Macromanaging Fleet Production

[corfe83]

As a long-time fan of AI War, I first want to say I love seeing the improvements that go into each version, and I think the game keeps getting better and better. It's one of the few games I've actually repeatedly come back to over many years, and because of this, is already going down as one of my favorite games of all time. Absolutely fantastic job on this game, and I'm really happy to see another expansion out for it!

I have a suggestion - I wish I could macro-manage fleet production in the game. Personally in *most* AI War sessions, I build up one "uber" space dock - I queue up max number of each scout, and one of every other unit (or slightly more than one for cheap/high cap ships), and set the whole queue on permanent repeat. If I need faster production, I add more engineers.

This works pretty well up to a point, but breaks down as I get more and more ARS's and marks of units unlocked - after some time, I hit a limit on the number of unit types allowed in the queue, and I have to build a second space dock (usually I try to split production by mark level, rebalancing in some orderly fashion if I unlock more ships and start needing 3 or more docks). I often set a similar rally point for each dock (blob of death, at least on defense), and in rare cases if one of them is idle and not the other, I will manually rebalance engineers between all of these production buildings A bigger issue besides managing buildings, engineers and queues is that I often wish I could maintain a balanced fleet for combat (roughly equal cap proportion of each ship), and if there is one unit type that typically ends up with zero cap after a raid, or if I just unlocked a new ship type, I'd prefer production to focus on restoring what I consider a good fleet ratio *before* building ships I already have a lot of, without having to babysit my various space docks.

I wish there was a way to tell space docks and starship constructors to automatically produce units (perhaps by a checkmark in CTRL that would make idle docks do this, or alternatively have a "special" item you put in the queue called "auto build a unit", and whenever it comes up it builds one automatically chosen unit). By default, it would always build the unit with the lowest proportion of its cap built. So if I have only Mk1 ships unlocked and 40% cap Mk1 fighters, 60% Mk1 bombers and 20% Mk1 Cruisers and 100% Mk1 scouts built right now, it would build only cruisers (until they got to 50% cap), then start building fighters and cruisers (roughly alternating) until both were at or above 60% cap, then start building all 3 in similar numbers until they all hit full ship cap. If I go on a raid where I lose *all* my fighters and only 20% cap of my other ships, production would focus on rebuilding a bunch of fighters, until their numbers caught up (again, proportional to cap for each ship type).

In my wildest dreams for such a feature , there would be a separate UI tab to choose weights of relative priority for different unit types and mark levels. For example, to tell it to try to maintain double the cap proportion of fighters compared to other ships, or (max) the cap of spire rail clusters (basically always build these first if under cap), or only .0001 the cap of (insert some ship you hate), or work on Mk2 ships twice as often as Mk1 ships for any ship type. Of course, unless the weight was *actually* set to 0 on any category, auto build would eventually produce full ship caps of every unlocked ship type and Mk level. I'd love to watch combat happen in the game, and go in there and tweak my ideal fleet ratio as the campaign progresses.

If we had this feature, the only reason you would *need* more than one space dock / starship constructor, is if you want to split your troops into multiple rally points (i.e. multiple front lines, or a planet off on its own somewhere with its own small production capability and fleet), which makes a lot more logical sense to me than building a new space dock when you unlock a new ship type (because your queue was too long to support it).

Does anyone else wish there were macro-level fleet production controls in this game?

[tadrinth]

You could suspend resource spending on your primary control group unless resources greater than 200k, and then have a secondary space dock in a control group which suspends spending unless resources greater than 190k which builds just the ships you tend to lose a lot (ie fighters).  I believe if you use warp gates and set the warp gates to a control group, you can funnel both docks into a single control group.  That's not quite what you want, it rebuilds ALL of your damage-soaking ships to cap first before it builds anything else, and if you have excess resources it'll just attempt to build everything, but it's sort of an approximation. 

You can also queue up more of particular ship types at a dock, ie something like build 10 fighters, then 2 bombers, then 1 missile frigate.  That will make the space dock mostly focus on rebuilding fighters. 

I do agree that a UI overhaul which made it possible to build an unlimited variety of ships from a single dock would be nice, or at least enough that your average player didn't usually run into it. 

[Kahuna]

I wish there was a way to tell space docks and starship constructors to automatically produce units

[Kahuna]

or at least enough that your average player didn't usually run into it.

