No Order Queue Love in 7.0

[EnVenta]

The order queue has been and continues to be the single worst failing of this game, even 7 major versions in.

The concept is simple: You have a ship with a queue of orders -- maybe trade plans, maybe exploration vectors, maybe placing hardware. The list can be quite long. If you want to add a stop midway or even at the beginning of the queue, you simply add the order and drag it where it's supposed go. Right?

Egosoft has failed yet again to give us anything but a rickety linked list system that you have to click an order individually to move it. And it gets worse: you never know which order you're actually moving because the UI presents no information except some generic name that could be the same name as the other 3 dozen orders in the same queue. You have to visually track the order as you click it all the way to top and pray you didn't scramble something in your tediously-laid trade plans.

Trade plans completely fall apart if even 1 order is out of sequence, since you can't sell what you didn't buy thanks to Egosoft's horrific and embarrassing implementation of a queue system. What's worse is this is such an easy problem to solve. Here it is, 7.0, and these Egoshafts still expect us to click an order 36 times per ship. Unbelievable.

Nice light diffraction effects though. Glad that feature was prioritized above other less useful things.

[aY227]

You can now ctrl-click to move order to top.

(also I don't think drag&drop is easy or even possible)

[EnVenta]

And if I want to add an order midway? How is drag and drop impossible?

[aY227]

Originally posted by tigris:

And if I want to add an order midway? How is drag and drop impossible?

You can't add in middle, I know that and Im not defending egosoft now. UX is terrible.
But it is as it is.

And why impossible? Just my guess - not a programmer - but it's a custom engine so something that looks easy may actually be super hard.

[lalala]

Well, I have said in other posts often times, they have absolutelly no sense for such things. They are bassically the opposite of factorio devs.

[EnVenta]

Mousedown event, mouseup event, x and y coordinates. Drag and drop is really pretty easy to build from scratch, which no one would ever do since it's a very common UI tool that has been done thousands of times in different tech stacks by 2024.

There's really no excuse to force players to click and visually track a single homogeneously-named item across N nodes to shift its ordinal 1 frustrating space at a time. I could see this being a rushed, incomplete feature in the early development, but it's 7.0. Egoshaft spent more time with their stupid diffraction lighting than they did on this glaring and loudly protested issue.

[Venerable_Sin]

Shhh, they want to be lazy, have a fun job and retire rich. Your messing it up

[DarthMalak]

Originally posted by aY227:

Originally posted by tigris:

And if I want to add an order midway? How is drag and drop impossible?

You can't add in middle, I know that and Im not defending egosoft now. UX is terrible.
But it is as it is.

And why impossible? Just my guess - not a programmer - but it's a custom engine so something that looks easy may actually be super hard.

Everything is hard for these 'devs' and half of them are volunteer modders... Their spaghetti engine doesn't allow for anything. But yeh.. Their attitude is what is more hurtful.. Just the hard refusal to improve anything.

[db48x]

In practice reordering a ship’s orders just doesn’t come up very much. Most of your ships will be given a behavior, and the behavior will give them orders. AutoMiners, AutoTraders, ships assigned to stations or to formations. >90% of your ships just don't need that level of attention. If you find yourself adjusting order lists frequently, perhaps you should consider playing the game a different way. You can just let them place the satellites down in an inefficient order. The result will be the same and it will waste less of your time and attention.

[Donauwelle]

Originally posted by db48x:

>90% of your ships just don't need that level of attention

100% True, but the 10% who need the attention are the ones the player is manually handeling aka Spotlighted aka important.
It drags into Fleet Command aswell, also part of the "egosofts AI is the...." post,
some of the nearly 100 pages dedicated to commands...

Originally posted by db48x:

If you find yourself adjusting order lists frequently, perhaps you should consider playing the game a different way. You can just let them place the satellites down in an inefficient order. The result will be the same and it will waste less of your time and attention.

Classic example why this CAN be anoying,
Mapping in Earlygame.
New DLC/ Big Patch, new game, new map and your sending out your first trashy explorers to map and drop sats.
You CAN use the amazingly inefficient auto-discovery feature, wait ages for the sector to be fully mapped while your explorer will explore some locations 5X times in the most inefficient way possible and THEN go arround once more with the explorer and drop Sats.

OR

You give some orders to swoop arround the sector in growing circles, efficiently mapping the sector in no time and que sats whenever you found a stations worth a sat.

