Your thoughts on new priority/job system?

[Tobruk]

Do you feel like it was overhauled in a good or a bad way?

[PhailRaptor]

Did they ever even discuss this in the stream?  Granted, I was watching it at 2x speed because I had to go to work, but, I don't think they ever mentioned the change.

What did they even do?

[Grimgaw]

They showed it on stream but told us to figure it out ourselves.

[Kasuha]

On the first glance it looks like Rimworld's system. Maybe there's difference, I didn't get far in playing the new update yet but on the first sight I'm a bit disappointed about it. Maybe it'll work, maybe it'll lead players to screw up their colonies even harder.

And when I built a compactor dupes started storing things around it and completely ignored my sweep orders both at default and raised priority. It was late, I didn't have much time for experimenting. Maybe I need to set the compactor to sweep only mode?

Also I did not notice the priorities window has its own button now (is it there before I researched jobs desk? I did not notice) and my learning -4 dupe was always first to occupy the research table until I notice that researching that very first item is taking way too long and manually pulled him away every time he tried it again. It was a tough battle.

[Flocc]

I think it's similar to RimWorlds manual priorities, which is great! You have much more flexibility. Now you can set errand priority for a dupe (Disabled, Low, Standard, High, Very High) - it used to be only Disabled/Enabled. Dupe will do highest priority jobs first (if there are two or more with same highest priority dupe will pick job in that new order Art > Tidy > Build > Cook > Operate > Farm > Supply > Care > Dig > Ranch > Research > Combat)

[TheScaryOne]

They said in stream that priorities trump urgency, which doesn't make me feel good about the new system. If I set urgency 9 to dig out a dupe's head from a tile, or to construct some ladders, I want ANYONE to go do it, not for my scientists to keep sciencing, and the farmers to keep farming, until the architect can swing by to do the job.

[Flocc]

It should be the other way - like it used to be, but with more customization. Most important should be urgency of the job. Then new prioritize system is only to determine dupe to do that job in more flexible/customizable way.

edit: Well i think it's bugged anyways. I just set all my dupes to Disabled for all kind of work. Picked two dupes and set them Build errand to Standard, and Dig errand to Low. I placed 10 Sculptures to build (urgency 5) and ordered to dig two places (urgency 9). One dupe started to dig, and 5 dupes started to build Scupltures (only two dupes were allowed to build and dig, rest of the colony Disabled for everything)

The way i would like this system to work is:

1. Urgency determines which task is first to be done (as it used to be)

2. Priorities determines which dupe to do that task (Very High priority first from left to right, then High priority from left to right, then Standard priority from left to right, and then Low priority from left to right)

[pnambic]

"Urgency will always be overridden by Duplicant Priorities" (says the "Urgency"-tool's tooltip)

I tested that, and it's true. Set up a dig at Urgency 9 and build a few tiles (in the ground) at urgency 1. If any Dupe has "Build" at a higher priority than "Dig", they will start to supply, and dig(!), and then build the tiles. The fact that "Build" comes before "Dig" in the default (left to right) priority hierarchy does not have the same effect, it's about individual priorities.

I do not understand what problem is solved by that behaviour. I find it completely unintuitive. A workaround would be not to use the priorities except to forbid certain dupes from doing certain errands, but from what I read above, that doesn't work anymore, either (and you'd have to remember to manually allow them to do their jobs, because job-configured priorities are high, not default).

Is there any communication from the devs as to what they are trying to achieve with this?

(Edit: OK, there are two types of "dig" errands. "dig-dig" and "construction-dig", which is in category "build". So my surprise at the digging happening for urgency 1 build tasks was misplaced. I wonder, though, what would happen if I were to try building something in Abyssalite, and my only qualified Miner were Unconstructive.)

[Amara313]

7 hours ago, Kasuha said:

On the first glance it looks like Rimworld's system. Maybe there's difference, I didn't get far in playing the new update yet but on the first sight I'm a bit disappointed about it. Maybe it'll work, maybe it'll lead players to screw up their colonies even harder.

And when I built a compactor dupes started storing things around it and completely ignored my sweep orders both at default and raised priority. It was late, I didn't have much time for experimenting. Maybe I need to set the compactor to sweep only mode?

Also I did not notice the priorities window has its own button now (is it there before I researched jobs desk? I did not notice) and my learning -4 dupe was always first to occupy the research table until I notice that researching that very first item is taking way too long and manually pulled him away every time he tried it again. It was a tough battle.

