Division of labour method.

When you set up a build que, you don't want all fabbers to be rushing around each structure, and wasting time running from place to place. The steps outlined below should divide the labor efficiently, intelligently and without creating situations where buildings take far to long to be built that would happen if fabricators were more simply divided between build sites.

1. Fabricators/builders are measured by distance from first build site.
2. Add closest fabricators/builders metal/second or build rates until building can be constructed in x (maybe 5) seconds.
3. Route those fabricators/builders to first build site.
4. Repeat with second build site and remaining fabricators/builders.
5. If no more fabricators/builders are left, wait until fabricators/builders are free.
6. If no more build sites are left, reroute remaining fabricators/builders to nearest build sites individually.

Are there no suggestions? Criticisms? Witty jokes about how I'm too stupid to divide anything? Come on guys.

I don't even know what to say m8..... uhhhh..... It's mostly reflex for me when I play I don't think to hard about it.

This is a method for the computer to do automatically when creating a build que.

I thought you were too stupid to divide anything?

Is this a mod, your thought process, a grocery list. I just don't know what you mean division of labor usually I just grab 2/3 of my mass air fabbers and everything works out. The more fabbers the better right?

I'm talking about how the computer should split up fabbers when you create a build que.

That sound like a really bad idea in general.
Some times you need to focus on a building times one at a time.
Say you building turrets when being attacked sure you better to have one finished turret instead of three half finished.

Just gonna take up more space to say what he said ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I think he is trying to make a mod that makes template build orders or something.

See step 2

oh boy another..... Do people actually publish them? I dont think I have ever seen any on PAMM.

oh and @ace902902 , with this division of labor good luck trying to rush umbrellas or anti nukes when 1/2 of them then fly off to go build energy storage and I have 15 nukes flying towards ya

I think what he actually wants to do is have the game automatically assign idle fabbers to nearby buildings. Say you select one fabber and place 3 new buildings. If you have 3 other nearby fabbers that are idle they'll automatically walk over to the placed templates and start the buildings.

Or the more commonly suggested version which is select 5 fabbers, area build 5 mex, each fabbers builds a single mex rather than all building the same one.

If that's what he wants it's been suggested before. As people have mentioned it's possible, but just more awkward to program. It's also unlikely to be the desired behaviour for higher level players because they'll just select smaller groups of fabbers and manually give each sub group a more efficient build queue. There's also the issue mentioned above of failing to rush up a turret if you're under attack because you queued up several turrets and your fabbers each tried to build one.

Did you just skip step 2? give it another read. Step 2 tells them to be ably to complete the structure withing 5 seconds.

Its the second and Im sorry for the poor explanation. I will edit it. However, the problem you seem to be getting stuck on is circumvented in step 2. Please reread. it.

I see what you mean, you could specify the amount of time you want a turret to be built in, but that either needs to be preset ahead of time and fixed or you need to modify when placing the building. The latter gives you better flexibility but requires some extra UI and more player time when you just want to place a building quickly and move on with your micro. People have also suggested it as a build toggle, eg normal queue build will build one after another, alt+queue build with spread fabbers between the buildings.

As I said, it's not impossible, it's just a little more complicated. It'd be interesting to see someone implement it just to see how well it worked and whether many people ended up using it. It's probably something that would have to be modded in though. If you've got the coding skills, go for it. Only issue in PA is that the mods are javascript, so you'd be doing whatever bits of processing needed doing in the UI's javascript rather than on the engine level. Depending on the number of fabbers and the complexity of the build queue that could get a little unwieldy.

This has been suggested before and is in my opinion a desperately needed feature.
About all the concerns you guys have: Simply make it toggleable - problem solved.

It would be a preset.

How could a preset like that work with sheared teams? When on player like different presets?

Well, the commands are issued by each player separately, so different presets makes no difference. Just like the row build commands mine.