[Suggestion] Update job priority system with some distance factor

[GZackham]

This situation has always been disturbing and annoying:

Dup A is in a digging site, dup B is in base cooking. I expect A to 1.dig, 2.grab the material falling on the ground, 3.use this material to build some ladders and bricks, 4. continue to push further. I expect B to just stay at the original place, grab ingredient for himself since water pump and cooking ingredients are right close to him. Any other dups are banned from cooking job except dup B, who has the highest priority to cook. Cooking job s are in queue.

Here is what really happens most of the time: dup A digs one block, then runs all the way to the other side of the base, pump some water for cooking, then runs all way back to the digging site. For dup B, even if he has the highest priority to cook and there is job in queue, he runs away from cooking job to some very wired location, grab some material, then run to the digging site, put those material on a building command but without building it, then runs back to cooking job.

After experienced too many of such situation, I tried to pause on each step of above procedure to check their job priority. Here is how to explain: After digging one block, dup A checks the job priority. Since in all supplying jobs, "supply for building" is the lowest, so he goes back to the base supplying for cooking. During this job, dup B finish his current cooking job. Even though "supply for cooking" should be his highest priority, but this job has been assigned to dup A. Cooking job is not available at this moment for him. So he checks the job list, and find the job "supply for building". He try to find the nearest material available, and the nearest one for him is on the opposite direction from the building site. He goes for the  job, grab and put the material on the building to be done, and check his job list again. Now supply for cooking has been done, he has the highest priority to cook so he goes back to cook.

This situation can continuously happen in the entire cycle so that almost no actual job is done today. 

I really thinks there should be some mechanic to "lock dups down on their position", without almost randomly run from this side to the other. A possible solution could be introducing a distance factor in the priority system. For example, jobs in 5m of a dup has no penalty on priority. From this distance, every 5 meters reduce the priority by 1. The reduction is capped at 10. This is not dynamically calculated(or it will be too difficult to program and resource-costing ) but only checked when assigning the next job.

And another small thing is that dups should be more intelligent when trying to fetch the required material for jobs. A simple strategy is comparing the one closest to the job location with the one closest to themselves.

One more thing: can you give some power bonus to human power generator when dup is skillful at machinery? It is annoying to have the engineer operating on the generator and someone else occupied the crusher.

[BaZERGer]

Are you using the "Enable Proximity" setting for priorities?

[PIRATE D KING]

1 hour ago, BaZERGer said:

Are you using the "Enable Proximity" setting for priorities?

i just realised that even existed....after cycle 1500...i am not sure if i am happy or i should kill someone xD

i suggest for this option to be activated by default.