stacking construction ships?

[henri51]

How does queuing construction ships work when there are no free construction ships? For example, if I order a mining station to be built somewhere, I can queue the "next" construction ship to do it? What does this mean? Does it mean when the closest one becomes free? Or the first free one wherever it is? Or the one who can get there first? Or something else?

Henri

[AminMaalouf]

I think it is the first free. If you have several constructions queued then I would assume that the program works through the file that lists building entries. The last is mere a guess.

[invaderzim]

I think it adds the queues the order to one of your construction ships. It would be great if you could have a space on the expansion planner to manage all your upcoming construction jobs.

[Plant]

They choose the nearest construction ship with no regard to current missions. I don't know if they choose one that is free or not. This can result in one construction ship with a queue of orders. So be careful.

[henri51]

It would be ideal if it chose the constructor that has the shortest total time (finishing present job +travel time to the new job), but this may be asking a bit much. At least it should not be random, or not choose a constructor that already has a queue.

The almost-best case would be easy to program if the queue were listed separately by the program (possibly in order of request), and when a constructor became free, it would check the queue to see if there is a request anywhere; if another constructor is already on the way and its time to travel is longer, the newly freed constructor would take over the mission and the newly freed constructor would check the queue to see if there is another mission waiting.This would almost ensure the shortest waiting time, but one would have to be careful about queuing missions far away from the capital planet, which could have all of one's constructors spending most of their time sailing to far-away places to fulfill queued requests.

It is easy to see that optimizing all this could require complex programming, but it would be nice to at least know how it works so that one can use it efficiently (for example by avoiding the queuing of jobs that are too far away).But I think that I could live with the "first-free" constructor taking on the queued job that has been waiting the longest time (i.e. the queued jobs are stacked and the first free constructor takes the job on the bottom of the stack).

Henri

[FerretStyle]

It'll pick one that's not doing anything if one is available. Otherwise it just adds the order to the nearest one.

Best to micromanage construction ships in this situation. It is a real pain when you get beat to a bunch of mining locations because all of your jobs got queued to a single ship.

[paShadoWn]

ORIGINAL: FerretStyle
Best to micromanage construction ships in this situation. It is a real pain when you get beat to a bunch of mining locations because all of your jobs got queued to a single ship.

[:D] when you get beat to a bunch of mining locations that arent worthless you move its owner up in "next victim" list.