Micromanage Jobs?

Started by siks, October 24, 2017, 08:31:51 PM

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siks

Hello.

Sorry if this has been suggested before, but I feel like the work priority menu seems a little limiting and even annoying when some actions are hardcoded to take priority before others. On top of that, I don't entirely know how the game functions, so if I'm wrong on some assumptions I've made from playing it then please correct me.

For example, after a raid all my construction workers go around repairing every single wall and sandbag that's damaged in the home area, when a bigger priority would be repair either the turrets or deadfall traps instead, or build new turrets and traps. I can force a colonist to do something but as soon as they're done they run to the opposite end of the map to handle whatever they think is a bigger priority.

For miners, it's often more important to harvest resources like steel or components which could take priority rather than treat it all equally. Another thing that constantly props up, if I prioritise a miner to mine a certain block they'll mine it only for a small period of time. I'm not sure if it's because the mining system is handled far differently to how other jobs work but it's definitely an annoyance having to wait for them to start walking away and prioritise again.

Doctors will rush to heal whoever is in a bed and needs medical attention, they don't factor in who's about to bleed out in an hour. They also don't factor who has infections, but correct me if I'm wrong.
In my games medicine of any kind is always rare and valuable for at least the first year of the start, and I would only spend medicine on infections that I know need the best treatment. This is completely out of my hand since I never know what the doctor will use the medice on, but it seems to be on any cuts first.
In some cases, tending to infections just a few seconds earlier could save a colonists life, and spending the only medicine on healing cuts rather than infections will make an even bigger difference.
It's understandable why cuts are prioritised, but for someone who's in absolutely in no danger or has plenty of time before death, bleeding shouldn't be prioritised before infections.

Tonnes of balancing and calculations wouldn't be necessary for these, if there'd be something along the lines of a job micromanagement tab, where you can create presets of what kind of sub-job is prioritsed, and possibly in what situation it would be prioritised more.

Growers will again grow anything, even if you might need healroot asap because your stocks are low or if you're desparate to fullfill a quest of delivering plants to a colony for a reward.

Hunters just go for anything, likely the nearest animal? Something like a muffalo or a megasloth would be greater priority as they provide a lot more meat and leather which you colony might really need. On top of that I think animals can sometimes leave the map (or maybe they just dissappeared in some cases for me?).

With plant cut you might want wood before anything else, but you still want to get the wild berry bushes or healroot that might be nearby. It's an annoyance if you need one resource and have to cancel every other to prioritise cutting the one you need the most.

Crafting also encompasses lots of different stations, no clue how it determines which should go before which but having to suspend everything seems like a little too much constant manual work.

Hauling is somewhat improved by the 'allow tool' mod which adds a 'Haul urgently' command, which I'm assuming makes haulers prioritise those items first, but I can't say I've seen it work for sure.
Something like that would be nice, but again having to manually set what you want dragged first is constant manual work. When your growers harvest all your crops and suddenly you have thousands of vegetables laying there in your growing area whilst your haulers are dragging everything but that and your cook is on his own hauling 5 fruit/veg at a time all the way back to his stove.

I'm not sure what kind of system could encompass all of this, but a menu that allows you too choose what sub-job is prioritised more with a number scheme could work for a lot of cases. For example in mining you could number 'components', 'steel', 'silver', 'gold', 'jade', 'rock' all of which the player could number from 1 to 6, 6 being biggest priority. You could also create prioritise and deprioritise tools which can select any blocks you've set for mining, with the priority tool it would increase the priority value, and vice versa. Higher priority blocks will be mined before lower ones so you could in theory set an area that you need for defences or hydroponics mined out as priority instead of something for a wedding room.

This is just a suggestion from playing this for 200 hours, lots of stuff cropped up that I got annoyed with but always came back for more.

As a final note I think the ability to remove bionics from a dead body should be a feature. If I remember correctly you can harvest bionics from living people, so someone who was alive 5 seconds ago shouldn't be less able to provide they're lovely bionic limbs than someone who is still alive. For balancing reasons if you don't want players getting ahold of bionics early on, then don't give them to raiders?

