Secondary Crafting is Highly Suboptimal

[macdjord]

Under the current system, autocraft will craft a secondary resource whenever the amount of that resource you have stockpiled is less than X% of the amount of the source resource you have stockpiled, where X is an adjustable percentage common to all secondary resources.

Unfortunately, this results in highly disproportionate crafting of the various secondary resources, because they each require different amounts of their respective primary resource per unit crafted. For instance, in my current game, I have a craft effectiveness of +612%. As a result, 13% of my steal income gets converted into gears, while 66% of it gets converted into alloy - but just over 99% of my slab production gets converted into concrete, because it takes so many slabs to make a single unit of concrete.

A much better way to determine how much of each secondary resource to craft would be this:

• Check how much of the required primary resource is currently stockpiled
• Calculate how much of the secondary resource could be manufactured if you converted it all right now. (Be sure to account for the current workshop craft effectiveness as well as the base ration of primary resource to secondary resource.)
• Multiply this number by the set secondary crafting percentage
• If the current stockpile of the secondary resource is less than the calculated amount, take the difference and craft that much of the secondary resource

The end result of this new algorithm would be that, over the long run, if you set your secondary craft ratio to X%, then X% of your income of each primary resource will be converted into the secondary resource.

[macdjord]

It would also be nice if we could set the %age separately for the different resources - I need a lot more alloy than I do gears, for instance - but that's less important.