Saripul on Thu Aug 19, 2010 4:17 am
Also, keep your total population per colony to a multiple of 25.
The math seems to be set at 25/3 food (or water) produced per worker in a food (or water) facility. This is why for every 25 workers total, 3 must be in a food (and another 3 in water) facility. When you multiply 25/3 times 3, this "clears the denominator, resulting in simply 25 food produced by three workers. This game seems to be plagued by integer to float to integer conversions, among other things, so it is in our interest to keep the tiny decimals straight, or pay the price.
A change a couple of months ago which helped speed up the scripts for colonies *seems* to have included setting the value of 8.33333 as a substitute for doing the math 25/3 somewhere in the script. The problem is that 8.3333333333333333 no matter how many threes, is never quite equal to 25/3.
A pop. 500 colony has 20 "units" of 25 workers each.
If I take 8.3333 * 20, I get 166.666 from my desktop calculator. If instead I take (20* 25)/3 , I get 166.66666666666667, on the same calculator. If I subtract one from the other, I get a difference which should not exist in a well-designed program. Depending on the program flow, this can result in you not providing 0.0003 enough food, which will cascade into another Guyana.
If you take numbers which are not multiples of 25 and multiply them, the problem gets worse.
This may have been resolved already, as I have not heard of issues that I can definitely pin on this in quite a while. And it doesn't happen to me anymore regardless, because I keep my stuff on the 25s.