Drugs serve the purpose of giving an advantage for the raiders that plenty of players won't allow their colonists to take or won't even have to give them. There's chances of vitaly damaging bionics just like real limbs (I think) so there's plenty of chance that the limb won't be recoverable anyway. Doctors can fail installation at lower skill levels, I think any kind of failure is an instant loss of the limb or at least with one of the degrees of failure at least a couple updates ago. In fact I've come across so few bionic limbs in all my time that I can't say for sure.

Anyway that's my big ol' rant, thanks for reading if you did. Felt I'd share whilst it's still on my mind.

Yoshida Keiji

I agree with you, made a post already:

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=35272.msg361372#msg361372

I have the problem after raids that my constructors go to repair damaged sections first, instead of building blueprint segments to complete the wall again. I want repairs to happen "after" wall completion, not before.

I also agree that the mining needs a sub-job command so that we can prioritize what resources we want first, plus a menu option like "Do until you have X" like we already have with the stove and other crafting benches. But this is still manageable my using the "orders" mine command and dragging a large line/square over the mountains, instead of just clicking the borders and selecting "mine".

About the Doctoring part, it is true that injuries take priorities over Infections, but personally I don't find that an issue. The medical treatment option works fine for me, and I only assign Medicine to the wounds that have a bigger blood icon and only if I think I will be needing that pawn sooner than letting him/her heal with herbs. I have the habit and preference to oversee the hospital myself for reassurance rather than go automatized. Mostly because the doctors see animals/pets equally to people, and same for prisoners. While my top priority is always my colonists over the other two.

I also have issue with growers but easily solvable. The highest skilled grower will sometimes go to low skill level plantations while I would want that one plating heal root. I solve that by just forcing the pawn to the heal root area and done. This means that the plantation zones should have a slide bar like stockpile zones to allow growers based on skill level. So I'm with you on this one too.

Hunters: I think it's best to micro over automatization again. Because leaving hunters by themselves risks predator attacks. Mind you, I always check my perimeter first, before predators get a chance to walk close to my base as a preventive measure. But still sometimes, predators may spawn already close if base is near a border and might be unseen if camouflaged with biome colors. After employing this behavior, I don't recall when was the last time I was victim of predator attack (I don't do killbox, so I'm always safe in this regard).

I don't have problems with cuts.

Haulers, give them priority 1 and set all other tasks lower than that and should be fine. Have trained pets so nobody has to haul, and if in any extreme reason I need hauling the most, I just stop tasking my colonists with other stuff so that hauling and cleaning is all there is left for them to do and I get it done.

I agree that bionics from raiders should be salvageable like their dropped weapons, so long as their bodies hadn't start rotting yet. So in a day or two, we should have this option as the prosthetic doesn't rot.

I also noticed in A17 there is few bionics around, but do show up at early game when its obvious you can't afford them yet, and then...not seen anymore...even with 3 outlander factions around.

Canute

The problem are, you priorieties differ from the priorities the one who created the game. So who is right you or the dev ?
You both are right.
But for this case, the dev made this game highly modable.
You just need to the right mod for the job.
In case of the micromanagment, try WorkTab, you can adjust the priorities for different subjobs.

siks

Yeah I think I'm asking for a little more automation, at a point it if you prioritise and automate everything just the way you like it. It becomes an ant colony rather than a game.

Either way. Regarding doctoring, I realise you can just assign different medacine/healthcare for a colonist, so why not just have a priority tab instead? Rather than for every colonist that gets an infection after being cut up have to manually make sure that they're getting the right type of healthcare, just give it a priority.

For growing that's not solvable when you only have a single grower. In that case I had to remove all the growing areas to keep them from harvesting and growing in areas I didn't want it done in. Restrictions could work, but then you have to keep setting up areas for what you want grown and what you don't.

