Using a Timer Fleet and an Annual Management Checklist

[skoormit (OP)]

In Aurora, there are a lot of things to manage.
To avoid spending more playtime than necessary managing relatively minor concerns, I use a simple system with three components:
1) Naming conventions for fleets and colonies.
2) Annual management task checklist.
3) Timer fleet.

An explanation of each component:

1) Naming conventions for fleets and colonies

I use a consistent naming convention for fleets and colonies.
Names of fleets indicate the fleet composition, as well as the location and/or task and/or capacity and/or needs of the fleet.

Example: FT ANT-A3 infra 245/yr Hlr x12 B
Interpretation:

• FT:   Freighters. (Just the default hull abbreviation.)
• ANT-A3 infra 245/yr:   Cycling orders to haul infrastructure to colony ANT-A3, with average throughput of 245 per year (varies somewhat by orbital positions of source and target colony).
• Hlr x12:   Contains 12 ships of the Hauler class.
• B:   Appending a unique letter per each fleet with the same hull abbreviation makes it easier to quickly find this fleet when a list contains several fleets with similar (or even otherwise identical) names.

Names of colonies include the base name (usually the name of the system body), plus the intended role and/or current task and/or current needs of the colony.
Example: _~ANT-A3 MINE DurBor -mines 25 ~500k

• _~:   Special symbol prefixes help me quickly identify colonies with pending tasks. The underscore indicates a freight task. The tilde indicates a colonist task.
• ANT-A3:   This colony is located at the planet ANT-A3.
• MINE DurBor:   A mining colony with significant deposits of Duranium and Borium.
• -mines 25:   Pending task to ship 25 mines to the colony. As I assign freighters for this, I update the name to indicate the remaining amount.
• ~500k:   Pending task to ship 500k colonists to the colony. As above, I update the name as fleets are assigned.

2) Annual management task checklist

Make a checklist of housekeeping tasks to be performed no more than once a year (or any frequency of your choosing).
Some of these tasks will involve assessing the status of fleets and colonies, and updating their names appropriately.

For example, suppose colony "ANT-A3 MINE DurBor" is my highest priority development colony.
If the colony's current infrastructure capacity exceeds current population, I will change the name to indicate a pending task to move colonists to fill it to capacity.
If the colony has available workers, I will change the name to indicate a pending task to haul in enough mines to occupy the available workers.

Examples of other tasks:

• Admin commands. Best commanders in place?
• Fleets. Check for hidden problems (bad cycle loops, forgotten fleets sitting idle, potential fuel shortages, active sensors or shields not turned on, etc.).
• Fuel and MSP supplies. Determine if additional production is needed.
• Scientists. Check for newly arrived (or recently improved) scientists with superior bonuses to those currently assigned.
• Shipyards. Did I leave idle any yards intended for constant shipbuilding? Am I adding slipways and/or adding capacity to all desired yards?
• Wealth. Am I spending the desired percentage on research?
• Minerals. Do I face near-term outages at any production centers?
• Orbital production fleets. Do I need to move any mining fleets due to depleting resources? Are my terraforming fleets performing as expected (or did I forget to check/uncheck a checkbox)?

3) Timer fleet

Create a fleet containing only a single trivial ship. (An empty no-armor hull costs 0.4BP.)
Give it a delayed Move order and a Send Message order, both of which target the fleet's permanent location, and cycle the orders.
This provides an event log interrupt at the frequency of your choosing.
Each time the event occurs, process your checklist.


With this process in place, I spend far less time overall managing the things in my annual checklist.

For example, commander announcements (new hires, promotions, retirements/deaths, etc).
Instead of stopping for each announcement and considering what adjustments to make, I just make an optimization check once per year.
This saves a lot of time, and the price is reasonable: command assignments becoming slightly suboptimal over the course of a year.
The exception to this is the death/retirement of an admin commander. An empty admin command breaks the chain of bonuses, so I always stop and make adjustments for those.