I think that's a bug.  I had dupes idling instead of sweeping.  I'll reserve judgement until we get a patch on that one.  In the meantime, I moved my storage out of the base and stuck it on priority 1.  then instead of idling they sweep stuff.  A little annoying that they won't obey the sweep orders, but again, I'm pretty sure that's a bug. 

[Kabrute]

sweep orders go only to sweep only compactors now for some reason

[LoadStar81]

Well, it looks like the latest hot patch should fix sweeping; hopefully that should alleviate concerns some people are having with the new priority system.

As far as priority orders taking primacy over urgency orders, this makes sense to me as someone who's played a lot of Rimworld, but I understand that it may take a change in thinking from people who have far more playtime in ONI than I do.  It may be best to think of Primacy and Urgency as a grid that your dupes will check when deciding what tasks to tackle next.  A given dupe will first look at the job they have been told is their highest priority: if build has been labelled as that particular dupe's only highest priority job, that dupe will look for any open/unreserved build tasks before moving on to another priority level.  Once they see that a given type of job has open tasks, they will then look for the most urgent task within that priority.  So yes, a "dedicated builder" will handle a build task with urgency 1 over a dig task with urgency 9.

What I like about this change is that it means your dupes can now be told to handle tasks they have skills in before they handle tasks they are less skilled at, without having to tell them to never do tasks they are unskilled at.  I want my dupe with the highest build skill to focus on building, my dupe with the highest research skill to focus on researching, and my dupe with the highest carry capacity to focus on supply jobs, while still being able to pitch in elsewhere when their primary job isn't needed.  The new priority/urgency method allows me to do just that.

[Giltirn]

I have hundreds of hours in Rimworld and find the system in that game very intuitive. If the new ONI system is similar that makes me happy. However I think that there needs to be a mechanism for manually telling a dupe to go do a specific job *right now*, which would alleviate any issues with emergency situations.

Edit: I've spent an hour or so with it and I like it more than the old system. However the major floor is as I alluded to above: we desperately need a way to make a particular job have utmost priority for everyone, regardless of their task. For example, both of my outhouses became blocked up, but because tidy was a lower priority than all my dupe's main jobs, the outhouses simply went unemptied despite me increasing their priority to 9. Fortunately I caught it and temporarily upped the tidy priority for all my dupes. Similarly my algae deoxydizer went several cycles without operation because it was not provided with algae, despite it's priority-8 setting. Perhaps we could optionally place certain tasks into a global priority pool to make sure they are done by any nearby dupe regardless of their job setup.

[pnambic]

I like the Rimworld system; I liked the previous (OC-256131 and pre-OC) ONI systems, too. Both make sense, but both are very different:

Rimworld has its focus on the Colonists. Your primary means of control is to make decisions about someones purpose in life, and they then take their pick from the tasks you set for the whole colony. In emergencies, you take direct control of colonists.

ONI had its focus on the tasks; you explicitly set task priorities, and the tasks were then distributed to dupes in accordance with their abilities (which you could expand or constrict through the errand matrix and job training). In emergencies, you prioritised mitigating tasks accordingly.

With the new system, ONI feels undecided between these approaches to me. If it wants to be Rimworld, it needs finer control over tasks set by buildings (as in Rimworld: "cook this until you have 25, start again when there's less than 10 left"), and direct control for emergencies. The whole "Urgency" mechanic can be removed, then. If it wants to remain ONI (as far as priorities are concerned), Urgency needs to trump Dupe priorities. As it is now, if I have a ton of build errands up, and my one exploring miner digs herself into a hole, I must either change someone else's priorities, or cancel the builds, or nobody will dig her out, even if it's priority 9, even if I tell them manually to go there.

[Giltirn]

2 minutes ago, pnambic said:

I like the Rimworld system; I liked the previous (OC-256131 and pre-OC) ONI systems, too. Both make sense, but both are very different:

Rimworld has its focus on the Colonists. Your primary means of control is to make decisions about someones purpose in life, and they then take their pick from the tasks you set for the whole colony. In emergencies, you take direct control of colonists.

ONI had its focus on the tasks; you explicitly set task priorities, and the tasks were then distributed to dupes in accordance with their abilities (which you could expand or constrict through the errand matrix and job training). In emergencies, you prioritised mitigating tasks accordingly.

With the new system, ONI feels undecided between these approaches to me. If it wants to be Rimworld, it needs finer control over tasks set by buildings (as inRimworld: "cook this until you have 25, start again when there's less than 10 left"), and direct control for emergencies. The whole "Urgency" mechanic can then be removed, then. If it wants to remain ONI (as far as priorities are concerned), Urgency needs to trump Dupe priorities.

