What is wrong with my city?

[DeletedUser37416]

Couple things, want to start with a question.
There are frequent comments about that after special buildings, what ever building you build last has priority over buildings built earlier. IS this still true?
If I go into a new age, and need supply buildings to be motivated first, should I build them last?

Being able to make 10 tanneries compared to 7 or 8 shoemakers might be feasible. Depends on needs, and how much time you want to spend gathering from buildings and resetting them.

I am going to colonial age soon, trying to decide whether to go plantation or clock maker. The clock makers require 11 population per square, compared to the 22 for plantation. Not sure I want to gather supplies on 30 clock makers though. Would rather gather from 15. Motivations on 15 buildings would be more efficient too I think.

As far as time goes though, you can do better the more frequent you run the production. It seems you can get just as many if not more supplies doing 2 8 hour runs, than one 24 hour. I tend to sleep 7 hours so easily can do an 8 hour run while sleeping, and do 4 hour runs throughout the day. I did the math one time, and came out with using 10 production buildings, using 4 hour productions was much more supplies over the day than using 8 or 24 hour productions. This included time I would be guaranteed to slip on the 4 hour productions by not being able to be at the building when it came due.

 

[Emberguard]

Couple things, want to start with a question.
There are frequent comments about that after special buildings, what ever building you build last has priority over buildings built earlier. IS this still true?
If I go into a new age, and need supply buildings to be motivated first, should I build them last?

According to this update the regular building behaviour remained the same. When you say last built has priority, that could be interpreted one of two ways. Either identical buildings are programmed into a separate array for priority within identical buildings, OR every regular building is lumped together into a single array to determine priority.

That being said I've never noticed building types taking priority based on when I built them, so without getting mod confirmation I'd be inclined to assume it's only within identical buildings (or do lots of testing to experiment and see results).

Edit:

I am going to colonial age soon, trying to decide whether to go plantation or clock maker.

I did both. The plantation might take more people but it's more efficient in supply production. The reason I did 3-4 of the tobacco and the rest clocks/sailmakers was due to sizing. I try to keep about 10-15 production buildings. Can't do that with only tobacco plantations (not without taking way too much space)​

 

[DeletedUser36624]

Last built, first motivated works for me. If I have to build houses now, I make sure to put them in the slums with no road so they won't steal mo from my shoemakers.

There is one wrinkle though. Once I collected everything, and then restarted everything except some blacksmiths built back in BA/IA, which I use for fast response to quests needing "11 thousand 5 minute collections". Normally the blacksmiths run a 24hr production just to keep them out of the way. But there was an event quest coming up needing collections, and I didn't want to start them, only to have to abort the productions when the event quest showed up.

And my houses started getting the motivations instead of the shoemakers! At first I thought it was just someone coming through doing a hand motivation, but they all got motivated right down the line, in the order I had put them in when I was trying to figure out if order was predictable.

Hunh. So I thought to myself, "Self, what is different this time that could cause this?" I had built nothing, leveled nothing, had made some military units but that never affected anything before. I mulled over the blacksmiths a bit ("self, you always have the blacksmiths running, but how could that cause issues?"). Well, what the hell, start all the blacksmiths on those 5 minute productions I'd need in a few hours and see what happens. And lo and behold, the shoemakers started getting the mo.

Now if you've made it this far, I must disclose that I am a database engineer, and I knew that it quite often happens that if you query a database without asking for a sort, what you get back may be in a predictable and stable order, this being a side effect of the indexes. And this predictability may get shot to hell if you change something in a seemingly insignificant way that changes the intricate details of how the results are found and returned. Blacksmiths running or having completed productions are eligible for motivation. Blacksmiths not running aren't.

So... I don't think that this is something Inno intended. But it works for me. It would be interesting to see how many other people it works for, because I too have seen the comments about build order mattering.

 

[Agent327]

That being said I've never noticed building types taking priority based on when I built them, so without getting mod confirmation I'd be inclined to assume it's only within identical buildings (or do lots of testing to experiment and see results).

Not last built, but higher age gets priority. Since most last built are often from a higher era it may seem that way.

 

[Emberguard]

That's certainly how I'd expect it to be coded without looking into how it behaves.