Prerelease 3.116 (Release Candidate 3, Bugfixes, Manufactory balance change)

[RCIX]

Yes.  Now it there is literally no economic reason to not use the auto-manufactory management functionality (that is on by default).

I quite frequently run into a situation where I need (or want) to manually manage them.  Often it looks something like this:

I have 100,000 crystal.
I have 200,000 metal.
I am gaining resources at -500 crystal / +100 metal due to some crazy turret production or something, usually a short term spike in costs.

If I don't manually enable crystal manufactuaries, I will run out of crystal and stall.  If I run the crystal manufactuaries on from the start, I can avoid that situation.

Though if I did have enough manufactuaries to produce 500 crystal to counteract the drain it wouldn't be important (would need over 60), but manufactuaries also have a cost, and I can manually advert meltdown with considerably less than that.

You won't stall, that's the whole point.  Assuming that you have enough crystal manufactories (I like to have around 30 of each, but sometimes need as much as 45 of one), then they will kick in once you are sub 1,000 stored crystal, and will start draining your metal. 

Assuming that your turrets or whatever are finished before you run out of crystal AND metal from that process, then your economy will go back to normal and the crystal manufactories will turn themselves off.  If you do wind up running out of both resources, then you'll stall out and all the manufactories will turn themselves off to avoid making the situation worse (but nothing would have saved that from stalling out on the production side, in that scenario -- you'd need to adjust your expenses instead of your production).

There's absolutely no reason to carry a big ongoing balance of metal or crystal, since you're able to adjust both income and expenses as needed.  In terms of absolute gross metal + crystal income, your income is best by always letting the sort of algorithm employed by the auto-manufactory management, rather than trying to use manufactories preemptively to keep a large balance of one resource or the other.  It turns them on at the last second in order to avoid using them at all if at all possible, since they do come at a cost, basically, which is something exceedingly hard to do by hand.

But if i do that, unless i build a zillion manufactories (admittedly a possibility now), then the conversion isn't enough. I manually use about 5 or 6 so that they act as a shim in my production when i'm doing massive drains of one or the other, and having them turn on at redline would simply cause the drain to be less (at which point it would be too late). Perhaps a solution is to double or triple both the consumption and production of them so that each is worth more, then you don't need (like Doddler said) 60 manufactories to deal with a measly -500 drain.

[Buttons840]

There's no lack of space, so you can build as many as you need without trouble.

I think we can all agree though, that nobody would ever build just one manufactory.

So I support the idea of increasing there cost and their conversion rate by 3 to 5 X.

[x4000]

I'm really not thinking it would be good to increase their rate, as that would really hurt their granularity and lead to a lot of wasteful situations.  Right now it's pretty well balanced for what you would want, and I think that the cost to benefit ratio all around is also pretty fair.

[Buttons840]

I'm really not thinking it would be good to increase their rate, as that would really hurt their granularity and lead to a lot of wasteful situations.  Right now it's pretty well balanced for what you would want, and I think that the cost to benefit ratio all around is also pretty fair.

Fair enough.  Like I said, it's not as though we'll run out of room.

Also, it's 9 EST and I'm ready for my 3.117 fixes.  (See what's you done by spoiling us.  We're so demanding!)

[x4000]

Yeah, that's part of why I reduced the energy cost to nothing, too -- keeps the costs lower, and the granularity still there.

[x4000]

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