So…
It has been suggested that in order to allow things to ‘flow’ better, production slots should use up the resources to apply to the car at the start, rather than the end of the fitting cycle. Obviously this would allow more time for new resources to show up ready for the next cycle, and would thus be a more efficient way for the production line to work.
I assumed this would be a complete nightmare to implement, but it turns out its fairly easy and seems to work ok, although actually the difference is not earth shattering in terms of flow. (In certain case it may be more of a big deal than others, depending on the number of resources being used by the slot).
Anyway, I’m planning to put this into the next update, but as something that gets researched, as it makes for something interesting to research as an optimisation later in the game.
What I can’t decide yet is whether this ‘Predictive Stock Control’ should be a global upgrade, or one that is applied to each slot at a cost?
Interested to know peoples ideas on research (and maybe implementation) costs as well. I was thinking a high research cost (maybe 4,000 points?) and to put it in as a dependency on improved efficiency?