planet automation

[Schöffe]

is the planet automation now good?

[Ryika]

Let me put it this way, if planet automation was your date, it would let you pay for the dinner and then order an uber for one person only.

[Dracon]

Yeah I played a game just to test it out, automating every planet

Its nice that it pulls from your normal empire stocks instead of having to set up recurring resource allocation and all that jazz.
However, it absolutely DRAINS your economy
I was playing my fav Devouring Swarm empire and my energy and food were so far in the red it was crazy, before even getting to begin devouring my first adjacent empire
I was doing much better before, handling each worlds needs
So yeah I think ima leave the planet automation alone, or at bare minimum at best.

The problem is, the automation doesnt seem to work at all to try and mitigate deficits that your empire winds up with. Even setting up worlds properly for things like Energy and food.
It just makes the most random decisions in building the planet up.

TL;DR Needs Work

[HappySack]

It works like it always has, not well and not that badly but needs supervision.

Just never do sector automation.

[The Grand Mugwump]

It's...okay. I definitely recommend assigning the planet designation yourself for what you want the planet to specialize in rather than leaving it to the AI to choose (default). Otherwise it will do what Dracon described above.

[Frenky]

One of the most annoying things is how it will almost always prefer maintenance drones when you play as hive mind/machine intelligence, no matter how many amenities the planet has
This means your recently colonized planets are producing nothing until you get alot of pops on them, and even than not as much as they could/should

[HappySack]

Originally posted by Frenky:

One of the most annoying things is how it will almost always prefer maintenance drones when you play as hive mind/machine intelligence, no matter how many amenities the planet has
This means your recently colonized planets are producing nothing until you get alot of pops on them, and even than not as much as they could/should

Did you enable the amenities option? it will unemploy any amenities related job whenever possible and when amenities are above 0.

[Persony Person]

Aside from when it used to spam out Clone vats when your food income was poor and that you could hard cheese it with the combined stockpile, the old automation was never that bad in the first place.

It's mostly the same as before anyway, only more customisable and no extra stockpile that you could dump thousands of energy credits into, to get tons of districts/buildings that cost minerals, and vice versa.

That change alone makes it a lot better.

[Dracon]

Originally posted by The Grand Mugwump:

It's...okay. I definitely recommend assigning the planet designation yourself for what you want the planet to specialize in rather than leaving it to the AI to choose (default). Otherwise it will do what Dracon described above.

Oh no, I manually selected planet designation and the automation still handled it quite badly lol.
Perhaps they will figure it out someday, but for now, im largely not using it.

[Tomos]

I played an automation heavy Machine Intelligence empire yesterday. I did a few bits of 'hands on' construction and building decisions, but I largely left my empire to automation 99% of the time.

It will spend resources if they are available, you aren't in the red, and you need new jobs for pops. It has no concept of storing though so each planet you have set up like this will try to build new things at the earliest convenience.

While this leaves me with a few issues, it's really efficient at economic timings if you set your planets up as specific designations. I had to intervene a couple of times to fix going into the red a few times, but otherwise by year 90 I had by far (not counting fallen empires) the largest fleet in the galaxy, the best tech, the most land, and vassalized the entire galaxy. Stopped in year 200 with +3K to each resource generation.

I will say it's a bit gung ho on strategic resources. I've found planets filled with crystal plants that should not have been there.

In the end, I appreciate the automation as it let me manage 22 worlds without going mad trying to plan them out by hand.

[Ryika]

Originally posted by Tomos:

Stopped in year 200 with +3K to each resource generation.

That's... not a good thing. Having 3k basic resource overproduction is about as inefficient as it gets.

[Tomos]

Originally posted by Ryika:

Originally posted by Tomos:

Stopped in year 200 with +3K to each resource generation.

That's... not a good thing. Having 3k basic resource overproduction is about as inefficient as it gets.

I had some fairly huge stockpiles and occasionally drained them down, only to fill up again pretty quickly. It only got to that point after extreme investment into the late game where I was making the numbers go up because I could. Had something like 2500 bots toiling away.

Edit: It should be noted the 3K figures are super late game when it stops mattering. Early on I was always low on resources as it was getting spent efficiently. It follows a curve where at the start, your population/planet count is lower and you'll build up a little resources. Then when you get a few more planets automation wants to spend more than you have. The final stage is when you start producing more than the automation wants to spend, usually from lack of pops to fill jobs or just filling everything out. I could have fielded a ridiculous fleet to put that surplus to more use but I didn't feel like it at the time.

[Ryika]

Originally posted by Tomos:

Edit: It should be noted the 3K figures are super late game when it stops mattering.

It never stops mattering though, at least not if you're on an appropriate crisis difficulty setting. Any overproduction you have could be converted into tech for more repeatables, or alloys and worker jobs for more fleet.

[Daan-B]

Planet automation is ''good'' if you know how to use it. The most important part is the automation settings that you can acces by clicking the cog symbol. You should only have a select few of the automation settings on, and you should never activate planet automation before defining the planets designation.

Planet automation is something that should only be done if and when you have a lot of planets, and you should always keep a few planets under direct control. It also comes with complications. For instance if you have both pop growth and assembly then you can get the situation where two pops are spawned at the same time or in quick succesion, causing unemployement on the planet.

Planet automation won't make your empire more efficient (unless you don't have time to manage your economy due to wars or multiplayer), but if you minimize the damage it is a very convenient tool at your disposal. It can also potentially increase your enjoyment if you dislike pausing the game, managing your economy or if you prefer to play on a faster speed.

[Chthonic Guardian]

Originally posted by Ryika:

Let me put it this way, if planet automation was your date, it would let you pay for the dinner and then order an uber for one person only.

While posting on TikTok: "Look at this loser I am out with!"

[Daan-B]

Originally posted by Dracon:

Yeah I played a game just to test it out, automating every planet

Its nice that it pulls from your normal empire stocks instead of having to set up recurring resource allocation and all that jazz.
However, it absolutely DRAINS your economy
I was playing my fav Devouring Swarm empire and my energy and food were so far in the red it was crazy, before even getting to begin devouring my first adjacent empire
I was doing much better before, handling each worlds needs
So yeah I think ima leave the planet automation alone, or at bare minimum at best.

The problem is, the automation doesnt seem to work at all to try and mitigate deficits that your empire winds up with. Even setting up worlds properly for things like Energy and food.
It just makes the most random decisions in building the planet up.

TL;DR Needs Work

Planetary automation has settings, one of which is "prevent deficit construction". When this setting is turned on (on by default) It will not construct anything that would introduce or increase a resource deficit (either by the buildings upkeep or the upkeep of the job, according to the tooltip). The problem is, is that if you have an energy deficit it will thus refuse to build any district or building with an energy upkeep, so it won't (or atleast shouldn't) build anything at all.

I'm wondering, did you suffer from a lot of unemployment during your playthrough?

You can find the automation settings by clicking on the cog icon.