QUEUE SYSTEMS
Ordered production pipelines — crafting queues that process jobs sequentially, build queues in factories and cities, research queues advancing while you look elsewhere — letting players batch intentions instead of issuing them one at a time.
- SOLO-DEV COST LOW
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN RTS · COLONY-SIM · 4X · AUTOMATION
RTS production queues are the foundational case (StarCraft's five-unit barracks queue versus queue-free APM purism is ancient competitive theory), colony sims queue work orders with counts and conditions ('make shirts until 10 exist' — RimWorld's bills), 4X research queues chain decades of science, and MMO crafting queues convert materials into overnight batches. Designers add queues because repeated identical decisions aren't decisions: once the player has decided to build twenty marines, making them click twenty times is friction masquerading as engagement, and the queue converts intention into standing order — freeing attention for choices that still matter. Queues also encode planning skill: a well-ordered research queue is strategy authored in advance, and conditional queues (maintain-quantity bills) are the gateway to automation thinking. But queue depth is a real competitive design question: queued production is capital sitting idle (resources banked in queue aren't working), so RTS design deliberately punishes deep queues, making queue discipline a skill. Key decisions: queue depth limits and their economic meaning, reordering and cancellation fluidity (a queue you can't edit is a trap), conditional versus fixed-count entries, and visibility — progress, time estimates, and blockage reasons (missing materials) surfaced or hidden. Pitfall: the silently stalled queue — a production line that stopped three hours ago for want of one ingredient, with no alert, converts the player's trust in delegation into a betrayal discovered at the worst moment; queues are promises, and a queue system without failure notifications is a promise-breaking machine.