Delivering priorities

[The Dark Lord]

I'm just wondering - how are deliverings prioritized? How does Remake decide what's more important? Are there exact numbers for this?
I was thinking it is useful to know what has the lowest priority of everything, because if you see this type of goods being transported you know you have enough serfs (I can imagine it is something like stone --> storehouse). Depending on the priorities I also might have some suggestions, because I often see my serfs don't bring stone to watchtowers unless I have some stone in my storehouse.

[Lewin]

We haven't made specific priorities for stuff like stone to watchtowers because it really depends on your village/play style (keeping in mind singleplayer/special missions need to work too). There are just basic rules like "house -> house/barracks deliveries are better than house -> store deliveries". Also a few deliveries are categorized as high priority which means they will happen before any others, from memory those ones are gold->school, building supplies to construction site/laborer, and food->inn.

Take a look here on line 552 to line 600: (function TKMDeliverQueue.CalculateBid(iO,iD:Integer; KMSerf: TKMUnitSerf):Single;)
http://code.google.com/p/castlesand/sou ... rQueue.pas

That function calculates a priority for delivery from Offer iO to Demand iD using serf KMSerf. Of the result it returns, 1 is the highest priority, infinity is the lowest priority. The code should be fairly self explanatory and there are quite a lot of comments (which start with // and go for the rest of the line). One other thing you might not know is that <> means "not equal to".

If you have any questions or suggestions just ask

[The Dark Lord]

Ah, that's slightly more complicated than I expected. I'll take a look at it when I have more time.
Thanks for your answer.

[Florek]

I'd love to see that solved in the way that it's working in Settlers - leave decision for your owns. It's mostly about coal/gold ore -> gold smith and gold -> schools. It would allow players to optimize cities even better to then gamestyle (tricks related to food delivery for example).

Maybe even allow players to save/load their presettings for each game (or setting them in options menu).

[sado1]

I'm not sure I'd be happy to see something like that. There's already too many things to handle and optimise for me, if this option is in, my skill will be even further away from the best players (selfish reasoning FTW! ) But being serious, this might be a good idea, we need to think about it for a while though.

[The Dark Lord]

Well I like it, it makes your playstyle much more personal. But it will make things way more complicated and people might not like it.

[Florek]

Original values will be very user friendly as well forum will be soon full of solutions and advices for those, who feels that they're a bit lost in those new settings.

Definitely, it will be really useful for those, whos will think a bit what and where is worth picking up by your serfs. I think it will make you able to use a bit less serfs than before. I can imagine few settings that's many players will make like "wood problem", "late game", "full food" and so on, which players will switching depending from situation.

For those whos don't know what we're talking about



Look at transport window.

[The Dark Lord]

Yes that sounds really good actually, I'm becoming enthusiastic.
But the Remake would have to check all settings every X seconds, not sure if that would do any harm (lag and such).

[Bo_]

That would be realy nice, it would resolve problems like this:
Everybody starts eating. => All serfs need to bring food to the inn. => Not enough serfs. => No serfs bringing coal & gold to the gold smelter. => No gold to make more serfs.
Or:
Late baracks. => Serfs bringing weapons to the storehouse. => Serfs won't bring them to the baracks. => Need more serfs. => At the end of pt you will have: Not enough recruits because you needed to make more serfs or less weaopons because they're still in your storehouse.
Last thinkable situation:
2 coal fields, 1 next to gold, an other next to iron.
Coal field for gold gets depleted. => Serfs won't bring any more coal to the gold smelters because it's too far. => Need more serfs. => No gold to make serfs. => No recruits.

So this are realy annoying situations that often happen IMO, it could help us out there, and for players who think it's too complicated it won't make such a big difference in other situations, you'll just need more serfs.

It could make it useful to store stone again, you just give it the last priority.

[Krom]

I don't like this idea for being too much micro-management. Besides, after reading Bo "problems" it feels like existing KaM mechanisms are already doing the job is used right.

MrBo examples are kind of unfair:
- Eating, if you dont bring any food you will loose much more citizens from hunger than be able to train. Also, gold is already a higher priority. Also, you can block inn input in a matter of 2 clicks with existing deliveries.
- Weapons, just block warfare input in Store.
- Coal, usually there's plenty of coal, but if you happen to miss a few bags - set Smithies coal distribution to 2 and watch extra coal goes to Metallurgists.

P.S. This screen dates from 1995 or so. How is it made in modern Settlers, do they have that manual control over delivery priorities?

[Florek]

It's working in same way in S3 and S4 (2001, newer than KaM!). Further games aren't Settlers.

[Bo_]

Food: Well your serfs will still bring food, maybe a bit less, but at least you will be able to solve the problem. You will have trained enough serfs before they actualy starve to death.
When you loose 2 or 5 citizens it's easy to train them back, but if you didn't make gold for 5 min it will take the whole game to recover.
Weapons: That's what we do, but at some point your smithies won't produce anything more because they already have 5 weapons, then it's better to have 10 weapons in storehouse and 5 in baracks than 5 weapons in baracks.
Coal: Well yes there's plenty of coal, but on some maps you have a big distance between gold and iron, usualy your coal field for gold runs out first.
Then the problem is not that you don't have enough coal, but that serfs will always find a task faster than walking across the city to bring coal to gold smelters unless you have way more serfs.
But what do you need to make more serfs? Gold.

[Lewin]

Late baracks. => Serfs bringing weapons to the storehouse. => Serfs won't bring them to the baracks. => Need more serfs. => At the end of pt you will have: Not enough recruits because you needed to make more serfs or less weaopons because they're still in your storehouse.

That's been fixed since r4001, weapons from store => barracks was treated as a "low priority" compared to most other deliveries because taking things from the storehouse is not as good as taking them directly from a house. It's now treated as normal priority.

As for the other examples, I don't really see how this system would help. Sure you could force your serfs to keep taking gold, but if there is extra work for your serfs then some part of your economy must suffer unless you train more. If you are balancing the number of serfs you have to just the right amount so none are idle but stuff is still delivered, then when an extra load of work appears (e.g. weapons from store->barracks) some other deliveries must be ignored while that new job is completed.

I think this game has enough micromanagement, it's already very overwhelming for new players. If anything we want to make the game more accessible to people who haven't played it before. Currently those people really struggle with the game, and throwing in more and more complex economic management features just makes it harder. I mean we could make it so you can override serfs individual orders and tell them where to walk, but that's just too much micromanagement.

But maybe someone can explain how the interface works and how you would use it while playing to convince me.

[vojta_f]

It would be great if it was set up taking away the main thing
e.g.
I need gold, coal - set the gold and coal

[Bo_]

It's not because it's possible to do more micro-management that a person has to do it.
It's like when you change the amount of coal your serfs will bring to gold. You can do it, but you don't have to.
So for new players I don't see how this could be more overwhelming.
Again, it's up to you.