[1.0.6.0] More Colony ship pathing

[AesirAvatar]

Picture this playing Akdarians:

[A) Human Independant - my target]
.. short distance ..
[B) My Cont. Planet with 47M Humans]

.. all the way to the other side of my empire..

[C) My Human world - was independant - 2M+ Humans].

Issue 1:
I build a colony ship at B manually tell it to load colonists (right click context menu) - no such option to load colonists.

Issue 2:
I then go set the colony ship to full auto, go to New Colonies Tab, identify human Ind (target A), click button to colonise. Shortly after, colony ship sets sail for C... all the way across my empire, bound to pickup humans from the 2M planet, not the 47M planet its orbiting. I sigh, there are closer Akdarian and Teekan habited planets between, but ok, lets assume it really wants humans to colonise the Human Independent. I wait a few years as the colony ship travels to pickup humans.

Issue 3:
Intermittently checking colony ship progress, I see its at C... but it's not picked up humans from C, it's decided to reroute to load akdarians from my homeworld now (between B and C).. go figure. Manually force colony ship to load humans at C. Manually driving it home now.

[Thineboot]

There have to be at least 500 M for a colony ship to load colonists.

Colony ships won't load colonist at 47 M.

A Human former independent with only 2 M Humans sounds a bit wrong... is it a typo, did you mean 2 B?

[AesirAvatar]

Correct - 2B or... lots.

Seems strange you wont take 30k from 47M. Not even a rounding error.
Might be good to include in the tooltip (disabled) "load colonists - needs 500M supply" for better feedback? or change/remove the limit...

[Thineboot]

Issue 1 isn't an issue. While I haven't checked before, there is no mentioning of the 500 M minimum in the manual nor can I find any reference to 500 in the Galactopedia. Also there is a hint about 500 M at page 72 in the manual: Once they reach 500 million or more inhabitants, depending on the worlds, they will start to become much less of a drain on your Empire’s economy and will soon begin to actually contribute to it.

Issue 2 isn't an issue either, see page 72 of the manual: By default, the automation will always try to colonize a new world with a colony ship loaded with the race that is most suitable to that environment.

Issue 3...

[...]
COLONIZATION
- improved loading colonists for new colony targets so that load most suitable race even when is not dominant race at load colony
[...]

Since the race of the independents don't have to be the best suitable for their planet, have you checked for this? If Ackdarians are better suited, did their people crossed 500 M during Issue 2?
If Humans are better suited than Ackdarians or there were more Ackdarians before Issue 2, Issue 3 is a bug.

[AesirAvatar]

Re: preferred race type - while I'm playing Akdarians - there's bugger all planets for them.

I lucked out early with an independent Teeken Colony. There's about a 10:1 ratio of sandy planets to ocean worlds. Needless to say I have a bazillion teeken integrated into my empire.

The Humies are similar to Akdarians with Continental planets.

Given the example above:

• Neither Teeken nor Akdarians would exceed the +20 suitability to colonise the new planet that was an independant colony. I assume this doesnt matter given early independant colonization has only one race thats usually not suited, and the AI works ok to colonize them with my initial race (Akdarian in my case)

• Human is best suited amongst available empire races, but the ship ignored the local Human planet (sub 500M pop) in preference for one 20yrs travel away that was over 500m Humie Pop. Side note, this then opened an interesting race challenge with the allied Teeken Empire next door who got there first with their Colonizer (note: AI using Teeken to claim ind human world) - I was saved only by the fact there was a bunch of aggressive pirates chasing off any and all colonisers - fixed by my offering a protection agreement with them. Until that point hwoever, my colony ship handnt come close to the world for this to be a factor.

• The preference calc didnt take into account there were other Akdarian and Teeken populations nearby also, over 500M population that could have done the trick, albeit at lower suitability (which is really academic for independant colonization given the first point above)

I would contend your points above - is it better to go for the "best" suitability of race, if the nearest colony (above the hidden definition of 500M) is far far away, while other suitable (just less suitable) races exist nearby? Given the race to control Independents, personally, I'd prefer to colonise an Independent with ANY race, because I immediately gain a well populated world where I can (via pop controls) remove the 30k pop I claimed with immediately afterwards (and I really dont care that those 30k pops dont grow nearly as well as the natives do).

[Thineboot]

I'm not arguing for the actual system, the way we are told it works or should work. See

COLONIZATION
- improved loading colonists for new colony targets so that load most suitable race even when is not dominant race at load colony

I'm still seeing colonization loading the dominant race instead of the optimal one for a colonization target. Is anyone else seeing this issue?
Can you add an option on the load right click menu to allow manually specifying a race to load if this can't be fixed?

I do see it choosing minor (less volume) races...

However, it doesn't look at the plentitude of that race before making its decision - so it ends up totally depleting a world - taking every last of that race off...

Whereas it should check that there are least 500M of THAT race before trying to grab them. More if multiple colonizers are trying to grab from the same world.

But it does pull the minors, which is a nice improvement.

as strong hint, that your Issue 3 is indeed an issue, a bug.


Pathfinding in particular is much too often a mess. Just look me up and you'll find more than one thread

I've seen ships crossing a whole galaxy to retrofit, passing by multiple big colonies with multiple docks.

In a complex game like DW2, with so many objects, algorithms have to be short. But the less code, the more optimized it has to be, the more careful you have to become. While one guy can do the work the more testing is necessary to make sure it works as intended. And at the moment it seems we are the unpaid testers way too often.


As for colonization policies, there should be a bunch of different ones, based on race to make the other empires distinguishable. The more diverse an empire becomes, the more diverse should their strategies become. All these fast breeding races, with females being pregnant for most of their fertile years, have different reasons for becoming a frozen specimen aboard a colony ship.
Sending colony ships to independent societies is a shortcut I'd like to see going away. This should be a diplomatic mission far beyond the actual hey slaves, we speak your tongues for centuries, learned all your mannerisms and you tell us you don't share them with all the other folks of your race you don't know because you've lost contact to your forepeople millennia ago? How dare you shooting at our peaceful diplomats, here have some pearls and all will be fine...

Besides my wishful thinking, there should be a palette of different approaches when it comes to colonization, and the player should be able to select or weight them for automation. There's always the personal touch of micromanaging.