I want

[Gio2k]

to be able to assign 0 factories to my production orders.

[Ceadrath]

when it was first introduced in the beta you could.

but the fact that you could have multiple orders 90% finished with no factories assigned just waiting for you to get inc and finish them convinced them to (rightly so) change it.

As it is it's possible to lower the number of factories assigned to an order and keep it indefinetly in production by adding to it, making it difficult to gauge whether your going to get built on or not.

But at least having to have one factory assigned is better than being able to have none

[Mzyxptlk]

You can, although it's an unpredictable system. Basically, what you do is make more orders than you have factories. The game then assigns 1 factory to as many orders as possible, while giving all the others none. This is all behaviour that I'd expect of the game, so no problems here.

However.

When the first order finishes, the factory that was assigned to it does not automatically go to work on one of the never-ending ones. Instead, it just sits around doing nothing. So when all orders are finished, you have one or more orders in your production queue which never finish, with all the resource hiding related advantages that come with such an order.

The unpredictable part of this manouvre is that I haven't the faintest idea how the game decides which order to assign a factory to and which ones not. At first I thought it processed the biggest orders first (either value-wise or resource-wise), but it turned out this was not always the case. I'm not sure any more, but I think it wasn't done chronolically (neither first in first out, nor first in last out). At this moment I think it's done either randomly, or by number of PU still left on an order (meaning that a new small order could be prioritized over a massive order that is almost finished). In either case, I'm sure the persistent player could find a way to exploit this. Go go inspector Gadget!

[Ceadrath]

Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk

You can, although it's an unpredictable system. Basically, what you do is make more orders than you have factories. The game then assigns 1 factory to as many orders as possible, while giving all the others none. This is all behaviour that I'd expect of the game, so no problems here.

You can't have more orders than you have factories, you get this

Originally Posted by Production Page

You seem to be out of factories.

Which means that every order has to be assigned at least one factory.

[Mzyxptlk]

Ok, then forget everything I said!

[Nadar]

I memorized it already, mz

[Gio2k]

I love this system

Production Number xxx
Ship	Order (delivery in tick 256 at 12:00 on Tuesday)
Spectre	500
Frigate/Destroyer done: (0%) 0/63280 + 10000 in factory cost. 

Production Number yyy
Ship	Order (delivery in tick 246 at 02:00)
Spectre	500
Frigate/Destroyer done: (0%) 0/24096 + 10000 in factory cost.

weeeee!