Now even the "efficient" mapping takes time and your mostlikely just keep playing while passivly mapping, so you will sooner or later think to yourself "damn i wish i could easiely que/switch commands to get a sat on this spot without wiggle-woggle with my commands for ages or wait till the sector is mapped and then drop sats


Clearing a Sector from enemys works the same, you give orders to kill 5 stations to ships and go afk/play/whatever. Every now and then you find a sole K/I you want to que into the list without having it ontop or re-do the que.


Imho this happens to me every new savegame,
i just find "auto explore" infuriating inefficient and doing it efficient/manually lets you run into the "need to que a sat in between" problem.
Que ontop is nice, drag and drop would be MUCH better.

[EnVenta]

Originally posted by db48x:

In practice reordering a ship’s orders just doesn’t come up very much. Most of your ships will be given a behavior, and the behavior will give them orders. AutoMiners, AutoTraders, ships assigned to stations or to formations. >90% of your ships just don't need that level of attention. If you find yourself adjusting order lists frequently, perhaps you should consider playing the game a different way. You can just let them place the satellites down in an inefficient order. The result will be the same and it will waste less of your time and attention.

Hand-crafted trade routes outperform autotrade margins by many orders of magnitude. Further, a strategy that supplies internally sourced goods to premium markets will be even more lucrative to operate. One of the core tenets of this game is trade and commerce. I don't think it's too much to ask to be able to manage ships that participate in this tenet in a sane way, even if it's for just 1 L cargo ship.

Yes, most ships will have some auto orders, but deep traders and scouts will have many, many orders queued up. In the case of traders, if even one of these orders is out of sequence, the entire run is botched since each stop either fills or empties valuable cargo space.

It is literally and figuratively a deal-breaker when a cargo hauler spends 2 hours making stops from a queue with nothing to show for it because a buy order was placed in the wrong sequence, filling the hold, and making every stop after it useless. This mistake can be made with alarming ease when clicking these arrows next to a non-descript Execute Trade label. What's even worse is the order you're trying to re-sequence moves every time you click it. It's just amateurish and embarrassing.

Add into the mix ad hoc supply requests -- either for missions or internal construction -- and stand-in boarding operations, and you have a quite regular need to juggle these rather delicate sequences of orders. Maybe you're satisfied with relying on sub-optimal, even abysmal auto behaviors, but suggesting that others dumb their game down to fit your low bar is pretty laughable.

[db48x]

Yea, so don’t do that. Don’t reorder the stops. It’s tedious and error–prone, so don’t do it. You should play the game in such a way that this level of micro is not necessary. Who cares if a particular ship is idle half of the time? It’s so easy to print money in this game that you shouldn’t bother to notice that your ships are not efficient. Use Repeat Orders to keep a wharf and shipyard full and you will make bank no matter what. Own the wharf and shipyard yourself and you will make even more.

[EnVenta]

Originally posted by db48x:

Yea, so don’t do that. Don’t reorder the stops. It’s tedious and error–prone, so don’t do it. You should play the game in such a way that this level of micro is not necessary. Who cares if a particular ship is idle half of the time? It’s so easy to print money in this game that you shouldn’t bother to notice that your ships are not efficient. Use Repeat Orders to keep a wharf and shipyard full and you will make bank no matter what. Own the wharf and shipyard yourself and you will make even more.

Being sloppy and lazy might be well and fine once one has a grand network of stations of ships. But how does one get there? How does one acquire the resources to build this 'money printing' empire?

You micromanage missions. You micromanage trade. You micromanage exploration.
You micromanage technology. Micromanagement is also a core fundamental that you must master and complete before you can drunkenly dismiss everything as "don't do that" under the wash of automated opulence and blind arrogance. And to be honest, some automated empire that prints money while you run it in your sleep sounds boring and less-than-challenging. Why even play?

For the rest of us who want to play a game that engages us more than the 187th syndication rerun of MASH, we'd like some syntactical sugar for our endeavors. That is, when I've fought hard to earn just enough cash to buy a L freighter and some cargo, I want every single hop to count. There is no "oh just ignore the inefficiency because the rest of the game is so boring I can barely stand to play anymore."

Yea, so don't do that. The game doesn't have mature automation, so don't rely on it. It's brittle and error prone. So don't do that. You should play the game or write your own automation to play it for you. Suggesting that others settle for your bland sense of accomplishment by creating an empire of waste while standing idly by and saying nothing about low hanging fruit is toxic. Don't judge others' playstyles by forcing your boring, mindless, inadequate-Egoshaft-AI-reliant style at them.