Paul
Is there a reason why basic production runs before mass production?

It would be nice if this was reversed so the mass production runs first.

Why? ... well

Mass production would then have priorty on ore usage

And more the reason why I'm suggesting it:
It would allow basic production to pick up any unused bp capacity.

Unfortunatly I tried doing this in its current order which uses the bp capacity and leaves the mass production unable to work as you exceed the limit and hence waste that production for the week.
ptb
Hmm I wouldn't want this as I often use basic production to insert urgent needs before mass production steals all my resources. Maybe basic production could be grouped into pre/post mass production, or is that adding too much complexity? smile.gif

Being able to reorder mass productions would be nice. Often my JIT style production lines get messed up and I find I'm producing what I need just after the things that need them.
Steve-Law
QUOTE
Hmm I wouldn't want this as I often use basic production to insert urgent needs before mass production steals all my resources.
It's a good point, but what if it only ran any mass production before basic production where the items are the same?

I agree with both points but on balance I'd say its better to let basic run first for this reason. Then you just need to make sure you clear the item from basic once the mass production has tooled (this just happened to me this very week - mass prod came on line and reported not enough BP capacity, I nearly put in a bug report until I saw this post and realised I still had the item in my basic queue).
ptb
QUOTE (Steve-Law @ Jan 13 2005, 10:57 AM)
but what if it only ran any mass production before basic production where the items are the same?

That makes sense, satisfises both the requirements of urgent building, assuming your not urgently building something your mass producing, and that of allowing basic production to pick up any unused bp capacity.

Not sure how easy that would be for them to implement, all depends on the current system I guess.
Frabby
I'd like to see an order to swap mass production lines, much as you can do with standing orders, and standard production to be one of them (i.e. like a mass-production line).

This would, for example, allow a mass production line on light alloys to be put on top, followed by one doing a BP, then comes general production which could use up the remaining allowance from the BP and build other stuff where it has precedence over all the other MP lines for rare ores, finally the other MP lines kick in. I guess with such an order available, most of my starbases would look pretty much like this.