[vorpal+5]

Nice, formalized management scheme. I also have my timer class, but I use them to deliver a message after some time, like 6 months from now, start this or do that.

I did not went this far into colony naming convention, but a question, how do you trace that there is something en route to a colony, if you update the name without referring to the original task? Should you not have at some point something like
- mines 10/25
?

Also, a more global remark, what you feel compelled to do, and that I feel necessary too, and probably that is also done in some way or another by others players ... Is the sign that ultimately there would be a need for more complex labeling for entities. Steve has his plate full but hopefully one day he will want to improve this part. 

[smoelf]

That is an excellent idea with a timer ship. I might have to implement that.

[skoormit (OP)]

I did not went this far into colony naming convention, but a question, how do you trace that there is something en route to a colony, if you update the name without referring to the original task? Should you not have at some point something like
- mines 10/25
?

I update the name to indicate the remaining amount. So if I send 10 mines, then "- mines 25" becomes "- mines 15".
It's not so important for me to know how big my total order was, just to know how many remain.

Also, a more global remark, what you feel compelled to do, and that I feel necessary too, and probably that is also done in some way or another by others players ... Is the sign that ultimately there would be a need for more complex labeling for entities. Steve has his plate full but hopefully one day he will want to improve this part. 

More complex labeling would give us some options to make managing these tasks easier, but my real dream is to be able to automate these management tasks entirely.

Civilian shipping is one of my favorite features in the game, but I find that the civ fleets simply can't keep up with my demands.
I'd like to be able to create shipping tasks for my own fleets in the same way I do for civvies.
And I'd like to be able to configure my planets to automatically create these tasks based on parameters I indicate.
For example, perhaps I could configure the ANT-A3 MINE colony to create a demand task for 10 mines whenever there are 500k available workers.

[Iceranger]

Using send message and delay in a cycled order as a timer is really clever, never thought of that before

[Graymane]

Just wish he'd look at the free game Stars! for how to implement orders better.  That game from the early 90s got micromanage help right the first time.  Lots of nice commands for auto building things and shipping things.  Most of what we need to use timers and naming conventions for are simply missing logistical commands.

[Vastrat]

Great idea with the timer ship. I agree with the idea of more automation, it would make life easier and could be used or ignored as players saw fit.

[skoormit (OP)]

Just wish he'd look at the free game Stars! for how to implement orders better.  That game from the early 90s got micromanage help right the first time.  Lots of nice commands for auto building things and shipping things.  Most of what we need to use timers and naming conventions for are simply missing logistical commands.

To be fair, Aurora is an order of magnitude more complex than Stars!
I do miss some of the very simple touches in Stars!, like giving a freighter orders to wait until full before moving on.

[vorpal+5]

Aaaah Stars! Fond memories of my first PBEM, with my lousy 33.4 Modem!

And yes, he had some pretty decent way of automating orders ...

[Graymane]

To be fair, Aurora is an order of magnitude more complex than Stars!
I do miss some of the very simple touches in Stars!, like giving a freighter orders to wait until full before moving on.

I don't think the order management portion is any more complex in Aurora than Stars!.  There are just more things, like more than 3 minerals.  I'm talking about copying orders to new colonies, build queues, load/unload orders, etc.  I think it is basically the same.  I have exactly the same criticism towards WITP-AE

[skoormit (OP)]

For any interested, here is the checklist I'm using in my current playthrough:

SAVE GAME

Admin Commands
   Best commanders used?
      mining
      tform
      navy
      survey
      logistics
   Any empty?

