How do you set up priorities?

Started by Jan2607, April 05, 2015, 05:58:41 AM

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Jan2607

I have now 9 colonists and I use manuel priorities to give them tasks.
Really important tasks like firefighting, medics and patient are number 1 priority, number 2 is what they have their best skills, number 3 are tasks they need to do, but not very important and number 4 is what they can do when they are bored.

How do you handle that? Do you have one colonist for one task - one for farming, one for mining for example? Or are they all rounder who do everything in order to their highest priorities?

Cimm0

Medical/fire/prison stuff naturally goes first because of the time-related nature of such jobs.

Cooks, crafters and artists get 1 for their specific skills but otherwise the colonists get the following priorities:

1) Hauling - get those items inside quickly so they won't lose quality. I started to give hauling 1 after there was always so much growing to do that people simply didn't have time to haul stuff --> lots of items losing HP and therefore value outside before getting hauled to beacon area. Also, those raider bodies aren't going to walk into the freezer/butcher table by themselves!

2) Growing - when everything is hauled into the base, there's plenty of time to concentrate on this. There's always growing to do but there's not that much hauling -> after a few minutes this will become the main priority, sort of, because everything is hauled to correct places.

3) Building/repairing - keeping good care of your base is a natural #3 option for me. Most of the stuff is made of stone so there's no real hurry to repair everything ASAP.

iame6162013

I go with the "get all them shit done now!" strategy, I only choose special peeps for work on tables... (or growing when that becomes I full time job)
Linus Torvalds: "But it clearly is the only right way. The fact that everybody else does it some other way only means that they are wrong"
Robert J. Hanlon: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Benny the Icepick

In the early game, it's really tough - when you have only three people to get everything done, I find myself overriding the scheduled jobs and forcing colonists to prioritize specific tasks. 

As the colony grows, though, I can specialize.  I try to have one or two people who prioritize cooking over everything else (and no one else allowed to cook), and the same for doctoring.  If I have particularly useless colonists - either incapable of many tasks or not very skilled in many tasks - they tend to be my dedicated haulers, cleaners, and growers.

Towards the later game, my colonists develop expertise in their particular skills, which is good and bad - the things they do they do VERY well, but they then become more or less invaluable, and it's incredibly painful to lose one, as no one else comes close to their aptitude.

Silvador

I specialise my colonists.

I discovered that there are two levels to the prioritisation. If all skills are set to the same priority level, the tasks are handled in order they are listed from left to right. But giving a task a higher number elevates it above those tasks on its left with a lower number. So, if all tasks are set to 4, giving the task furthest to the left a 3 is literally pointless as it changes nothing. However, setting a task on the right to 3 will force it to be checked first, above the level 4's. It's easiest to think of the system in a 3D sense, in which there are four layers. The top layer is checked for tasks set to it, from left to right, in that order. Next is the layer below that, once again from left to right, then the third and finally fourth layer, left to right. The list is essentially the default priority, predetermined by design/programming. The number allocation serves to change the order, rather than make it from scratch, and essentially moves a task to the "front of the line".

I made the mistake of assuming that the order the tasks are listed in was simply a "list of tasks" and not actually meant to be a set order. But the order in which the tasks are listed is purposeful and works as a priority order in and of itself.

I, personally, try to have colonists designated to specific tasks as soon as I have enough colonnists to permit it. Cooking, Medicine, Growing. Number of colonists permitting, I also prefer to allocate colonists specifically to the mining, construction, hauling and even "soldier" tasks. Of course, since I elevate their respective tasks to 3 or 2, I also move firefighting and patient up to the same number, so that it isn't behind whatever "right task" the colonists is specilising in.