[glob2-devel] Inn maintenance bug

[Andrew Sayers]

Workers have some sort of order in which they prefer to do jobs, and it
seems that their most preferred job is to maintain inns.  In fact, they
will even wait to fill up an inn rather than do other jobs.  This might
apply to other jobs too, but I don't know enough about the pecking order
to do a proper test.  I suspect this is what's happening:

Inns need to be constantly topped up with wheat, and workers are
employed to do this.  When an inn is almost full, new workers are turned
away rather than risk overfilling the inn.

The worker then starts looking for a job (and is listed as such).  Since
its most preferred type of work is inn maintenance, it will look for
those jobs first.  The worker might find another inn to work on, or
might find the same one again, at which point it applies for the job, is
turned away, and starts looking again from the start.  Since the glob
never counts as employed by the inn, the inn can hold any number of
workers idle - potentially far more than it is allowed to employ.

Normally, this is only a temporary problem - if the inn is filled up for
even a moment, the workers will find other jobs to do.
However, heavily used inns can remain in a perpetual state of
almost-fullness.  I've not checked this properly yet, but I suspect that
this situation can cause all workers to gradually become idle, unable to
do any work other than maintaining inns.

I've only got quite a sketchy idea of the details of this problem - I
can do some more tests/thoughts if it would be helpful to anyone going
after this bug.

One important effect of/workaround for this bug: if you are in the
middle of a large game and notice a lot of your workers seem to be idle,
set all of your inns to 0 workers for a moment, then back to normal.
Unless your colony is seriously overworked, the inns will quickly
recover and the idle workers will find real jobs.

        - Andrew