Dalas120 This probably isn't necessary for prototype 5 PD, since they use 1/10(?) the power of 0.14.4. But if PD power consumption goes up then I agree with letting them store 2 batteries.
Prototype 5 PD uses 150 power/second, 0.14.4 uses 500 power/second.
Note that PD power refilling works a little different than most other parts. Most parts won't demend more power until they've spent half a battery, so that crew will be less likely to drop off and waste more power than it needs. But since PD only hold a single battery, having it only demand power once it spends half a battery would cause it to go offline frequently, so PD demands power the moment it uses any.
Dalas120 HE missiles could possibly work if they only shot off 1 missile at a time, so if the factory is close they would only demand ~4 crew, and if the factory is far the launcher would empty out and demand all 12 crew.
Unless I misunderstand what you mean, that's how they work in Prototype 5. (1.5 second cooldown time between each missile, though whether that's long enough I'm not sure.)
Dalas120 How do crew currently decide on jobs? Maybe there's some way to set up priorities where if I put 8 crew near this launcher and 8 crew near that launcher, they'll divide evenly (and some will still remember to power the factories/shields).
Basically every job has a priority, and for ammo/power fetch jobs, the priority scales linearly with remaining capacity (and taking into consideration any ammo/power that is scheduled to be dropped off by other crew), so that a weapon at full capacity would have 0 priority and an empty weapon would have 100 priority. And now, as of the 0.14.5 prototypes, there's a 10% priority penalty per tile of distance that the crew would have to walk to get to the new job. So if the missile launchers were far enough apart, the crew would usually only switch when they had literally nothing else to do.
Dalas120 Related: do empty parts need to have greater crew priority than full parts? I agree they should demand greater numbers of crew, but them having higher priority causes problems like the small cannon thing I talked about in the last post.
Yes for sure, that's how crew will self-balance when there are fewer crew than there are jobs. Without the scaling priorities, you could have 8 crew get assigned to one part and 0 to the other.
FWIW, factories have twice the priority as weapons. (Meaning, a half-powered factory has the same priority as an empty weapon.)
The cannon problem you mention might indicate that the priorities between weapons and factories aren't balanced properly. Perhaps the high end of the priority range could be increased to even more than twice that of weapons, or even the low end could be increased so that a 99% full factory would still have higher priority than an empty weapon (though I suspect that'd be too extreme).