For hunting I kill any predators that I see and let my colonists hunt freely. I don't really have problems with colonists being attacked either.
Take for example a megasloth spawns on the map, it's winter and food is low and with a larger map your colonist takes a while to travel to any kind of animal on the map. Hunting the megasloth would provide lots of meat, but you've already assigned all the deer that are on the borders of the map for hunting. Now you have to find every single deer and cancel their hunt jobs, at the same time trying to avoid any space ship chunks or blocks you want mined or structures you want deconstructed or bushes/trees cut down.
It's not that this can't be done, it's not that you can't pause the game and manually set everything up without your colony blinking an eye. It's just a lot of manual work that can be avoided.

Hauling is always a problem for me. There's constantly colonists getting legs and arms cut off, walking at half the speed and carrying 20 items at a time. Apart from that every attack or injury of any kind leaves my base riddled in dirt and blood which needs to to assign half my haulers to cleaning before my colonists go berzerk.
There's constantly drop pods landing at the very opposite end of the map, and having your one armed colonists hopping on their leg to the opposite end of the map back and forth takes time. But of course you want that valuable loot that dropped there.
I have a mod where colonists haul items to blueprints, so that adds up the amount of work they have. There's always something to build, and the construction workers can barely handle the blueprints let alone haul to every single one.
Pets are always a pain in the ass, dogs can be useful, but at a point they become something for raiders to shoot at. Unless you completely isolate them from everything and leave them to haul they're not very useful. They also cost food and medical care if you put them into fighting, bleeding over the base, requiring medical attention. They also rarely haul and the food they require probably ends up being far more when you compare to what a very useless colonist with manual labour can haul.

-Canute
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give Work Tab a go and share what I thought of it.
Like I said above, most of the stuff I'm complaining about isn't something you can't manually do. You can pause the game and usually force the colonist to do what you want them to do. A priority system would avoid having to babysit every single one of your colonists.

Yoshida Keiji

I still prefer Infections to be micro manageable, that is because some have a fast immune gain, so at the end, once they surpass the infection progress, you would need to cancel the Infection treatment priority. Which is jus the inverse of the current manual priority. On a game developer perspective, I think it would be a job with little reward, almost a waste of time.

You can forbid plantations. I personally make everybody have a low priority in growing so that if people have nothing to do but cleaning, growing takes priority even in Growing p4 and Cleaning p4, unless of course said pawn cannot grow.

If you are low on food, make them gain starvation on a minor level, instead of feeding whenever hungry, and unforbid the food only when starvation would certainly kick in a mental break. Like Ramadan, I'm not muslim btw.

I find pets useful, I just don't send all of them to the frontline and keep some as a last resort. Even incapacitated pets are useful as decoys, were enemies to breach your walls, they will target those unable to move pets instead of your people. It's fun to see that. I'm currently playing 2 games in Tropical (A17) & (A18 -  Tropical Swamp), so there's enough grass.

Devon_v

I also use mods to extend the control of the work types. Vanilla just does a horrible job of it because it's more concerned with closest pathfinding than anything else, and some of the work types that fall under the same category aren't remotely equivalent. Take "growing" for instance. Anyone can put a seed in a hole and cover it up, but a low skill grower will ruin the harvest. You want to be able to tell everyone with at least a little skill to help with the sowing, but you only want the best farmers to bring in the harvest. Vanilla you have to keep micromanaging who's allowed to "grow" at any given time, when you can just set the correct priorities with a mod. Plenty of other skills have this issue where you absolutely want low skill pawns doing the "unskilled" part of the job, and you don't want them anywhere near the skilled labor. And yes the forced/prioritized work feature would be nice if the pawn didn't constantly try to get back to what they think they should be doing. Especially annoying is when they won't even finish what you told them to do first.

Personally I play smaller populations with a lot ot mods that make the game more hands-on, so micromanaging my pawns isn't really a big deal and kinda makes the game more...interactive...but there are times when the pawns just make stupid choices that are like "this is why I can't leave you guys on speed 3 for a few days to get somethint done."

