The Order Board

Heroes in this mod do not run a private script each. They all read one queue.

The Order Board is that queue: a faction posts work, and any hero of that faction who can reach it may claim it. It is the reason two admirals of the same faction do not both fly to the same emergency, and the reason a hero who is idle is genuinely idle rather than waiting on a timer.

It is also the mod’s best debugging surface, so it ships as a screen you can open.

The inspector

The board is read-only in the UI. You cannot post a task, cancel one, or steer a hero from here. What you get is the truth of what the AI is currently working on.

The footer is the honest summary of the whole mod at that moment: 45 heroes, 20 factions, 1026 live tasks.

Two things in that list are worth reading twice. The Xenon are carrying 233 tasks against 4 heroes — a faction generating far more work than it can staff, which is what a front line looks like from the inside. The Yaki have 3 tasks and one hero, which is what a faction with almost no territory looks like.

One faction’s board

Click a faction and the work is grouped into sections.

The split is not cosmetic. A task is typed to an archetype and only that archetype claims it. A raider will never pick up station duty, and an admiral will never run a saboteur job — so the Pirate/Raider section here is empty not because anything is wrong, but because the Teladi employ no raiders.

There are only three section headings, and the mod has five archetypes that produce work. What that costs the screen is worth reading before you take the first heading at face value.

The Active heroes table below is the other half of the picture: it shows what each hero actually decided, which is how you catch a hero idling next to a board full of work it cannot reach.

A single task

Drill once more and you get the rows themselves.

Five columns, and each one answers a question you would otherwise have to guess at:

Column	What it tells you
ID	The task’s identity. It is stable, so you can watch one task across several visits.
Target / Sector	What the work is about and where.
Status / Claimant	open with no name, or in progress with the hero who took it.
Prio	The score the claim is decided on. Highest wins.
Age	How long it has been on the board. A high age on an open task means nobody can reach it.

That priority is a fraction, not a rank — 5.65625 here. Scores are computed, not assigned, so two tasks of the same kind still order deterministically against each other.

How a hero picks

The claim is the whole decision model, and it is short:

1. Filter the board to this hero’s faction.
2. Filter to tasks that are reachable — the hero’s current sector, plus faction-owned sectors one cluster away.
3. Filter to status == 'open', plus the task this hero already holds.
4. Take the highest priority survivor, mark it in_progress, and stamp it with the hero’s key and the claim time.

Step 3 reads like a technicality and is a scar. The scan originally matched open only — but claiming sets in_progress, so on the very next tick a hero could not see its own task, the lookup returned nothing, and the hero fell through to other behaviour. A hero abandoned the job it had just taken, every tick, because the filter that found work excluded work in progress.

Reachability in step 2 is why the board can be long and a hero still idle. Work three jumps away is not a task that hero has; it is a task somebody else will take.

The 31 task types

Five archetypes produce and claim work. The board, however, has three sections — and that mismatch is the one thing to understand before reading the screen.

Admiral — 6

Type		Type
station	station duty	urgent_defense	urgent defence
fishing	fishing	hunting	hunting
recon	recon	satellite	satellite

Coordinator — 8

Type		Type
emergency	emergency	defensive_dismantle	defensive dismantle
invasion	invasion	fishing	fishing
defensive_repair	defensive repair	satellite	satellite
defensive_build	defensive build	recon	recon

Pirate raider — 8

Type		Type
trader_ambush	trader ambush	saboteur_run	saboteur run
fishing	fishing	base_reinforce	base reinforce
satellite	satellite deploy	base_build	base build
recon	recon	joint_raid	joint raid

Kha’ak — 9

These are not faction work. The whole block is written only when a faction has a Kha’ak hive lord or seeder, and each type is claimable by one of them alone.

Hive lord — 4		Seeder — 5
swarm_summon	swarm summon	small_resonance	small resonance
gate_defense	gate defence	big_resonance	big resonance
call_for_help	call for help	system_resonance	system resonance
fleet_defense	fleet defence	hive_development	hive development
		expansion	expansion

Four names repeat across archetypes — fishing, satellite and recon for the admiral, the coordinator and the raider alike. The same word is a different task. A raider’s satellite deploy is not an admiral’s satellite; they are separate rows on the board, produced by different planners, and claimable only by their own archetype.

Why the screen says otherwise

The board prints three sections — Order types, Coordinator order types, Pirate / Raider order types — from a field on each declared row. There is no Kha’ak section, so all nine Kha’ak types carry that field set to admiral and appear under the first heading.

That heading is wrong for them, and it is a display bug rather than a design. No Argon admiral has ever summoned a swarm or tuned a resonance; the claim for every one of those nine is gated on the hero being a Kha’ak hive lord or seeder. You only ever see them on the Kha’ak faction’s own page, where the section label is the only misleading thing on screen.

The tables above are grouped by the archetype that actually does the work, taken from those claim gates rather than from the section field.

Reading the board as a diagnostic

The inspector was built to answer questions about the AI that no log line answers well:

• A hero is idle and the board is long. Look at the sectors: the work is out of reach, not being ignored.
• A faction’s task count climbs and never falls. It is generating work faster than its hero cap can absorb — the cap arithmetic is on the hero pool screen.
• A task’s age keeps growing while it stays open. Nobody of the right archetype is near it. The Teladi raider section above is the extreme case: no raiders, so raider work would sit forever.
• Two heroes, one target. Should be impossible; the claim is exclusive. If you ever see it, it is a bug worth reporting.

Honest list

• The board is read-only. By design for now: the queue is the AI’s, and a player-editable queue is a different feature with different failure modes.
• ⚠ The Kha’ak types are printed under the admiral heading. A real display bug: the board has three section headings and five archetypes produce work, so the nine hive lord and seeder types are declared into the admiral section for want of anywhere else. Only the label is wrong — the claim gates are correct, and no admiral can take one.
• Priority is not explained in the UI. You see the number, not its terms. That is deliberate while the weights are still being tuned — a documented formula that then changes is worse than a visible score.
• Counts are live, not historical. The screen shows what is on the board now. Completed tasks leave it, and their record goes to the hero’s chronicle instead.
• Per-faction pages are registered lazily. A faction’s detail page exists after you first open it, so a fresh session registers them as you browse. This is a Simple Menu API constraint, not a choice.