Dupes are very inefficient

[Rainbowdesign]

Hey, You really did a great job with the new content and the performance increase.

Only one thing looks a bit problematic: I am having trouble to make dupes work efficiently.

For me the new version has aggravated the problem.

As example: I had a Supercomputer on priority 9, little water available and i did mop an area with a little water.

Now it did hog up the whole colony for a while because they transported some 3 grams each to the supercomputer.

Also storages should have a certain threshold (preferred setable ingame) before calling for filling, if lets say in a container a miligram of polluted dirt is sublimated it should not cause a dupe to come running to fill it, even if its on high priority.

Composting should not be a skill in the farming area, instead it should be operating, farmer should collect food and such, not operate refinerys.

Building auto sweeper / conveyor systems should require maybe construction 3 as talent not operating, if i make an operator it makes no sense that he does construction errands too. Usually when i am ready to build auto sweepers the dupes are not really ready and i have to wait for them, so it would be better at that point too.

[Hexicube]

4 hours ago, Rainbowdesign said:

Composting should not be a skill in the farming area, instead it should be operating, farmer should collect food and such, not operate refinerys.

Composting is IIRC a Farming/Supplying chore, which is correct since it produces dirt that AFAIK only has uses for farming or ranching.

[Gurgel]

14 minutes ago, Hexicube said:

Composting is IIRC a Farming/Supplying chore, which is correct since it produces dirt that AFAIK only has uses for farming or ranching.

Dirt is also useful for research and cooking (well, what Meep thinks is cooking...)

[suicide commando]

Which is why you should never let Meep near the kitchen.

 

[Gurgel]

5 hours ago, suicide commando said:

Which is why you should never let Meep near the kitchen.

Au contraire, Meep often is my assistant cook, with Stinky being the master cook. How else is he supposed to learn?

[suicide commando]

Remind me that if my dupes ever visit your colony that they bring their own food. And wear hazmat suits at all times.

 

[Rainbowdesign]

On 11/21/2020 at 4:24 PM, Hexicube said:

Composting is IIRC a Farming/Supplying chore, which is correct since it produces dirt that AFAIK only has uses for farming or ranching

I really dont care about this point the

 

On 11/21/2020 at 12:19 PM, Rainbowdesign said:

 

Now it did hog up the whole colony for a while because they transported some 3 grams each to the supercomputer.

This is the main topic.

[suicide commando]

That isn't your dupes fault. Dupes will go to a location where there is material that is needed to be delivered, then pick up all they can within 2-3 tiles or so starting at the nearest to them, this means if there's a row of 3 gram bottles, they will head to the first one, pick it up, pick the 2nd and 3rd up as well, then head to the super computer to deliver it.
If you want them to deliver more at once, make sure the batches they can pick up are larger. 

Dupes are not very smart, they can't be, simply because more intelligent behavior means more coding and more calculations to determine what they should do. This would eat way too much of your computer's computational ability.

As such, one of the ways you can improve their efficiency is to observe their programmed behavior and plan accordingly. For instance, don't set your storage boxes to contain everything and anything. If you do, they will have small batches of various materials in them, so when a dupe goes to fetch said material, he'll find the nearest box, which only holds say 100kg, while he needs 800, there's no other boxes with the material nearby so he picks up the 100 and goes to deliver it. If you set your boxes to contain only 1 kind of material, he wouldn't have to back and forth from one box to another to pick up small batches of material, he'd go to 1 box which has 20 tons of what he needs, so he can grab as much as he can carry/needs and deliver it.
 

A little under the radar improvement I recently noticed ( not sure if this is part of the dlc or a general fix ), while bottle emptiers can't hold more than 200kg of liquid, if there's multiple of them near eachother all set to the same material, a dupe will pick up more than 200kg of liquid if possible to deliver. In the past a single dupe could only deliver to a single emptier, now they can deliver to multiple, so dumping mopped liquids is easier now.

 

[Smife]

On 11/21/2020 at 11:19 AM, Rainbowdesign said:

Only one thing looks a bit problematic: I am having trouble to make dupes work efficiently.

Dupes are people too.

[Ambaire]

14 minutes ago, Smife said:

Dupes are people too.

I have doubts about this. Convincingly programmed biorobots, yes.

[Slvrsrfr]

dupes are hairless mutant-smurf fraggles, it is known. except by them, bless their hearts.

[Hexicube]

2 hours ago, Rainbowdesign said:

I really dont care about this point the

 

This is the main topic.

You listed an issue you had, and I pointed out why it is not an issue. That doesn't detract from dupes being idiots with supply quantities, which should ideally have a minimum, preferably settable on the prefab for modders.

[Rainbowdesign]

On 11/25/2020 at 4:54 PM, suicide commando said:

Dupes are not very smart, they can't be, simply because more intelligent behavior means more coding and more calculations to determine what they should do. This would eat way too much of your computer's computational ability.

I am programmer, as such i tell you if you put more time into code to make it better and more efficient it reacts more intelligent.

 

And thats why i made this thread, i would like klei to put more time into the AI.

[suicide commando]

7 hours ago, Rainbowdesign said:

I am programmer, as such i tell you if you put more time into code to make it better and more efficient it reacts more intelligent.

 

And thats why i made this thread, i would like klei to put more time into the AI.

I am also a programmer, and as such, I tell you that putting more time into the coding of the AI might give some improvements, but it's not the holy grail you're making it out to be. The more 'aware' dupes become of their surroundings and the more calculations are done to improve their performance, the more this will require from the machine the game is running on. Add in the crazy numbers of critters and dupes some people ( myself included ) unleash on their colonies and such extras become major performance hogs.