Lua idea - budgeting

[RogerN]

This is an idea I had, and I don't know if it's even possible with Lua... but I think it could reduce the micromanagement of building econ considerably and add a lot to the strategy element of the game.

Basically, I would like to have a widget/system which allows you to manage the stuff you're building by using a slider to devote a fixed percentage of your income to building more econ. The widget would track how much metal/energy was being spent on war vs. econ, and temporarily pause construction projects when needed in order to stay close to your budget. For example, I might set the slider to 30% econ, and the widget would pause my construction vehicles building solars or fusions periodically to make sure that at least 70% of my metal is going toward more tanks.

This way you can specify your budget strategy directly instead of trying to find the optimum number of builders to put on each task in order to meet your goals.

Is something like that even possible?

[Otherside]

There is a widget in CA that does something vaguely similar to this.

Its called priority and it gives Labs/constructors or specific buildings a priority of what should be finished first.

So if you want to finish a fusion first but do not want to have to pause or cancel other projects just set priority to high and it will direct the majority of resources to the fusion.

It has 3 levels of priority High/Normal/Low

High is very useful on commanders and cons when expanding or wanting to rush defenses.

Its not exactly what your looking for i know but its similar and could be used as an idea for the widget you want.

[manolo_]

nice, could u post a link to it? i wanna try it out

[YHCIR]

OPs idea sounds like what CA has but better but more automated (and much more complicated).

Maybe someone could just hack together CAs widget and some script that just flips med/low/high priority based on the users selection on the slidebar.
e.g. 50% eco 50% defensive would set all tank/offensive builders to low and set some eco to high, some defensive to high.

Would also be cool if all units constructing mex were automatically set to high priority until they finish building, then revert.

[TheFatController]

I initially wrote smart nanos so it would assist building with nanos only with excess resources if idle by using bursts, it ended up sending something rediculous like 2000 commands a minute with 15 nano turrets and 1 factory so I scrapped it.

Something like this would be better done in the engine.

[Tribulexrenamed]

nice, could u post a link to it? i wanna try it out

[Otherside]

its somewere in CA go find it :p

[Beherith]

Heres a great way of implementing this. Its how I do it.
A lab has the buildpower of a basic con unit. If you assign two cons to your lab and have two making wind or adv solars in a large grid, then you have a 3:2 ratio of econ and army. After tekking use separate nanos for lab and eco and just queue up lots of shit for eco.

[CarRepairer]

Heres a great way of implementing this. Its how I do it.
A lab has the buildpower of a basic con unit. If you assign two cons to your lab and have two making wind or adv solars in a large grid, then you have a 3:2 ratio of econ and army. After tekking use separate nanos for lab and eco and just queue up lots of shit for eco.

Or, instead of doing all that fun math just set the priority to high for whatever you want to build fastest gg lern2play.

[yanom]

How about a lieutenant unit? it uses an AI program to give orders to whatever units are attached to it

[hoijui]

i see two main issues:
1. the one TheFatController mentoned: you have to make sure not to pause/unpause every frame -> reduce commands
2. you had to manually define or automatically evaluate what is eco and what is war.

then there may be problems with the GUI to use, but i have no idea about that.