Do people capture every single ARS in the galaxy?
EDIT: Well if you have CSGs enabled you kind of have to. But is that enough bonus ships to make you run into this problem? Or do people also have multiple homeworlds?

[corfe83]

You could suspend resource spending on your primary control group unless resources greater than 200k, and then have a secondary space dock in a control group which suspends spending unless resources greater than 190k which builds just the ships you tend to lose a lot (ie fighters).  I believe if you use warp gates and set the warp gates to a control group, you can funnel both docks into a single control group.  That's not quite what you want, it rebuilds ALL of your damage-soaking ships to cap first before it builds anything else, and if you have excess resources it'll just attempt to build everything, but it's sort of an approximation. 

You can also queue up more of particular ship types at a dock, ie something like build 10 fighters, then 2 bombers, then 1 missile frigate.  That will make the space dock mostly focus on rebuilding fighters. 

I do agree that a UI overhaul which made it possible to build an unlimited variety of ships from a single dock would be nice, or at least enough that your average player didn't usually run into it.

Thanks tadrinth, that's a creative solution, and yes it's not EXACTLY the feature I want, it's close enough that I'm going to try it out in-game and see how it feels.

[corfe83]

or at least enough that your average player didn't usually run into it.

Do people capture every single ARS in the galaxy?
EDIT: Well if you have CSGs enabled you kind of have to. But is that enough bonus ships to make you run into this problem? Or do people also have multiple homeworlds?

I play with CSGs enabled, so that might be part of why I run into this, yes. I hit this in every game I make any significant progress on, though perhaps it's related to my playstyle of spending most of my knowledge on fleet ships, hacking backup designs, and hacking mk IV factories (which results in producing all 4 mark level of ships from main space dock).

Actually, I just tested, and you can reproduce the issue right from the start without getting a single ARS - start a new game, and unlock all the CHEAPEST (in terms of knowledge) starship techs at the very beginning of the game. Now try to queue them all up in your starship constructor - you'll be a couple of queue slots short to include both mk levels of the scout starship and the riot control starship (the limit is apparently 16).

Edit: A better real-world scenario is if you hack an advanced factory, queue up Mk 1-4 fighters, bombers, cruisers and your initial bonus ship at the dock, that's your limit of 16 already - you won't have any room in your queue to produce scouts from the same dock (or the ships from the first ARS you capture).

There's also the other more interesting part of the problem (unbalanced fleet composition if below max cap). Tadrinth had a neat solution which might mostly accomplish it in many situations (I'll need to test it in a game).

[Salamander]

When I had captured several ARSes, hacked many core fabricators, as well as downloading designs and having the advanced factory in my latest finished game, I just built more space docks back at home (3 in total) and queued up 1 of each ship on repeat queues like Kahuna shows earlier here. The engineers will assist each dock as needed when a unit dies and needs to be replaced and I used the gates to shuttle the production closer to the front automatically.

Once the first dock was full I then built the 2nd, filled it up and then the 3rd.

[keith.lamothe]

Periodically I get an idea for production macromanagement in AIW but every time I run into a fairly big obstacle: its usefulness would be exceeded by the complexity of the interface

That said, I think it would be fine to add a control-group-CTRLS toggle for "build lowest-population ships first" or something like that.

With that you could, for example:

1) Select a space dock.
2) Assign it to control group 0
3) Populate its build queue, hit loop
4) Open the CTRLS window, go to the control-group tab
5) select control group 0
6) check the "build lowest-population ships first" toggle, hit save

And whenever that dock finishes a ship and asks the question "which ship do I build next?" the game would see the toggle and override the default "the next item in the queue" response with some logic that would check the %-of-cap of each item in the queue and pick that one (which could be the one it just finished).

Don't expect massive precision from this, as it's probably not going to be able to reliably count ships in production by other docks, but I'm guessing it'd still be fairly useful even so, without adding a ton to the interface.

[corfe83]

1) Select a space dock.
2) Assign it to control group 0
3) Populate its build queue, hit loop
4) Open the CTRLS window, go to the control-group tab
5) select control group 0
6) check the "build lowest-population ships first" toggle, hit save

And whenever that dock finishes a ship and asks the question "which ship do I build next?" the game would see the toggle and override the default "the next item in the queue" response with some logic that would check the %-of-cap of each item in the queue and pick that one (which could be the one it just finished).