I don't think there needs to be any real distinction between the two games: for the sake of prioritizing jobs they both have the same problem to solve. However in Rimworld I never feel as if I have no control over my colony, whereas in ONI it is a constant battle to get the dupes to do what they should. I think the issue is that ONI has a lot more jobs that need regular and periodic maintenance for the colony to function properly, and any form of job-based prioritization is going to have these tasks falling behind unless you have a dupe that prioritizes that particular category. This is why I feel that we need to be able to move certain tasks outside of the job-based priority into the old global priority.

[goboking]

I think the system would work better if it was inverted so task errands took priority over job priorities.  The way it's currently implemented is too rigid.  Here are some examples illustrating why I think so.

Say I've got a dupe who I want to handle building and machine operating.  I want things built first, so that gets the higher job priority.  There isn't an endless stream of construction projects, so when she finishes building whatever I needed built she'll then go tune up power generators or run the oil refinery.  But now she'll ignore the tune ups and refinery because she wants to start building the blue prints I've laid out using a task urgency of 1.  If the system were inverted she'd literally never touch a blue print with an urgency of 1.

Yes, there are workarounds for this problem, but those involve me scrapping the use of urgency 1 to lay blueprints.  Already the system is more restrictive than it needs to be.

Here's another example.  I'm accustomed to giving everyone the ability to perform the Tidy job.  I set my storage compactors to a low urgency of 2.  This means they'll tidy up the base if and only if they'd otherwise be idle.  Under this new system I'm faced with the choice of either setting Tidy to a lower priority than I use for my dupes' main jobs and risk outhouses going uncleaned or I set the Tidy to a higher priority and take on another dupe dedicated solely to cleaning.

Again there is a workaround to the problem this current setup creates, but again the solution forces my hand in a way that's avoidable if the system is inverted to one where urgency trumps priority.

[chemie]

Assuming dups still retain the skills after reaching 100% on the job training, don't you add a bunch or micro as you have to keep adding that job to the errand priority tasks?

So Dup1 is set to only dig until he gets trained on building too?

[pnambic]

1 hour ago, chemie said:

So Dup1 is set to only dig until he gets trained on building too?

Correct. Except that you can actually set them to "mostly dig" or "mostly build", however, if you do that, they will do any outstanding "mostly" errand, regardless of urgency, before even considering the other one.

[mircomars]

On 9.3.2018 at 10:38 AM, TheScaryOne said:

They said in stream that priorities trump urgency, which doesn't make me feel good about the new system. If I set urgency 9 to dig out a dupe's head from a tile, or to construct some ladders, I want ANYONE to go do it, not for my scientists to keep sciencing, and the farmers to keep farming, until the architect can swing by to do the job.

pretty much this. I lost 2 dupes this morning (2 different occasions) because of all the others having better things to do than digging them out... we need at least an emergency override. priority 10: if you're able to do this job, hurry and do it already! perhaps max 5 jobs on this prio at once, adds stress and teamwork is allowed. I take a colony-wide stress-puking contest over a dead tier 4 dupe every cycle.

[chemie]

3 hours ago, pnambic said:

Correct. Except that you can actually set them to "mostly dig" or "mostly build", however, if you do that, they will do any outstanding "mostly" errand, regardless of urgency, before even considering the other one.

I was fine with "on" and "off" (so for example, no dupes do art except for my +4 artist).  Why do I need someone to maybe do a little art?  As others have said, if these override the "I need this done now by anyone" 9 priority we had, it sucks.

[Giltirn]

With some though I agree with other posters that inverting the current system would be better. The task urgency should serve to categorize the tasks, and the job priority to sort which dupe should be preferentially chosen to perform the task. For example, I will want my harvested food to immediately be moved to my sterile storage room, so I will set the boxes to priority 8. Alice will have a high priority on supply (or is it tidy?) and Bob a low priority, so when food is lying there on the ground it will preferentially be moved by Alice, unless Alice is busy and Bob has completed other priority-8 tasks with higher job priority, in which case it will be moved by Bob instead. Either way, this move task will be performed with much higher urgency than other jobs.

12 minutes ago, chemie said:

I was fine with "on" and "off" (so for example, no dupes do art except for my +4 artist).  Why do I need someone to maybe do a little art?  As others have said, if these override the "I need this done now by anyone" 9 priority we had, it sucks.

Art is somewhat special. Other tasks like tidy, supply, operate and dig can usually be performed by anyone, but you don't want your artist wasting time sweeping up when he has some important paintings to finish, so you would set those tasks to low priority for when he has finished painting.

[Stoof]

Really can't get my head round this current system. No idea what my dupes are doing but it's not what I want them to. It seems like a lot of the small tasks now need to be micro managed which is not fun.

