Messages

Research direction should be more vague, unless the researcher has high enough research skill, or unless you have a colonist with a high-enough related skill to think of the idea. Or maybe you can find "lost technology manual" items to reveal a research topic to you, and maybe boost research on that particular topic.

If none of your colonists "think of an idea" then you can still research them, but you have to do "exploratory research" in one of the larger categories to discover the idea first.

Of course you'd probably want to rebalance how long it takes to research each topic.

For example, just using existing research options, it could be like:

Food Improvements
----------------------------------------------------------
- Hydroponics          (thought of by colonists with 9 growing)
- Nutrient resynthesis    (thought of by colonists with 6 cooking, 5 research)
- Fertilizer pump       (thought of by colonists with 5 growing, 5 construction)

Social
----------------------------------------------------------
- Crematorium         (thought of by colonists with 6 social, 3 construction)
- Cryptosleep Caskets      (thought of by colonists with 9 research)
- Carpet Making         (thought of by colonists with 5 construction, 4 social)
- Colored Lights         (thought of by colonists with 6 research, 5 social)

Economy
----------------------------------------------------------
- Geothermal Power      (thought of by colonists with 5 construction, 5 mining, 6 research)
- Pneumatic Picks      (thought of by colonists with 8 mining)
- Electric Smelting      (thought of by colonists with 8 craftsmanship)
- Machining         (thought of by colonists with 7 craftsmanship, 8 research)
- Tailoring            (thought of by colonists with 7 craftsmanship)

Medical/Military
----------------------------------------------------------
- Hospital Beds         (thought of by colonists with 7 Medical)
- Gun Turret Cooling      (thought of by colonists with 6 shooting, 5 research)
- Mortars            (thought of by colonists with 8 shooting)

etc.

Hiding research options like this will also make it possible to add in more powerful options with less chance of unbalancing the game, since you can control how likely or how quickly a player will be able to obtain them.

Small useful bots to do "dumb labor" and other unskilled manual labor things. They should still take an expensive AI chip or something, but surely we can make Roombas or auto-tree-choppers or hauling bots that can't improve themselves the way Colonists can, but that can still do cleaning/plant-cutting/hauling chores?

The bandit idea is really cool! I'd say bandits should show up without a notification/warning, unless they happen to be not particularly sneaky ones.

+1 on queued prioritization.

The default/non-manual AI should also choose the next task in a far better way, i.e. if your next task is a construct/deconstruct task, do the next-physically-closest one, rather than the next-oldest-order.

I hate telling a colonist to prioritize building something only to have them bring all the materials for it, then run off and do something completely different elsewhere, leaving no construction done at all. They also will finish one section of a wall and then run away.


There needs to be some kind of detection of "the rest of the job," i.e. nearby tasks that are similar to the one the colonist just finished.

As far as AI goes, when colonist A overrides colonist B's task, colonist B should look for similar tasks in the vicinity (maybe a 5-10 square radius of his original task).

I guess mostly I'm going for something that is much faster to interpret visually. At the moment I just nickname everyone something relevant to what they do, but if I could, in a few seconds, get a full analysis of which jobs/roles I have filled, I'd spend much less time with the game paused just scrolling through my colonists. Often my colonists aren't particularly amazing at anything just yet and I still want to make them focus.

Another thing along these lines that would be AMAZING: Once you have colonists displayed at the top of the screen like in EdB's interface mod, below each colonist have three tiny icons indicating their top/best 3 skills, sorted left to right.

Any chance an Alpha 8 version is in the works?

Windows should also let in light. There's no reason every indoor space should be dark during the daytime without electricity.

This would mostly be a cosmetic change in the game.

Add a number of icons that can be overlaid on the Overview or otherwise on any given colonist, to allow players to identify quickly which role they have decided they want that colonist to play, without reevaluating their skills. Especially with higher populations this will be very useful, with a high payoff for implementation difficulty.

Icons could be simple things like a gun, a leaf, a hammer, a flexing-bicep-arm, a speech bubble, a shovel, a frying pan, a chef's hat, a graduation-cap with tassel, a bow-and-arrow, a butcher's knife, a police badge, a red cross, etc.

Just add several colorings of each of the above and you've got a ton of icons without much extra work. I'd be willing to do artwork for it, even, but I don't know how to do vector artwork .

Is bumping bug posts bad? (*bump*)

This bug is very irritating.

+1

This may be related to or combined with the "Override" suggestion, which is also fairly popular.

Very cheap: Hotkeys should be a small number of keys across all menus/situations. Even better would be allowing the player to map hotkeys as he or she chooses. What I mean is that it should be easier to use hotkeys without looking down at the keyboard or moving your hand from the mouse and/or from the WASD position.

Less cheap (unless you get permission from EdB to pull code directly?) would be to basically adopt all of the interface improvements in the EdB interface mod.