You can order your planets to create things that you have researched. You can choose to improve your planet by building new facilities. Many of them increase the productivity of your farmers, workers, miners, bankers and scientists. Others for instance strengthen your planetary defense.
All these buildings have in common, that you can build as many of them as you like. The only limit is the amount of available space on the planet. So it is for instance perfectly ok to have 5 farms, or 3 universities on a planet. Each of them improve the productivity of your citizens. However, the more you build of them, the more expensive subsequent builds of the same facility will be! Read Facility Production Cost for more details.
The same goes for buildings that improve your planets defense, like the Light Turret, Heavy Turret and the Shield Generator. You decide how many of them every planet should build, and by that you choose how well fortified a planet is.
Some buildings however enable you to build certain things on that planet in the first place. For instance the Shipyard enables you to build space-ships on that planet. The Central Defense Agency on the other hand allows you to build scans.
By clicking the current production icon a context-menu the usual production menu item will pop up. The list item in the menu allows you to hurry the current production for a specific cost. Click it to hurry the current production. You need to have the required amount of credits available, otherwise this menu item is disabled.
Please note that the current production needs to be at least half finished, in order to hurry it. Also once the current production is hurried it cannot be changed.
The cost of hurrying production is 4 credits per production point left.
The production-queue button is located on the right of the production-storage box.
Click on it to open up the production queue window.
Inside the production-queue highlight the production-icon and click it to change that entry. If you want to append new entries, click on the Wealth icon, which always represents the end of the queue.
When you hover the mouse over an existing item you will notice that plus, minus, count-mode and infinite-mode icons will appear on the left. You can click on them to change how often this item should be built.
An alternative method of changing the count per item is to select one or more entries and using the Plus and Minus key on your keyboard. Use the Asterisk key to toggle infinity, or use the Slash key to toggle the count-mode. This way you can also delete the selected entries: Simply press the the Delete key.
With the count-mode icon you can define if you want to build an item a specific number of times, without taking already existing items into account, or you can choose to build up to a specific number of times, taking already existing items into account.
Say you order to build 5 Factories. If there are already 2 Factories existing on this planet, then in the first mode, 5 more Factories will be built regardless. When the latter mode is active only 3 more Factories are built.
This also works for scans and ships. In that case the total number of scans and ships your empire owns will be taken into account. That means if you order several planets to build up to 10 Colony Ships, then these planets together will stop building Colony Ships as soon as your empire owns the required number of ships.
The production queue is processed from top to bottom. Entries that are already built will be grayed out. The currently produced item is displayed bold.
Items that can not be built have a yellow warning sign displayed next to them. Hover the mouse over that icon to find out why it can not be built. You can change the order inside the queue by dragging one or more selected items over a specific item. This will insert the selected items right at the drag marker.
Note that you can change the order inside the queue at any time you wish.
How’s the queue processed internally? After the current production is finished, the code will start looking from the top of the queue again, and browse it down until it finds an item that can be built. That means, if you try to build a ship before you built the shipyard (the ship will have a warning sign displayed next to it), the code will automatically pick the shipyard instead, because the ship can’t currently be built. After the shipyard is complete it will start browsing the queue from the top again, this time it can build the ship, so it will select to build that item next.
So what happens if I have a queue full of ships, but somewhere in the middle run out of ship-resources to build them? Well, just like any other item that can’t be built for whatever reason, the item will be skipped and the queue continues with the item that can be built next. If there are no other items left, the queue will switch to Piling-Up-Wealth, but checks every turn if the situation has changed (like enough ship-resources have been mined in the meantime), and continue with processing the queue from the first possible item that can be built.
Say you have a complex production queue set up, but you would like to manually order the planet to build an extra Turret (because a hostile fleet is approaching), and you want it to automatically continue processing the queue right after the Turret was built. You can do so by simply changing the current production of the planet. After the item is finished the planet will continue building items from the queue.
In order to share a production queue among different planets, that queue needs to be given a name. By default a new production-queue does not have a name. However you can name such a queue at a later time, should you wish to share it.
So you have a queue on a planet that you wish to assign to other planets as well. Enter a unique name into the Queue Name combo box, and press ok. Now enter the planet view of another planet, and click on the production-queue icon. Now, instead of editing the queue simply select an already existing one from the Queue Name combo box. Please note that the Assign Queue to this Planet button is now enabled. Click this button to assign the currently selected queue to this planet. This queue is now assigned to two different planets. Of course you can assign this queue to as many planets as you wish.
Please keep this in mind that when you modify a shared queue it has a direct effect on all the planets that have this queue assigned.
A shared queue (that is one that has a name) can only be deleted if it is not assigned to any planet. You can create as many shared queues as you like. They don’t even need to be assigned to a planet.
Once you’ve assigned a shared queue to a planet, the only way to remove the planet from that queue is to override the current production to Wealth. Simply click on the current production and assign Wealth. Now, the planet is removed from the shared queue. You can now create a unique production queue for this planet.
If a planet provides more production points than needed to complete an item, the excess production points are carried over to the next item in the queue. If there is no next item, the excess production for that turn is saved for future use, whenever another item is chosen for production.
The only way to lose production is if you have incredible productive power coupled with building many cheap items in a row, because the overflow from the previous round can only ever fill up the production-box once.
A convenient example: You’re building 10,000 production points per turn, but the frigates you have under construction costs just 6,000. You have an excess of 4,000 points per turn. Now this isn’t a problem for a turn or even two, since the excess production goes towards completing the next frigate. So, on turn 2 the next frigate will already be 66% finished (4,000 points out of the 6,000 required).
On turn 3, however, the excess production totals 8,000 - 2,000 more than required to build the 3rd frigate. These 2,000 points are turned into wealth (hence ‘lost’, since it’s considered an ineffective way to make money). This is not a common occurence by any measure, however.
manual\production-and-queuing.txt · Last modified: 2012/02/26 22:17 by nongolf
