I've grown increasingly annoyed by the sliders in the Controls menu --- the "autobuild engineers, rebuilders, and matter converters" and "Energy Buffer to Maintain" controls. Right now, in the 8HW game I just started, I'm trying to set up the number of engineers per homeworld based on what I want each to build. For example, because I have 3 construction yards on one world, I'd like 9 each of MkI and MkII engineers [1] to always be present. Unfortunately, due to the multi-HW explosion in the cap for these ships, one pixel (judged by one "increment" of movement of the slider) on 1280 x 1024 does not correspond to one engineer. Instead, I can only choose to build 8 or 10 engineers, no matter how carefully I try to move my mouse. In general, I can typically get the slider to the desired value after several tedious attempts of moving my mouse back and forth, though most of the time releasing the mouse button moves the slider just enough to require me to start all over again. And to be clear, I've experienced this problem, though less severely, on 1HW games as well.
I realize that I can just build the engineers directly, rather than setting up the autobuild, but I'd like to "set it and forget it," especially if that particular world comes under attack (extremely important on frontier worlds, where I want to ensure enough engineers to quickly rebuild / repair my defenses).
In my view, replacing these sliders by a textbox would be preferable, as it allows the Player to exert explicit control over the autobuilding system without having to futz with a bad slider. The main point that I see to the slider is to prevent someone from inputting a value outside the available engineers / energy / etc., but I think this could be easily solved with a tooltip stating the maximum valid value (e.g., the number of remaining engineers / energy / etc.), potentially with a warning that values above (or below) that range would result in unpredictable behavior. And I presume that some input validation is already present for the other textboxes to ensure that, e.g., negative values are not input, so carrying over the same logic to these new textboxes should not be difficult (though I could certainly be wrong).
I checked Mantis and didn't see any reports about this, so I figured I'd post a thread to see if anybody thought the same way, or if anybody had other ideas about how to handle this situation.
[1] I realize that this is likely not optimal (due to diminishing returns on engineers per construction yard), but I haven't seen any specific description of what the optimal engineers-to-shipyard ratio is, so I just default to 3 per mark per yard.
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