Currently, when you tell a group of fabricators to cover a planet in mex, they will all work together to build single mex. This is horribly inefficient. I propose that when told to build structures that take small amounts of time to build (and are not defensive structures like turrets), fabricators should split up and attempt to construct them with multiple small groups of fabricators in order to reduce the amount of micro involved in building on an especially uncontested planet. If the structure is a T2 structure, then this might be slightly more complicated, as no more groups can be formed than there exist T2 fabricators in the whole selection of engineers, and each group must have at least one T2 fabricator. Alternately, or perhaps in addition to this: If you tell one group of fabricators to cover a planet in mex, and then tell another group of engineers to cover the same planet in mex, the second group of fabricators will do nothing, presumably because there is "nothing to do". I request that area building mex should not prevent other fabricators from construction structures that prevent the completion of the area build order (for some reason I don't always see the clear-white building placeholder when I queue up mex like this anyways, but other engineers still won't build on them).
Unless it changed in the last update, the second group will still go around building over the whole planet even though the first group is doing it too.
Ok, I have done some more thorough testing and found the results...Inconsistent. Sometimes I will be able to get two groups going, and the third will refuse to do anything, sometimes only one group. If I send just one group to mex the planet, some times I can send a smaller group to build a small clump of mex on that planet, and sometimes I cannot (depending on the mex, not the engineers involved I think). All of my attempts to do similar things with multiple groups of fabricators building on half of the planet have completely failed so far.
Last I remember, you can get another set of fabbers building planet-wide mex, but only if you haven't told them to do anything else first. If they're part-way through a queue, they adhere to the 'dibsey' the first lot of fabbers called and won't build (maybe it's the holding of shift that adheres to the 'dibsey'). I notice with some small planets, no queue still doesn;t allow you to planet-build mex with a separate fabber group, it may be because there aren't many mex on these planets. I'd like a modifier key which splits fabbers up when pressed while building a queue. It could be quite powerful and intuitive this way, allowing you to queue up all-build-one (current) and split-up builds in a single build queue. As an example: Select 5 fabbers Hold shift to start a queue Build a line of pgen Hold split-up modifier key Build a line of three laser towers and an umbrella Let go of split-up modifier key Build a row of factories Let go of shift Deselect units They would: All build the pgens together Split themselves evenly between all split up work, wrapping themselves round as necessary in the order the structures were queued (so, 2 fabbers on one laser tower, 1 fabber for the rest) When they had finished building their structure, they would move to the nearest structure yet to be completed (or started in the case of more split-up structures than fabbers in the selection) When all the laser towers and umbrella are finished (aka all split up work is done), they all start building the factories together (aka the non-split-up work)
I noticed this bug too. I just tested and this is the behaviour: If you select 1 group and let them build the planet, they will go. Then select the second group and let them build the planet will also work. But if you select a group and let them build one area while pressing shift, they won't build because it is taken (if a group is on its way to build the whole planet). Without shift, they will build this small area. The odd thing is, that as long as you tell them to build on the whole planet it doesn't matter if you hold shift or not. In short: Once you have a group building mex on the whole planet, you can't order a second group to build small spots while holding shift.
Also, if you have 2 groups building mex they won't realize when eachother have already built on a spot. So they'll walk back and forth to mex that are already built, wasting almost as much time as though you'd had a single group doing it.
That could (and should imo) be special-cased by devs in the future, for when you or your team have built/building a mex there. Mex points occupancy is a special case and a prime target for an array lookup. Code: want_to_build_at = 6; if ( not_occupied(want_to_build_at) ) { //move to mex point in preparation for building mex } else { //move to the next thing in the queue without mindlessly moving to the occupied mex point } tldr: The queue is smart when you queue up mex, the fabbers should also be smart when they come to build the mex.
