Failed orders and behaviors: A potential positive

[builder680]

I'll state right up front that I've said multiple times that I don't want this info cluttering my UI. It's annoying extra information that by the time it becomes ubiquitous/important, it's just UI bloat. I hate it, and if I had the option to turn it off or delete it, I would, IN A HEARTBEAT. Even with everything I say next, I still want rid of it. I don't care if you failed a trade or a behavior, DON'T NOTIFY ME WITH A GIANT ORANGE FONT. I DON'T FREAKING CARE.

BUT...

It has helped me in a new game to streamline production and delivery. I will watch as ships pile up with these notifications, and it has trained me not to throw more freighters and miners at factories that simply don't have the production capacity to use them. I'll unassign these ships as found, and reassign as needed (or just put of into a pool of future use). This of course requires the use of a spreadsheet (I made my own but there are many available to download), and combined with a wares flowchart, allows you to stop "throwing ships at the problem" and actually solve bottlenecks at their source. I've seen that doing so sometimes requires multiple hours of real-life time for the simulation to resolve these bottlenecks (even if it's obvious what the problem is), but it DOES eventually do so. I know this because I have watched it happen at multiple economic tiers over multiple real-life days. I've re-assigned multiple dozens of freighters and miners thanks to this.

It's damned annoying... but it's also kind of neat. It made me learn some things. I'd still rather be rid of them, though. I guess that's what they call cognitive dissonance. I hate it, but I still appreciate that I have learned from it. If you work to remove these notifications from the very beginning of a game (and you will encounter them by the dozens as you scale your empire), you will gain a better balanced economy in the end. It's a giant headache though. I'd rather just be rid of them, honestly. The biggest problem is they don't have a timestamp or a reason, so you can't trace the problem to its source except by watching your entire supply chain over large amounts of time, and comparing to trade rules. Which gets old very fast.