ridiculous and try to focus on petty non-issues to argue against a feature that would make a lot of things a lot more enjoyable - and I think you know that, too.

[Chastity the Celibate]

Supreme Commander Forged Alliance let’s you queue things with resources you don’t have.