I understand that upgrading the AI to think deeper would kill the performance, but having the options to set up a smarter "if-then-else" tree for each pawn really helps. It's one of those mods that I can't live without, and I just can't tolerate new alphas until I get the ability to actually give my pawns brains again.

cultist

#6
It's a tough balance, too much player involvement and you end up getting stressed, making mistakes because you can't babysit the AI constanly. Too little, and you're just watching a computer simulation play out.
I feel that Rimworld is currently in the "too much" category, although only slightly. Rimworld tends to distract me a lot more than other games, often taking up huge chunks of time because there's always some small thing I need to attend to or monitor. That suggests to me that the game is asking a bit too much of the player once you have a decent-sized colony.

With that said, the "personal touch" required is what bonds you to your pawns, which is a major part of the small-scale strategy/tower defense experience with meticulous tracking of injuries, mental conditions and relationships.
You may sigh in frustration every time bob walls himself into a corner because godlike construction skill apparently isn't a replacement for common sense, but you're going to miss those moment when bob takes a mortar shell to the face and you have to make the choice between leaving him on the ground to bleed out while his friends watch, or euthanizing him later because of a ruined spine.
Those moments don't mean anything if you have no memories of your pawns, and you won't have any memories if you never need to check what they're doing, in a scenario where the AI is capable of playing the game on its own.

Limdood

Keep in mind, by keeping everything equal, you create consistency.

Consistency is one of the most important things in a game like this that runs on system layered upon system.

you ask the doctor to prioritize a sooner-bleeding-out patient?  but they don't...they rush to the first patient they see when they look for a job, and finish that job.  You'd HATE it if the doctor ran over, grabbed a medicine, ran to the 8-hours-til-dead patient and started treating his first wound, then STOPPED, and ran over to get medicine (because the medicine he was using was reserved so no one grabs it out of his hands), then ran to the 7.5-hours-til-dead patient and started treating, then STOPPED, grabbed meds, ran to the 6-hours-til-dead patient that just limped in...all without ever treating a single wound. 

You ask the game to KNOW that you want turrets built before walls are repaired, or steel mined before stone...what if i need my walls back intact rather than my in-prison turret?  or i desperately need to finish a mountain room to get the beds put in before night?

The issue would be that you would have created all these "special rules" that no one can follow.  It's the same argument as the "i want him to haul something on his way back to bed."  The problem isn't the 8 people out of 10 that want that to happen.  the problem is the 2 people out of 10 who didn't want it to happen but now have no way to turn it off and no way of knowing WHY this is happening.

The work priority system is intentionally simple because it's a system you build your whole colony on.  You need to completely understand it to use it, and that doesn't happen if jobs get prioritized differently from their settings because the game is programmed to GUESS what you want more at a given moment.

Did you know that construction and repair used to be 2 separate jobs in the work priority?  people complained because it was easy to accidentally set one and not the other, so some things didn't get done.  Tynan combined them and, big surprise, people got even angrier.  If you REALLY need, i know i've read about a mod out there that breaks every possible job type apart, allowing them to be prioritized separately (repair and construction, cooking and butchering, hauling and burying, etc.).  I suspect that won't actually fix most people's problems unless they make only the tiniest changes to how it already works though.

TheMeInTeam

Quote from: Yoshida Keiji on October 25, 2017, 08:13:07 AM
I still prefer Infections to be micro manageable, that is because some have a fast immune gain, so at the end, once they surpass the infection progress, you would need to cancel the Infection treatment priority. Which is jus the inverse of the current manual priority. On a game developer perspective, I think it would be a job with little reward, almost a waste of time.

You can forbid plantations. I personally make everybody have a low priority in growing so that if people have nothing to do but cleaning, growing takes priority even in Growing p4 and Cleaning p4, unless of course said pawn cannot grow.

If you are low on food, make them gain starvation on a minor level, instead of feeding whenever hungry, and unforbid the food only when starvation would certainly kick in a mental break. Like Ramadan, I'm not muslim btw.

I find pets useful, I just don't send all of them to the frontline and keep some as a last resort. Even incapacitated pets are useful as decoys, were enemies to breach your walls, they will target those unable to move pets instead of your people. It's fun to see that. I'm currently playing 2 games in Tropical (A17) & (A18 -  Tropical Swamp), so there's enough grass.

