Dilvish wrote:There are a couple additional complications to the issue for FO though -- one is the (somewhat recently imposed) penalty for switching focus (which at least no longer kicks in just from temporarily switching focus to check things like this); the AI has some modifications to try minimizing such penalties (the basic algorithm is susceptible to churn), but I think a human can still do better at that task.
Certainly. But, said human finds the task very tedious late in the game, so said human would prefer to delegate it, especially since doing better than the AI under the typical late-game circumstances (large, monolithic empire) requires far more calculation than is fun. Early in the game, when every RP counts, the user should be able to, and should, manage things manually.
Dilvish wrote:Another issue is when the empire is broken into multiple Resource Groups due to incomplete supply connections somewhere (such as due to blockade)-- there is no clearcut and comprehensive decision possible about when this should lead to planets being set to Research (which doesn't need supply connection), though of course some kind of rule of thumb can be employed.
In my experience, either it's a handful of planets (which can be managed manually, letting the bulk of the empire be managed automatically), or a temporary state of affairs. Either way, the user can always assume direct control.
MatGB wrote:A single choice made on conquest that only needs to be revisited if you pick research and then get to the end of the tech line isn't, to me, micromanagement. It's a fairly straightforward decision for me based on whether there's a gas giant generator in the system and what the species is best at. Once done, unless there are other planets in system to conquer, or that species is new to me and I want to colonise with it, I'm basically done, time to move on.
If you conquer an empire whose species are good at Production and bad at Research, wouldn't it make sense to flip some of your planets with species that are worse at Production and/or better at Research over to Research? Your heuristic generally works, but there are many factors influencing a given planet's trade-off between RP and PP, including species, presence of specials, gas giants and asteroid belts in the same system (as well as their development), and neighbors. Decisions made at the time of colonization or conquest aren't necessarily optimal even score turns later.
MatGB wrote:For me, the only micromanagement problem that annoys me every game is the late game "find all the research focusesed worlds and make most of them industry" thing that you need to do once you've got most of the key techs, the Objects menu helps with that but beyond that...
I find that I have to switch empire-wide priorities a bit more than once per game. And, it's tedious to find
which planets are optimal to switch.
MatGB wrote:There is, now a "preferred" focus for each species and they'll default to that on conquest, at some point I plan to go through all of them and redefine several of them but it works fine. There isn't, currently, an Empire preferred choice and I think in the late game I'd prefer it if all conquered planets get Industry by default.
Combining this with the recent changes in the current test releases that set most meters, including supply and output, to zero on conquest and it works in a nice balanced way for my preference.
I don't follow what this has to do with my proposal.
MatGB wrote:Focus settings are there to reduce/elminate the need to micromanage in the way that, for example MOO2 needed you to assign each population unit to a task, and making a single choice per system is, to my mind, part of the game, it's such an easy one to make I don't think automating it would ad anything, especially for me, and would also detract from the game in my mind, you're supposed to be making strategic decisions about stuff.
I can see the benefits of a helper that manages focus settings over time, but given the penalties for changing focus setting are fairly severe (and that focus can be used for other things like defence, stargate, PsyDom, etc) I don't think it'd be a good thing for the game, focus is part of the strategic choice, it's not like you need a build queue per planet for basic level structures like in a lot of other games of this sort.
For vast, vast majority of planets, vast, vast majority of the time, the optimal choice is trivial after a few basic calculations. However, a human player trying to shift, say, some of the Production over to Research has to figure out which of the Production-focused planets would gain the most RP per PP lost if switched to Research. This is tedious, especially late in the game, when there are many planets. Choosing which planets in the interior of the empire are focused on what is not even a tactical decision, much less strategic. It's arithmetic.
Krikkitone wrote:ie Target X if this world had X as its Focus / current Target Y (Y as focus)
So if I want to switch Industry to Research
I see planets ordered by which would give me the best Research gain/Production loss for switching.
Then I just switch the top planets.
I like this idea; just getting a list sorted by the marginal rate of transformation would solve 70% of the problem.