[Mariilyn]

The trick is that we don't need to micromanage so much the priority levels because the dupe will follow the urgency level for every job assigned in the same level of priority. 

On 10/03/2018 at 3:40 AM, goboking said:

Say I've got a dupe who I want to handle building and machine operating.  I want things built first, so that gets the higher job priority.  There isn't an endless stream of construction projects, so when she finishes building whatever I needed built she'll then go tune up power generators or run the oil refinery.  But now she'll ignore the tune ups and refinery because she wants to start building the blue prints I've laid out using a task urgency of 1.  If the system were inverted she'd literally never touch a blue print with an urgency of 1.

In this particular case I would set up a equally high level of priority on both build and operate jobs on this particular dupe. She will do both build and operate jobs before everything else; you just need to set a higher urgency level on the the buildings that needs to be done immediately and a mid urgency level to the tune-ups. That way she will do them before the less urgent level 1 blue-prints.

On 10/03/2018 at 3:40 AM, goboking said:

Here's another example.  I'm accustomed to giving everyone the ability to perform the Tidy job.  I set my storage compactors to a low urgency of 2.  This means they'll tidy up the base if and only if they'd otherwise be idle.  Under this new system I'm faced with the choice of either setting Tidy to a lower priority than I use for my dupes' main jobs and risk outhouses going uncleaned or I set the Tidy to a higher priority and take on another dupe dedicated solely to cleaning.

Again, tidy doesn't need to be set to a higher or a lower priority than your dupes main job. If you set the tidy priority at an equal level of priority than your dupes main job, they will then follow the urgency order for every job assigned to this same level of priority, like before. If you want these task to be performed by everyone, then just let tidy have the same level of priority than their main job.

19 hours ago, chemie said:

I was fine with "on" and "off" (so for example, no dupes do art except for my +4 artist).  Why do I need someone to maybe do a little art?  As others have said, if these override the "I need this done now by anyone" 9 priority we had, it sucks.

You can still disable art for everyone except for your artist. If you dont need or want to use the priority levels, you can still play like before and use one level of priority for everyone.

At first glance, inverting this system seems to me like a terrible idea... but I need to think about it further.

[Stoof]

24 minutes ago, Mariilyn said:

In this particular case I would set up a equally high level of priority on both build and operate jobs on this particular dupe.

 

24 minutes ago, Mariilyn said:

Again, tidy doesn't need to be set to a higher or a lower priority than your dupes main job.

From what I can see and have read on the forums it is not possible to set 2 things at the same priority.  If you do this they will fall back on the default priority which I'm not 100% but someone above said was Art > Tidy > Build > Cook > Operate > Farm > Supply > Care > Dig > Ranch > Research > Combat.  If this is true you could have some double jobbing, ie you could have your main digger also operate on the side, so he would do all operate tasks before doing any digging, but this would not working for your builder as he would by default want to complete all builds before any operates, unless operate is set as a higher priority.  To confuse this as soon as you give him the job of builder he automatically gets set to prioritize build jobs at the top level, though you can over rule this which might be the way to go.

 

I think the current system would work if there wasn't a hidden default priority for each dupe in the background and you could set tasks to the same priority which would then just follow urgency of the task.  Feel like am rambling on, so I'm off to play the old build until this is sorted out in a more usable manor.

[itsYiyas]

I think the new system is harder to use. I often have to reset my priorities because dupes simply wont tidy when its on slightly low priority. It's got a few kinks that make it unintuitive but the extra control over the dupes is a good move.

[Mariilyn]

On 09/03/2018 at 4:28 AM, Flocc said:

Dupe will do highest priority jobs first (if there are two or more with same highest priority dupe will pick job in that new order Art > Tidy > Build > Cook > Operate > Farm > Supply > Care > Dig > Ranch > Research > Combat)

 

1 hour ago, Stoof said:

If you do this they will fall back on the default priority which I'm not 100% but someone above said was Art > Tidy > Build > Cook > Operate > Farm > Supply > Care > Dig > Ranch > Research > Combat. 

 

Maybe they do this if there is more than one job with the same priority AND urgency level because in my game the dupes clearly seems to follow the urgency order for jobs assigned to the same priority level. My outhouse at urgency level 8 is regularly emptied (its still a new game with 4 dupes at cycle 16).

I'm also fairly sure that the task assigned to the highest level of priority are at the same level as the job priority level. It clearly state so in the tooltips. The auto-reconfiguration of job priorities when assigning a new job is optional and it is possible to deactivate it in the job tab.

 

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