All in the title,

I think even if primary entity are maxed they should still have milestone that allow them to give a chance to secondary entity to get upgraded.

Totally happy to have that as an option to for players to configure.

The way it works now, assemblers that can still be upgraded will generate credits as a ratio of assemblers to secondary units. The maxed entities don't affect that ratio. So a player just needs to have a single upgradeable assembler and it can drive upgrades for the entire base.

For example, 2 un-maxxed assembler and 10,000 un-maxxed secondary entities == 5,000 upgrade credits for the secondaries each time one of those assemblers earn an upgrade credit.

But... I could see having the maxed out units continue to earn credits. It might lower the progression rate since more assemblers mean a lower ratio, and any that are idle also aren’t helping. But it's nice having the mod highly configurable so players can choose what they want.

I mentioned in the other thread that I'm traveling, but I'm happy to review/accept a patch if you feel inspired! Are you on discord? I'm happy to chat about it too. I might be able to take a look in a few days.

The code is structured well for this change, got a patch done at the airport. But I want to do a quick test before releasing it.

I've been trying to come up with a clear tooltip to explain how this works, and I think it's illustrating that the original design is flawed. I think assemblers and furnaces at max quality should always stay counted.

Here's what I came up with for the tooltip setting:

Max quality assemblers still contribute:
When enabled, assemblers and furnaces at maximum quality will continue tracking manufacturing hours and generating upgrade credits for secondary entities (like inserters, beacons, etc.), even though they cannot upgrade further themselves.

Enabled (default): Max quality assemblers continue generating upgrade credits for secondary entities. This can provide steady progress for secondary entities in the late game.

Disabled: Only low quality assemblers and furnaces that can still upgrade generate credits, but they are generated as a ratio to the secondary entities that still need upgrades. In an extreme case, this means a single low quality assembler could advance an entire factories secondary entities.

It seems a little ridiculous for a single low quality entity to drive change for an entire factory, it seems a lot more natural for an advanced factory to upgrade entities at a steady rate.

Steady rate make way more sense for me like "every X I can give a chance to upgrade Y thing" the question is how many, most assembler have at least 2-3 inserters, two electric pole. So maybe like 5 credits ?

got a patch done at the airport

LooooooL

but I'm happy to review/accept a patch if you feel inspired! Are you on discord? I'm happy to chat about it too.

I sux so hard in lua :p I will if needed do some PR. I'm on discord same name, Stargateur

Yeah the steady rate makes sense to me too. It's funny how a design seems obvious once you finally get to it.

most assembler have at least 2-3 inserters, two electric pole

Yes, the quality change attempts to generate at each threshold was a tricky number to set. I tried a few different approaches, a fixed number, an average rate that assemblers were achieving, and an exponential weighted average over time... they all had major trade offs. Finally settled on a dynamic ratio of primary entities to secondary ones. This adjusts naturally to different build styles, and can handle any combination of settings being turned on or off. It keeps the overall upgrades evenly distributed among things that are enabled. So if a player has 1:2 ratio of assemblers to inserters, for each 1 assembler upgrading, there would be 2 inserters upgrading.

Although... now that max quality assemblers can continue contributing, the ratio is less important. It was needed to get the base to the max quality at about the same rate as the assemblers, but if assemblers can keep working... then I can definitely see an argument for a different approach. I think the main thing I was worried about was that legendary buildings with beacons can get extremely fast, so would pull the rest of the base up with them too quickly. Balancing this mod is hard!

Release 1.4.0 adds a setting to enable entities to keep generating upgrade credits. Thanks for bringing this up!