Drills and resource slots

[Chris Johnson]

Rotting is applied once a day - for some organic resources there are high decay values. If you don't pick up your resources by the time decay is applied then you may see similar losses

The way Harvesters/Drills are programmed means they produce exactly what you ask for - this is hardwired into them

[glitterdown]

Impossible or not, I'm fairly certain it's happening or I wouldn't have mentioned it. If you've examined the code, and it's impossible, then I'll have to be more observant the next time it happens. and maybe post it to flyspray.

Are you actually saying that in one day (or more precisely at the tick when decay is determined), it is possible that exactly 1/4 of a food resource left on the ground will rot? Because that's what would have to be happening (16kgs fall to the ground, and 12kgs are there to be retrieved without another action happening in the town between the two events) if it's not a bug with the way production is determined.

[Nick]

Resource gathering machines produce what is asked for.
Period.

[Nick]

Well, you could set the project for a portion of the amount you want and have it repeat. Unless you're especially unlucky (or lucky!), that should keep you a lot closer to the amount you were aiming for.

Are you sure about that? The lowest you can still get would be -20, and the highest would be +20.
I don't think you're really changing the odds.

[Chris Johnson]

Are you actually saying that in one day (or more precisely at the tick when decay is determined), it is possible that exactly 1/4 of a food resource left on the ground will rot?

Yes - Some resources decay at higher rates than even that , a lot are less but 25% is possible

[Maelstrom]

Well, you could set the project for a portion of the amount you want and have it repeat. Unless you're especially unlucky (or lucky!), that should keep you a lot closer to the amount you were aiming for.

Are you sure about that? The lowest you can still get would be -20, and the highest would be +20.
I don't think you're really changing the odds.

He's right. It's a matter of probability and normal distributions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution

Call it a project for 1000 foo. When you're done, you get anywhere between 800 to 1200 foo, and there's no distribution because it's a single occurence. Make that a project for 50 foo 20 times, and you're going to get very close to 1000 foo in the end, because each event has a random component. Some will be high, some low, but they should tend to balance out. If you could slice the project infinitely small and into an infinite number of repeats, you would get exactly 1000 foo.

Everything I've written assumes the code treats each 'harvest' as a random event, applying the 20% mod to each repeat separately. Of course, if it's not coded the way I expect it is, I could be taking out of my rear, here.

[wichita]

Actually, from what I have seen, each project in a repeat gives the exact same yield, so the +/- must be calculated at projetc setup. The statistics lesson is fun anyway.

[Just A Bill]

I suspect your loosing a bit of productivity each time a project goes to a repeat or ends, so in the long run you will work better on large projects.

My hunch is that each hour some percentage of the work is completed on the project. This is based on skill, tiredness, damage ect. When the project amount of work done meets or EXCEEDS 100% (the total work required) the project completes that itteration ends and the next hour you begin the next repeat if there is one. So the amount of work that you do in excess of 100% of the project requirements is wasted.

In a worst case scenerio, you set a small project that you think will repeat every hour, say gathering 25g of a resource that is gathered at a rate of 200/day. You would expect if you were average in every way that this would generate 25g per hour. If however you are a bit tired or not quite average in skill you might complete 99% of the work in the first hour, the second hour the repeat completes and you get 25g+-20%. Now this would happen for every repeat on the project, almost halving your productivity.

Best case, is that you exactly finish your project at the end of an hour, so loosing none of your productivity. Since knowing exactly how much you can produce in an hour is difficult when factoring skill/damage/tiredness on average I suspect you will loose a half an hour work for each repeat of the project.

So while your results will tend to be more consistent with many repeats (law of large numbers, see previous posts), I would expect them to average less than a single large project as you only waste time once, versus loosing time on every repeat.

Please note, this post is based on assumptions on my part of how the code works without having seen it. Someone from ProgD should be able to verify/refute this.

[Sho]

In general large projects waste less work for the reason Just A Bill pointed out.
On the other hand, an active player can derive an advantage (unfair and somewhat of an exploit, I suppose) by running small 99-repeat projects, seeing how much the first repeat yields, and dropping the project (and starting another like it) if it has a bad random deviation. The advantage can be as high as 20 percent, though realistically 10 or 15 percent is good. In any case, if done right it more than compensates for the inefficiency.

[wichita]

How about this. We just set up a project for a day of work, repeat if we want the charatcer to be on autopilot for a while, then wander off to find a real life. Just a thought.

[Nixit]

I like real life.

[Sho]

But we're power users! We must have our big databases of statistics and our all-encompassing knowledge of game mechanics! Minutiae give us the critical edge! Learn the system, analyze the system, beat the system.

[Shaderon]

...or just play the game and enjoy it

[Doug R.]

I could swear that I've seen repeat projects go from 90ish% to low% after an hour, but maybe that's only if there was more than one person working on it.

[Sho]

Yes, I've seen that. I believe the system goes through all the characters and increments the projects they are working on. Therefore it is possible for one character to complete the project, resetting it to 0%, and another to do additional work on it.