Hurrying Production Mineral Loss?

[Yxklyx]

So, is one turn of mineral output lost when you hurry production by buying it? What if you have something in queue? Do your minerals go to the next item?

Also, in general, are excess minerals applied to the next item in queue?

[Flubber]

The carryover method provides a few rushing options

1. Pay full price or just enough less to take advantage of the carryover of mins-- I usually do this when I am cash rich and want to hurry something frequently



2. Pay the bare minimum to complete the unit/facility-- This is the more frequent case when you just want the thing builit now and savings off the full hurry cost are needed elsewhere

3. Overpay the hurry cost to trigger the maximum mineral carryover. This is something I believe I have done but as I write I am not sure I am recalling it correctly so I will run off and tect the effect of overpayment on the mineral carryover.

[WhiteElephants]

You can change the amount you pay in the rush build by considering how many minerals you are over producing (this is more complicated for units because the cost per mineral varies depending on how many minerals are left to build the unit). The basic cost of one mineral for a facility is 2 energy, but only after the first 10 minerals have been added to the beginning of said facilities production. So, for instance, if you are producing 20 minerals and the cost to rush build is 100 you would be losing 10 of those minerals to the rush build. Given that you've already accumulated at least 10 minerals for the facility rather than pay the full rush build cost and lose 10 minerals in the process (because only 10 carry over) simply reduce the cost of the rush build by the number of excess carry over minerals (10 in this case) multiplied by 2. In this example you'd only want to pay 80 for the rush build because of the excess 10 minerals multiplied by 2 equals 20 that is subtracted from the original cost of 100, which equals 80. You would then finish the facility on the next turn and have 10 minerals carry over as well.

If, for example, you were only producing 10 minerals you would have to pay the full amount to have those 10 minerals carry over to next turns production. Or if you were strapped for cash you could rush build the facility for 80 energy and finish it next turn, but would lack the carry over minerals.

The best part of carrying over 10 minerals for next turn is that next turn you can rush another facility based on the cost of 1 mineral equal to 2 energy rather than the inflated cost of the minerals because the first 10 have not accumulated yet.

I hope this makes sense and I apologize if you already realize this.

[RedFred]

1 - No, fortunately SMAC is not like Civ2.

2 - If you have something in the queue your next turn's mins will be applied to the new item.

In smacx if you have nothing in the queue and you just rushed a base facility there is a bug which allows you to get both the 'stockpile energy' AND the mins applied to the new item if you put a new item in in the turn after the turn you rushed.

3 - Your first row of red bricks will be applied to your new item. If you have more excess, such as often crops up when you switch SE to Planned, you will lose all of the excess red bricks after the first row.

[T-hawk]

Nitpick: actually the carryover minerals is a fixed 10 and not dependent on your SE settings. It is probably equal to the Mineral Cost Multiplier in alpha.txt.

[MariOne]

What WE said (in a more circuitous way than I usually do! ).

To put it more simple:

You can always carry over excess production (the minerals you'll get in your next turn), but the limit is 10 minerals.
This works whether you rushed your item, or just accumulated the minerals turn by turn.
This works whether you have an item in the build Q, or not (you will find those minerals anyway when you choose the new item).

As the others said, if you rush an item, you can pay just the needed amount to get it, or pay the full price. But if you are producing more than 10 minerals, making a complete hurry is a waste, so if you are producing 10+X pay for the missing minerals minus X, at most.

As other pointed out too, the 10 minerals limit, valid both as upper for carryover and as lower for rush double cost, is fixed and independent from your SE, i.e. from your mineral rows length.

BUT

You can NEVER carry over a single mineral from your excess accumulation.
If you switch to a far cheaper item, if you overpay a rush by mistake, or if you switch to a better SE, every sinlge brick that is shown in red will be LOST.

As units hurrying costs grow with the power of two of the missing minerals, while facilities minerals always cost linearly 2ec each, there are very rare occasions in which overpaying may make sense: if you have 10 (or very few more) minerals accumulated, and more than 40 missing for your deisred expensive unit completion, it could be convenient to overpay the facility, counting that you need double the minerals (over the 1st 10) when you switch to the unit. Those minerals would cost you 4ec each, which can be cheaper than directly hurrying the unit.

Of course you must be rather desperate at that point, and you should also consider upgrading, if the rules you adopted allow you to upgrade from the dw and then use the unit in the same turn.


The exact mechanism for Stockpiling Energy Bug, is that it hits everytime that the next item in production is Stockpiling.
In such case, your minerals are counted *double*, one for normal production (with carryover limit) and another one your *full* production is converted in energy, as if you had Stockpiling from the previous turn. When you switch to the next item again, your carryover minerals will be there intact to use.
The quirk is that the game switches to stockpiling *automatically* (that is, by default: it always did even if you were not aware of it) after a facility if there's nothing in the Q. You can reproduce that behavior after a unit production, by adding Stockpiling manually as 1st item in the Q, if the rules you adopted allow it.


