Building things. Everyone has done this, right? I don't think there's any player who hasn't at least built the PHQ docking bay. So I assume everyone knows what I'm talking about. The situation is something most people here know: you have a huge production of Claytronics and Hull Parts going as foundation for everything else. Without tens of thousands of building materials you would get nowhere.
So here I am, gradually expanding my huge factory, so that it may produce even more building materials. But as most of you also know, the amount of materials you need to build a dozen of Claytronics modules is quite high. Not too high, but high enough to keep a few transporters busy for some time.
This is where my woes began: keeping the Build Storage supplied without creating over a hundred transport commands by hand.
- Attempt 1: "Repeat Orders"
My first attempt at delivering the first batch of 20000 Claytronics and five times that of Hull Parts was to create a Command Loop. Yes, the new feature in the beta. I told the transporter to get the material and transport it to the Build Storage. But it didn't work. After some time I learned that there's a bug (already fixed in the next build) with supplying build storages via the loop. Ok, can happen.
But here's my gripe with it: When I heard we get a loop command, I expected it to give me a basic command along the lines of
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"Load number N(1) of goods X at location A and unload number N(2) of goods X at location B - repeat"
What we got was
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"Buy number N(1) of goods X at location A for price Z(1) and sell all but amount N(3) (you don't tell how much to unload, but how much NOT to unload) at location B for min. price Z(2), but only if their budget allows it to buy it from you, even for internal trades - repeat"
Here we go again, dealing with station and build storage budgets for internal loops. In my case I somehow got it working for Hull Parts, but not for Claytronics, despite identical settings. So I needed another solution.
- Attempt 2: "Mimic commander's behaviour"
Going by the letter of the command, it should mimic whatever the commanding ships does, right? At least that's what I expected. So when the commander is (manually) delivering 3 loads of Claytronics, I expected/hoped to see the subordinate ship to mimic that exact thing. But I hoped for too much, as those other four transporters just stood there, watching the commander making his rounds between the station and its build storage. So yeah, that also didn't work.
- Attempt 3: "Trade for Build Storage"
Not the fanciest of all commands, but it should work at least. So I give 10M credits to my build storage, another 10M credits went to the station budget. Nevermind that I shouldn't need credits for internal trades in the first place, but whatever. The station commander has 4.5 stars, there's an active sell order on the station, set to lowest price, limited to my own faction. The build storage has an active buy order, highest price, limited to my own faction. Then I tell 4 empty M-sized transporters to "trade for build storage". Well... "searching for trades". That's it. All of them standing there, searching for trades. And searching. And searching...
- Attempt 4: "Transfer wares with..."
That's the only reliable way of transferring goods between stations and build storages. Doing it manually. This is tedious beyond words, when all you have is a bunch of M-sized ships. 395 Claytronics per ship, 20000 Claytronics alone make 50 deliveries. But we have 100k Hull Parts too. And far more of everything in the future. Hundreds and hundreds of manual commands. Come on, really?
My (rhetorical) question is, why does it have to be so hard to keep your own build storage supplied? Even more so since it is the build storage of the station producing the needed materials in abundance. So I'd like to propose two very simple ideas to improve this important aspect of the game.
Idea 1: A checkbox in the build storage that reads
"Use station storage if build storage is empty"
I mean, would it be so hard to implement that? Earlier we had Cargo Drones transporting those goods automatically, but it didn't work reliably enough. It was removed then, without giving us any replacement.
Idea 2: Expand upon the "Repeat Orders" command
Right now all we have is the buy/sell loop. It would help immensely if we also got a
loop for the "Transfer wares with..." command that every ship already has. For internal trade loops this would be priceless.
Those two things would make my life (and I daresay that of many others) easier by a huge margin. One of the most tedious things ever is to transport many goods between my own stations and is has been kind of a nightmare up until now. A simple transport loop (without buy/sell, just transfer wares) and using station storage for building would really help.
