Duplicant task selection in Occupational upgrade

[Kasuha]

After some experience playing the Occupational upgrade, I noticed that if a duplicant with occupation runs out of his own job opportunities, he goes doing literally anything else, often helping other duplicants with occupation instead of doing jobs that are not covered by other duplicants because they're a bit further away. That then requires either selecting a duplicant to cover it, or (more often) using strict prioritization to get these tasks done which is in my opinion a lot of unnecessary micromanagement.

 

My proposal is, there should be four kinds of job from the perspective of a duplicant:

1/ jobs that correspond to their occupation (e.g. building a ladder piece)

2/ jobs that directly support their occupation (e.g. delivering material for that ladder piece, or digging the tile under it, but not other deliveries or digs; similarly delivering materials for whatever machine the duplicant's job is to operate or eventually even operating a machine generating power for it)

3/ other jobs that don't have any duplicant with a corresponding occupation

4/ other jobs that have a duplicant with a corresponding occupation

A duplicant with occupation should select jobs in this exact order. If he can build, he should build. If all his building orders are blocked by another action (delivery/digging) he should perform that before everything else. Then he should do things that no other duplicant has specialization for, and only after that he should go helping others in their selected jobs.

When a duplicant doesn't have occupation set, the first two do not apply to him but he should do the last two in that order again - run errands nobody else bothers with first, and helping those with a job last.

Also, when a duplicant is not available (e.g. on medbed) the game should consider it as one less duplicant of that occupation available, eventually rendering his jobs as the class 3, jobs that don't have a duplicant with corresponding occupation. That would help other duplicant taking care of his tasks before helping each other again.

 

I believe this could alleviate need to use strict priorities all around the place, especially in early game when the player doesn't have enough duplicants to cover all kinds of tasks.

 

[Ipun]

This.

Spoke my mind out.