Commanders
   Diggers
   Planters
   Stabilizers
   

Civilian Admins
   Aden sec: Prod/Mine/etc
   Ant sec: Mine/Prod/Log/Pop
   Prime: Prod/Mine
   ADE-A5M12: Ship
   FAL-A1: Production (for now, then mine/prod)
   ANT-A3: Mine/Prod
   Mine (rank by total mins):   ALL-A3, CAR-ast50, CMCs
   ADE-A6: Wealth
   HAL-A2: ? Prod/Mine/Pop   
   assign any idle
   

Save game, update excel

Fleets
   Movement orders: Idle? Bad cycle?
   Check names. BigPlan matches?
      --Update BigPlan for current col cost of infra target
   Actives not on? (Run reset script?)
   Shields not up?
   Delete fleet histories
      all older than X
      all for some fleets
         TK ZA CAT-A5 harv cycler Tanky 007


Colonies
   Stockpiles that need moving?
      Minerals
      fuel
      msp
   Facilities and population to move--update colony names.
   Worker shortages?
   Mineral depletion
      Orbital Miners
      Automines
      SorHarvs
      CMCs
   Terraforming according to plan?
   Geo Surveys finished?
   Protection needed?
   

Wealth healthy?
   Research >= 30% of income?

Mining
   near-term empire outages?
   shipbuilding colony has minerals and fuel for 1 yr?

Fuel
   production vs consumption?
   turn refineries on

MSP
   production vs consumption?

Industry
   targeted production on schedule?
   colonies: prod plans and minerals for 1 year?


Best scientists used?

Shipyards
   building haulers?
   building collies?
   adding slipways?
   adding capacity?

SAVE GAME

[davidb86]

Save game, update excel

What all are you tracking in excel?

[skoormit (OP)]

Save game, update excel

What all are you tracking in excel?

Quite a lot.
I use several SQL queries to get data out of the database. In Excel I can easily sort, calculate, and aggregate.

Sheets that use queried data:
TFPlan: Basic information for all known bodies, with auto-calculated terraforming requirements.
Surface: Stats for each produced mineral at each surface source (including CMCs I am purchasing from).
Orbital:  Same, for orbital miners.
Minerals: Aggregates the above two (plus queried data similar to Empire Mining tab in-game), calculates total consumption of each mineral, projects empire shortages, calculates needed throughput of mule routes.
SorHarv: stats for sorium harvester ships (modules, commander, net modules with bonus)
Shipyards: stats and calculations for all yards, including BP/yr at full production. Helps me know how much of a stockpile is needed to support warship production at full capacity.

Sheets with manual input data:
SystemDist: A matrix of distances between systems.
BonusCheck: Calculates net bonus from admin commands for mining and terraforming.
BigPlan: Calculates throughput and fuel usage of my freighter and colonist fleets, calculates additional fuel usage of yearly new production of those ships, and compares to total fuel production. Compares per-destination throughput of colonists with throughput of infrastructure and installation, which makes it easier to send the right amount of each. I keep the fleet lists updated manually. I input fuel consumption specs for each ship design, and data for fuel refineries. Uses data from SystemDist, SorHarv, BonusCheck, and Minerals.

Sheets for calculating:
ShipComponentBuilding --how to allocate industry among different ship components to complete at same time
Speed --translates km/s into other useful units
Sheets for comparing different design specs of Freighters/Colonizers/Tankers/Surveyors/TroopTransports

[serger]

A bunch of maniacs, that's what you are!

[Jorgen_CAB]

For minerals we can issue an order to wait until a certain amount is available before the ship loads... now I would like for this to work with everything you can load and move in quanteties such as installations. I hope this will get added at some point.

Now I have to calculate roughly how long it will take for a colony to produce something and issue a timer and then a pick up order and cycle this... the problem is also that over time this will change so you will have to go in and tweak the timer once in a while which is not optimal.

I certainly agree that we need more tools for automation so we can concentrate more on the fun stuff and not micromanage things that could easily be automated.

You can get pretty far with the timer and messages, but it still is allot of work for setting it all up. And as said... some system similar to how civilians pick up and transport stuff would be nice using a supply and demand system.

One irritating thing with civilians is that you can't set an infinite supply, you should be able to do that. Which means that whatever is produced of that type is automatically added to the supply... you should not need to go in and manually update the supply list for every item once in a while. If you give too much supply civilian ships will go there and try to pick up stuff that is not really there and you get messages about it and you wast civilian traffic by doing so.