Meat of the suggestion is bolded and painted in eye-rape orange for your tl;dr convienience.Isn't it kind of odd that a newcomer to your colony is allowed virtually everywhere in the settlement, can knock himself out with all the booze, food and drugs he wants, and doesn't even have to lift a finger to get it?
So I suggest a completely optional feature, something that you CAN use but don't have to - caste/rank system.
- Tribals would have castes, while spacers would have ranks. They should be highly customizable if-then scenarios for colonists, for example:
Tribal settlement has a newcomer - D, the settlement already has A, B and C which are in founder caste (or whatever the player picks, really); D has to do something to be accepted into a higher caste, for example, spend x amount of time in the colony, or cut down x amount of trees, or earn x amount of money. Castes could be customized into what areas they can or can not access (this is important for the information part, keep this in mind), what food they can or can not eat, drugs, et cetera. - Another point - money. Ever since A16, I have thousands upon thousands of silvers laying around in my vault with little to no use. An in-colony economy would be very nice thing to have.
A well organized settlement could dispense silver from high ranks to lower ranks for work they do, in turn they could buy items from other colonists, food, drugs and so on; essentially flowing the money within the colony - a completely optional feature, keep that in mind. You could still run a communist wetdream colony if you so wish. - Third point is co-jointed: spies and information dissemination. A new guy comes in from God knows where, just waltzes straight into your base past your defenses, grabs a meal from the fridge, smokes a joint and then plops down on his new bed, wait what? Is that really how it works in real life?
Spies: A small chance for a wanderer/converted prisoner to be a spy/double agent. A player would have to be on a lookout for suspicious activity, such as hanging around important areas for apparently no reason (could turn the obnoxious random BZZT and break downs into a predictable, avoidable events) or walking into storage areas, stealing resources and then disappearing, because you were too careless to just welcome everyone into your colony as if they were a part of your family right off the bat. To balance this, spies would have a hidden patience value and hidden objectives, such as stealing x amount of money or a specific item, sabotaging something et cetera. Such patience value would reset back to 100 every time an objective is completed. Once patience would reach 0, the spy would do something drastic that would reveal him, such as taking as much stuff as they can and bolting it. But would spies be simple thieves? No - information dissemination: - Every time you steal an organ from a prisoner deep inside the colony where only your doctor and the unfortunate victims are, the entire colony instantly woes over the poor raider that got his kidney stolen, despite the doctor not talking to anybody and the prisoner presumably being too unconscious to scream at the top of his lungs about it - it makes no sense.
Hence, information dissemination feature should be added to customize who is allowed to talk about what. X rank can only talk about Y with Z, but they can't with A or B. Doubly, only witnessing events such as organ harvesting should be known by the witnesses - this ties to previous part about restricted access, you do not want your disposable goons to know you are running an organ harvesting operation, do you?
Alcohol and top secret stuff does not mix well - restricted information might slip out when someone who knows something secret is drunk or drugged and has a social talk, or if the person is truthful (new trait, for example) they just can't keep quiet about the inhuman raider-genocide human meat-to-kibble organ harvesting monstrosities he's being forced to do. - But this is only the colonist part, what about spies?
Spies would gather information about defenses (by witnessing them, traps, turrets and so on), about storage places (by walking into them, overhearing a talk, being told about them, et cetera) and high value targets (silver, gold, AI cores) again, by witnessing them or being told. - But how is this relevent to anything? It would require some work to change how raids work - raiders could come unprepared or prepared. An unprepared raid would be similar to what we have now, a headless chicken raid where the raiders don't really know what to do so they beat up a bunch of doors and maybe kidnap some unfortunate colonists. Prepared raiders would be the real threat to a late game colony - raiders would EXACTLY know what they want to get, they would have secondary objectives, they would know what paths to use, what paths to avoid, the weaknesses, defenses, traps and they would know how many men to bring and what weapons to use - however, that would rely on spies heavily. A thwarted, captured spy is of no use to them, and dead men tell no tales. The only way to be safe from extremely dangerous, prepared and planned raiders would be to find and deal with seemingly unimportant spies - which can be kept at bay by either designing a well-oiled machine which keeps itself in check, or constant vigilance and attention from the player.
Also raids get boring later in the game so this would spice things up.
Thoughts, suggestions? Something to add? This is a lot of work to potentially do, so I don't expect it to be done for A17, even A18 is optimist outlook, but it would be game-changing features.