I think this would be close enough to what I want to be quite useful - in addition, can we also get rid of the 16-item queue size limit? I would propose making it unlimited, or if that's difficult, I think a new limit of 64 (or higher) would suffice.

[keith.lamothe]

in addition, can we also get rid of the 16-item queue size limit? I would propose making it unlimited, or if that's difficult, I think a new limit of 64 (or higher) would suffice.

I'm very limited in what I can do with that 2-d array of GameButton objects in the lower-left corner.  But if I can manage a UI overhaul things like that would be possible, yes.

[corfe83]

in addition, can we also get rid of the 16-item queue size limit? I would propose making it unlimited, or if that's difficult, I think a new limit of 64 (or higher) would suffice.

I'm very limited in what I can do with that 2-d array of GameButton objects in the lower-left corner.  But if I can manage a UI overhaul things like that would be possible, yes.

I heard UI changes were one of the major goals for 8.0 - I'll look forward to the UI changes even more then!

[Hearteater]

I'll pull my notes together this week. In the meantime, this mantis suggestion would be nice.

[keith.lamothe]

I'll pull my notes together this week. In the meantime, this mantis suggestion would be nice.

My current planned schedule for AIW updates is:

- leave it alone for a week after the 8.0 official (so until August 25th or so) to make it less likely there are any critical fixes that will warrant a quick official patch

- spend two weeks (so until September 8th) cleaning up some of the bugs I didn't want to touch while Chris was responding to bugs from the unity-upgrade and linux port.  And address other bugs that come up, that can be addressed without introducing much instability.  Probably also do some small-ish balance changes like buffing widely-regarded-as-UP-bonus-types.

- let that sit a few days, then do an official release of those as 8.1, and let that sit for a few days to shake out any critical bugs

- then around September 15th start the actual UI overhaul, and basically just keep at that, with mild bugfixing and balancing on the side, until it's ready for an 8.2 official.

So having the notes soonish for discussion will help, but you're not racing with the coder in this case


Edit: and yes, that does sound like a good suggestion to avoid "the turrets accidentally my economy" issues

[Vyndicu]

Periodically I get an idea for production macromanagement in AIW but every time I run into a fairly big obstacle: its usefulness would be exceeded by the complexity of the interface

That said, I think it would be fine to add a control-group-CTRLS toggle for "build lowest-population ships first" or something like that.

With that you could, for example:

1) Select a space dock.
2) Assign it to control group 0
3) Populate its build queue, hit loop
4) Open the CTRLS window, go to the control-group tab
5) select control group 0
6) check the "build lowest-population ships first" toggle, hit save

And whenever that dock finishes a ship and asks the question "which ship do I build next?" the game would see the toggle and override the default "the next item in the queue" response with some logic that would check the %-of-cap of each item in the queue and pick that one (which could be the one it just finished).

Don't expect massive precision from this, as it's probably not going to be able to reliably count ships in production by other docks, but I'm guessing it'd still be fairly useful even so, without adding a ton to the interface.

Personally I don't want to put docks in control groups to use this option if possible at all.

My control groups priorities are already kind of overloaded with respect to micromanaging. I usually go like this, group 1 is champion if any, group 2 is the main blob of death fleet, group 3 is Golem and other similar superweapons, and 4 - 0 for whatever I need like science mk 2, since they don't fly through AI controlled to find knowledge on a breach system or in case of nomad isolated from other yet to be deplete knowledge systems. Sometime I would hotkey MSD separately not always. Spirecraft Penetrator almost always get their own group especially Zero. If I plan to do lot of survey then that is another group number in use. Another control priority is Experiment Engineers since they can teleport anywhere before AI catch them usually. Various transport, vanilla, spirecraft and assault, likely will have their own control groups as well.

In total I have at least 11 control group priorities depending on the game setup. The total doesn't count having yet another two control group for docks, normal and merc.

[corfe83]

I'll pull my notes together this week. In the meantime, this mantis suggestion would be nice.

I've added a comment (slight tweak to this issue), and also added my support to this issue. I'm a big fan of removing any unnecessary micromanagement to let the game be about the more interesting strategic problems.