[2.2] Station drone management FUBAR - Fixed in 2.50

[BurnIt!]

Still not fixed in 2.50 Beta 1. Messing with Drone target amounts of a station I managed to get the station to magically produce drones without any raw materials (no smart chips or drone components). It is better, but still there are issues. I am unsure if this is the original issue or not, but it certainly does not feel like correct behaviour.

In this case this most likely was correct behaviour. When drones are dismantled because the wanted amount is reduced the resources are not lost but kept around in the drone assembly bay. When you increase the amount of wanted drones again, as long as the resources are sufficient they will be used and the drones will be assembled right away without the need to buy more. What you describe sounds like exactly this may be the case.
Due to (pre 2.50) issues that could lead to drones being dismantled when they shouldn't have been we've opted not to remove these leftover drone resources.

[mr.WHO]

Still not fixed in 2.50 Beta 1. Messing with Drone target amounts of a station I managed to get the station to magically produce drones without any raw materials (no smart chips or drone components). It is better, but still there are issues. I am unsure if this is the original issue or not, but it certainly does not feel like correct behaviour.

In this case this most likely was correct behaviour. When drones are dismantled because the wanted amount is reduced the resources are not lost but kept around in the drone assembly bay. When you increase the amount of wanted drones again, as long as the resources are sufficient they will be used and the drones will be assembled right away without the need to buy more. What you describe sounds like exactly this may be the case.
Due to (pre 2.50) issues that could lead to drones being dismantled when they shouldn't have been we've opted not to remove these leftover drone resources.

Question - how should I prepare for 2.5 release?
If In my station for cargo drone there is 100/0 (100 drones in station, but target amount set to 0) will the 2.5 deconstruct those 100 drones?

[BurnIt!]

If the target amount is 0 then it should dismantle the 100 drones but since it will keep the resources you can set the slider back to 100 and will immediately get them back.
To "prepare" you could set the target amount to 100, then it shouldn't change at all and be correct going forward.

[mr.WHO]

One more question - is there any kind of functional cargo drone limit?
I mean if I have 6x Large ship docking ports on my station then what would be optimal amount of drones? or sky is the limit and the more the better?

I also found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/X4Foundations/ ... t_feature/

is this working only IS or also OOS? where I could find what amount of drone would be needed for this?

[Imperial Good]

That last report should have been in the Public Beta forum.

I will go into details there when I have another fully reproduceable test case. I bumped this to make it clear that it has not been fixed by 2.50 currently.

In this case this most likely was correct behaviour. When drones are dismantled because the wanted amount is reduced the resources are not lost but kept around in the drone assembly bay. When you increase the amount of wanted drones again, as long as the resources are sufficient they will be used and the drones will be assembled right away without the need to buy more. What you describe sounds like exactly this may be the case.
Due to (pre 2.50) issues that could lead to drones being dismantled when they shouldn't have been we've opted not to remove these leftover drone resources.

Except it happened to a station that was not effected by previous versions drone deconstruction. In other words not a station I mentioned in my previous demonstration of the issue, one of the other working stations.

If drone bays hold resources, rather than them being returned to station wares storage as one would expect, this should be shown to the user in station information tab of logical overview window. Otherwise such behaviour might be confusing to players as they have no indication that it may occur.

The fact still remains that the construction is not instant, but rather happens spontaneously upon modifying the target amounts but only after doing so many times. The game is paused during this time so either construction should always happen instantly with every modification one makes to the target amounts fields, or it should never happen until unpaused as some period of time is required for the change to come into effect. I am looking into finding a reproduceable example in 2.50 beta.

One more question - is there any kind of functional cargo drone limit?
I mean if I have 6x Large ship docking ports on my station then what would be optimal amount of drones? or sky is the limit and the more the better?

I also found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/X4Foundations/ ... t_feature/

is this working only IS or also OOS? where I could find what amount of drone would be needed for this?

You can measure this by looking how many cargo drones are in use while the ship is docked and exchanging a lot of wares.

If you want a scientific estimate then get the cargo capacity of the Shuyaku Sentinel and divide it by the cargo capacity of a cargo drone. This will give you the maximum possible number of drones that need to be in flight at a given time to move cargo off the largest L trade ship. Multiply this by L dock count.

The reason you may want more than that is for zone station to station trading. Only the selling stations needs to worry about this as they will generate the trades. Same logic applies as above except 100,000 applies to the capacity of such a trade and this is multiplied by the number of such trades that can happen in parallel. This will use the most drones as such trades keep drones busy a very long time due to their slow speed and long distances travelled.

I suggest creating a discussion topic about this since this is not really part of the bug report.

EDIT:
Seems like it might actually be fixed in 2.50 and it is just a case of an unknown amount of hidden drone resources from the previous bug. Still would be nice to see these resources. Additionally I did find a bug when trying to deconstruct drones with 0 target amount that I have reported in the beta forums.

[BurnIt!]

There is no specific time requirement for the (dis)assembly of drones when the target amount changes. It will happen when the amount is changed even if the game is paused. (may take 2 or 3 frames to show the update but does not take time)

You recommendation for cargo drone numbers seems pretty good. Technically you are not going to need as many drones for (un)loading large freighters because there can only be so many drones flying the short distance between the pier dock and the ship, so throwing more at that won't accelerate the transfer. However you are of course correct that potential station to station (or station to build storage) trades involve longer distances and thus keep cargo drones busy for longer periods of time.
Also keep in mind that trade ships typically bring their own cargo drones to the table so even if a station doesn't have enough to fully saturate the cargo throughput of all docked ships the trades will usually run at max capacity regardless. (station and ship share cargo drones for a single trade operation, you can see this happening when empty and full drones launch from both parties at the same time)

As for displaying the drone (and missile) resource amounts: I agree, however for now the focus was on making sure it is functionally correct first. Improving the user interface for this scenario is on the list.

[Imperial Good]

After further testing I am fairly confident this bug is fixed in 2.50 and my prior post was due to the hidden drone wares amounts that accumulated on some stations as a result of the bug.

There is still the bug of target amount 0 not deconstructing drones but that is being handled by a separate thread in the beta forum.