Inventory and Production

[ManicMiner]

This isn't necessarily a bug but more of a useability issue. In the most recent Windows binary (thanks Destructavator!) the research works great but the whole workshops / manufacturing / inventory side of it... (Sideshow Bob Shudder).

I allocate all my engineers to make 8 combat armours the first chance I get, but the UI never shows how long it'll take or how many engineers are assigned to the job or any hint at how long it'll take - and there's no notification when it completes.

Back in September (game time) I recruited 30 engineers and tasked them to build 8 instances of the reinforced armour made available through research - it's now the following February and I have 15 items of alien armour which I can only assume were collected following successful missions, no new suits of armour in the inventory, and according to the UI I still have 8 units marked to be built.

The only other thing I've assigned any engineers to do is disassemble a scout and I started that in June in the home base; it's still not completed.

I've progressed a fair way down the research track (got three new types of aircraft and all laser/plasma weapons have been researched) but I'm still flying ships with bog-standard rocketry. Why? Because when I go to manufacture weapons for the aircraft, there's nothing new in the list for me to build.

The research notes you get in mail tell you everything except what object categories the new production items are - it shouldn't take much to show "We can now build: New Item: (Primary / Secondary / Heavy / Other / Aircraft / Aircraft Component)"

Basically, the interface is trying to be far too clever for its own good. All we need is something similar to the research UI; assign X number of engineers to X task, there should be a calculation as to how long it'll take and therefore the user should be able to see how far along the manufacturing process is.

[geever]

All engineers are working on the project which is on the top of the production queue. You may want to modify order of production requests.

-geever

[ManicMiner]

Even so, to have 30 engineers on my second base (China, after all where else would one locate the mass production?!) spend a month making 8 suits of armour, but still have 8 items to go five months later on in the game when they're not making anything else... how can that be right?

My home base (Europe) only has 20 engineers, but it's been disassembling a scout for nearly a year. In that time my scientists have researched two alien species, at least 6 items of alien tech, laser weapons, alien origins, antimatter and lord knows what else.

Put bluntly: the engineers in UFO:AI are taking ten times longer to disassemble an alien aircraft than it takes the boffins to figure out how to rebuild it!

[geever]

Well, I didn't tell you that it can't be buggy but (hopefully) cleared how (should) it work(s). Btw. you can check the progress of produce on Base Summary screen (in dev version). It is also possible that there is no bug but prod times need balancing...

-geever