With stuff like infections a little UI goes a long way.  Having a graphical representation of tend duration (numbers would be hard to see) over pawns with disease would go a long way; you could see who's coming due for treatment without clicking on pawns, other menus, or watching health status like a hawk.  It'd still be micro intensive, but the real-life time sink would likely be more than halved compared to right now.  Order bedrest, order best doctor to tend when the bar is low.

Coupled with something like allowing tending in the last 2 hours before previous tend expires (you don't get longer duration, just a new tend) this would make the whole process suck so much less while barely changing how the mechanic works right now.

Devon_v

Quote from: Limdood on October 26, 2017, 10:12:27 AM
Did you know that construction and repair used to be 2 separate jobs in the work priority?  people complained because it was easy to accidentally set one and not the other, so some things didn't get done.  Tynan combined them and, big surprise, people got even angrier.  If you REALLY need, i know i've read about a mod out there that breaks every possible job type apart, allowing them to be prioritized separately (repair and construction, cooking and butchering, hauling and burying, etc.).  I suspect that won't actually fix most people's problems unless they make only the tiniest changes to how it already works though.
That mod is night and day vs. Vanilla. It makes such a HUGE difference in being able to get your pawns doing what you actually want them to, especially when you are able to set your unskilled pawns to perform in an assistant's role so that your specialists only have to do the critical tasks, not all the grunt work. It keeps things moving without requiring you to micromanage every interaction to avoid skill 1 pawns performing delicate tasks.

No, it won't help with certian interactions like "I'm going to treat this guy's hang nail because he's closer, all those bullet wounds will probably be fine for an hour or two", but I don't mind micromanaging post combat because it's kinda a big deal event. Day to day common sense though? It would be really nice if pawns had that.

Limdood

Devon, i can't recall the name of the mod and can't get on steam atm to check it.  It sounds like you have it?  could you post the name and maybe a link so anyone interested can check it out...might be relevant to some of the people in this thread.

Millefleur

Fluffy's Work Tab

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=16120.0

I consider Rimworld almost unbearably frustrating without it. (It does take a bit of tinkering to find a set-up that works for you but it's worth it.)

siks

The rules, priorities and the actions colonists take don't need to be changed.
But they also don't need to be hidden within the code, away from the player.
If I find that I don't want my colony go repairing after EVERY raid, if I find that I need some critical stuff built after EVERY raid, if it takes a lot of babysitting, pausing, prioritising and unpausing EVERY time, then an extra little menu tucked away in the deep corner of the UI that lets me do a little switcheroo of the repair and construction is a solution to it all. Almost every job type would be improved so much more with this simple addition. It doesn't need to be in your face or manditory that ends up confusing new players. And this alone shouldn't make the game so much of a simulation that you can sit back and watch your ant colony.

There's lots of stuff that annoys me with Rimworld, taking it all away would would probably reduce some of the fun, it's the micromanage that makes this game what it is. But there are things that blend into that micromanage a little too well, stuff that needs to be rid of. Stuff like a colonist building himself into a corner. You know the funny thing is, I can remember so many times that's happened, but I have no clue who exactly did it even with my most recent colony.

Yoshida Keiji

Quote from: Limdood on October 26, 2017, 10:12:27 AM
[...]

Did you know that construction and repair used to be 2 separate jobs in the work priority?  people complained because it was easy to accidentally set one and not the other, so some things didn't get done.  Tynan combined them and, big surprise, people got even angrier.

[...]


I don't want to turn into headhunting but the people who complained about that should never be listened again.

sadpickle

The most annoying thing for me is when after a raid, when the wounded should walk to a medical bed and STAY THERE because I had bed rest set to priority 1... they go lay down, doctor goes to grab medicine, starts walking back, then they (the patient) inexplicably get OUT of bed to go eat some berries while they bleed out. I have even seen this happen mid-treatment. The only solution is to expressly send them to the bed. It's a lot of needless micro (and post-raid is always crunch time for micro with prisoners and the like), for a minor thing that can have devastating consequences.