CHAOS ON THE PRODUCTION LINE!

June 24, 2014
By R. Ritnour

Well, what a week I have had! For those of you still waiting for some or all of your gratis star ships, I can only say that they are on the way. Grinding out turns for ALL of the player positions in the game has been quite an undertaking!

When we decided on the additional transports and warships we didn’t know that there would be a rebellion at the shipyards. I can hear the engineers and shipwrights on hundreds of worlds crying out when they heard the news. “What? Do you realize the effort involved? Do you know what this will cost in RUs? What about all the planetary tec raises? This is lunacy!” We of course ignored all those little alien experts and plunged ahead.

I manually hunted for a proper planetary candidate for each empire (a bit tricky with Nomads), raising the planet’s tec level and adding shipyards as needed. I then went about the task of inputting build orders for ships on each planet. Imagine tracking all of the empire player ID numbers and making sure I had the right empire planet in each build.

Finally, after all of the manual work, I set up the run and pressed the start key. However, as my commanding officer was fond of saying back in the day, “No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy.” I had forgotten to add the needed RUs to the player economic records! I watched helplessly as the computer remorselessly ground through the turn orders. Some empires had enough RUs on hand to flawlessly build the ships. Other empires would be unable to build any; a simple fix. The rest would build SOME, which meant that I had to manually dig through all those turns and figure out what to build in the inevitable second build round.

“Why all the difficulty?” you may ask. After all, we have done this once before with the award of the Dreadnought on Memorial Day weekend. Yes, true enough, but we were a bit late with that one as well and the volume of player empires has increased significantly since then.

So, if you have received your new builds in full, you are indeed one of the fortunate ones. If you have received partial builds or no builds at all, I am replenishing your RU account and then redoing the orders as you read this. You have all been very good about the delay, and I am grateful for your patience!

The take away from all this is that for the new game, we must be sure to include in the programs the ability to award assets globally without the need for manual tracking of any sort. That is a good lesson to have learned here.

Oh, and while I am on the subject of snafu, we failed to indicate the deadline for the scavenger hunt. It was in the survey, but not on Facebook or the Forum. If you took the survey right away, you would know the deadline. Otherwise, you wouldn’t even know that there was one. So, we have extended the scavenger hunt to the turn deadline this Friday.

Scavenger hunt link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3GZTK3B
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