It would be very interesting to see Round-Robin algorithm to be used for tasks at the same priority level. Or at least an optional setting to enable this behaviour (per-colonist, perhaps?).
Calibrating task sizes may be difficult at times.
Examples:
- How many crop hexes are optimal to maintain when You have x colonists?
- Should I mine in chunks to balance with smithing?
- This guy has 10 Construction and 10 Growing and others have 0 in both. Why should I wait for him to plant all of the map before building beds for 20 people? Why should he build ALL 20 beds and have no food before starter packs run out?
Round-Robin would prevent task starvation and balance output in all areas. With Round-Robin, game would require less box-ticking and allow more big-planning. Non-blocking, asynchronous task execution in timed chunks (avoid counting when JOY or SLEEP time).
May be undesired for beating fire (unless colonists live in a really hardcore world where they take turns to prevent base extinction).
Round-Robin Algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_scheduling
im guessing on really large maps travel time could become a very large issue.
travel time is always the biggest issue, no matter the map size.
as soon as a pawn aborts a job, walks away to do a one time job with higher priority and
walks back the whole travel time is wasted time .. which grows the farther the job locations are apart.
And yes, if a butcher walks to the far end of the map through knee deep snow to pick up a dead hare,
than he wasted a whole day ..
Is this problem not solved by Restriction Areas? Currently it is a problem in game with or without Round-Robin (which would be optional, so You could still do operations in batches when You want, for example when a cargo pod drops and You want to haul things first or not haul them at all).
When I think about appliance for this feature, I think early game, when there is 9999 things to do and player does not want to prevent themselves from acting until a lesser milestone is achieved. So for example, instead of:
- "I have just built this 3x3 room in the rock, now I can order to build another one... oh wait, harvest time. Let me harvest first...)"
I would prefer:
- "Ok guys, listen up. I want six 8x8 rooms in that rock, five 8x5 fields there, trenches around perimeter, these marble chunks hauled from around perimeter and for God sake, Orange, put Your pants on."
In my opinion, big-planning is one of things that trigger flow in the game. It works for me. And my flow is reduced by self-imposing milestones.
I always micro droppods.
I check whats in them, and I either allow it to get picked up or not,
and if I really want it I go through my workers list and look up who is doing something unimportant and order them to get the stuff