If I use an infinite loop on them and give them so many units in the queue and that total is 12 (is it 12 that they hold?) then will my unit cannons always have the same set of units in them if I only fire them when the appear to be full (no longer building)? What is the easiest way to handle them if this approach is wrong?
It is best to think of infinite loop as setting the ratio between units. So if you have 1 tank and 1 spinner on infinite loop, your unit cannon will hold 6 tanks and 6 spinners untill you shoot it. Then it will try to build back up to 6 tanks and 6 spinners untill you shoot it again.
You set the loop to infinite and its enough to set one unit. It will keep building that unit over and over again. Setting multiple units of one type is only usefull to control the ratio of a specific unit when building more then 1 unit type. You need so set the loop first because I noticed in factory's that if you set a unit first and then the infinite loop, it would often produce only 1 unit and that issue is probably also there with the canon.
From what i can tell from using them, setting loop build and queuing 12 units will fire the same group of units each time, provided you wait for building to finish before firing. As you have described. I often do this to create an insertion force such as a group of builders, spinners, slammers, and combat fabs. It is helpful to queue before the unit cannon itself has finished building, or perhaps when powered off, to prevent queue shenanigans.
That's because units in the progress of being built are not in the queue, so when the infinite loop is set there is nothing to loop. It's a UI issue really.
Btw, did you know you can temporally override a repeat queue by ctrl clicking units. Works for uc and factories, whatever was ctrl clicked gets made next but only once, after which factory / uc returns to its saved queue. Handy if you realise you want to add a single combat fab to your salvo without undoing the rest of your queue (although keep in mind the last unit won't be made as you'll have used up its slot)...
This is the first time i've heard of that function, sounds incredible useful. Btw, a slightly offtopic thing since we're talking about UI: What happened to the 3rd energy option for factories, were they would only produce when ressources are available (as to not stall the whole economy)?
Yeah. No. It still exists. I use it in the stable every game since I learned about it. I have never seen it not work right. It works well for me.
Good, so it's not permanently. I found that function was really useful for smaller factories in late game.
Um... are you guys talking about the last two versions of the PTE? It's still in stable and it works perfectly.
It's not exposed in the vanilla UI, so that may be the cause of the confusion. That features is only enabled by one of the mods.
This has gotten off topic and I think we are being trolled. Ctrl works. The End. Admins can lock this thread. It's useless now.