About the cost for hurrying units, there were epic threads in the past about it, and even recently I reposted an easy reference excel table, which got zero downloads. So if you're interested in knowing the exact prices *in advance* to make sure your plans are covered by adequate funding, go and search for it...

[WhiteElephants]

Originally posted by MariOne

About the cost for hurrying units, there were epic threads in the past about it, and even recently I reposted an easy reference excel table, which got zero downloads. So if you're interested in knowing the exact prices *in advance* to make sure your plans are covered by adequate funding, go and search for it...

Well, it wasn't all for naught as I had copy and pasted the table you put in the "epic thread" you refer to and have gotten plenty of use out of it. Thanks.

[Adalbertus]

So, if I understand you correctly, this for MP banned bug with leftover minerals ist a SMACX feature only? I already wondered why I didn't notice anything in SMACwithoutX.

[MariOne]

Pas de tout, Adalbertus!

- the Stockpiling Energy bug is not MP banned, it is banned in the Apolyton tournament rules, but also allowing it is a perfectly viable alternative, and even more balanced than the default behavior. You just need to have all the players of a new pbem to be informed and agree about it in advance.

- the bug is NOT about the leftover minerals. The WHOLE production of that turn is taken into account when the Stockpiling part is counted. Just "as if" you had Stockpiling there from the previous turn. Imagine that you have TWO productions that turn: one is the item you see, the second is Stockpiling.

- the bug is there since the very beginning. For sure since the Demo. Probably even since the Beta! It is embedded in the structure of the game algorythms. It's because in the beginning-of-turn calculations, the program counts production *before*, and *then* energy.
Probably adding a simple flag variable could have solved it. But when FurXs got their noses rubbed in it, out of the scorn they preferred to declare it a "feature" rather than admit their mistake.

- if you don't count the expected income and the minerals, you hardly notice it. You probably realize that you're getting more money than expected, but it's hard to tell where it comes from if you don't know where to look
___

WE, you're welcome.
Just search for a recent post of mine with an attachment (IIRC is a 2 or 3 replies thread): that table should be updated and much more readable and handy

[johndmuller]

For those more inclined to crunching their own numbers than downloading, I believe that the formula for the Cost is:

Cost-of-Unit = ((MxM)/20) + 2xM
Where M is the number of Mins needed
and Cost-of-Unit is rounded down if you buy them all
and if you buy only a portion, any fractional costs are rounded up
and the cost of all or partial purchases is doubled if you have yet to bank 10 mins.

Warning numeric details ahead
For example, you need 23 mins (not considering your expected production of 11); the game says it will cost 72 (the calculation would yield 72.45 mins, rounded down to 72). Buying the full amount would give 11 more than the expected minimum needed to finish production; that would waste one min since you would be attempting to carryover 11 extras. If you wanted to buy just 22, to carry forward the maximum 10 permitted, it would cost you 70; that would be 3.15 times 22 = 69.3 rounded up to 70 (3.15 is 72.45 divided by 23). If you wanted to buy just 12, knowing that would be the minimum necessary to complete the build (11+12=23) the next turn, it would cost 38; that would be 3.15 times 12 = 37.8, rounded up to 38.

BTW, if you look at the income estimate in the F3 screen and compare it to what you actually get, by remembering how much cash you finished the prior turn with, the difference may be largely accounted for by the Stockpile Energy bug.

[MariOne]

Very concisely and precisely expressed!

The "cost for complete hurry rounded down" can be expressed mathematically by applying the INT() operator.

INT( (M^2)/20 + 2M )

About the SE bug, once the turn update is completed, all the bases where the bug came into effect will be displayed as "producing" Stockpile Energy indeed (that's the *essence* of the bug).
So, the income displayed in F3 *at the beginning* of your new turn *takes into account* the effect of the bug (i.e. of the bases now in Stockpile mode).
In practice, you won't see your treasury increased by the F3 income declared at the end of the previous turn, but by the F3 income you can check before doing anything else in the current turn.
To determine the exact amount of cash you gained thanks to the bug, you can browse the bases and pick any other item in the Stockpiling bases, and compare the F3 income to the one you observed at beginning of turn (don't touch anything else).
In alternative, in single player, you can save at the end of previous turn, and run two tests, in one of which you'll put any other item in the queues to avoid that any bases switches to Stockpiling on completion.

___

jdm, exactly, I also insisted on that in the original thread.

Once you know the formula, you don't "need" the table.
But once you know the formula, you CAN produce your table.
Rather than applying the formula everytime, you can build a table once.
Then it would be much more handy to "lookup" in a table rather than "calculating" a result.
Of course YMMV

[Yxklyx]

Thanks for all the responses! So to get around the bug (and not reap the rewards) I should have something in queue before production ends? Can you set the default next item in queue to be something other than Stockpile Energy? In a config file somewhere perhaps?