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I think the animal changes a bit ago made for more choices. This combo is still too alike.

Since the Bison doesn't give the nice leather, perhaps also make it eat slightly less?

Was playing a cold/low food map and realized there was no standout in that category there.

[Preface]

UI/AI/Info Screens overlap. It is all about management that is fun, making interesting decisions vs management that is unfun, usually repetitive micromanagement, or management where finding the info to make the decision is annoying. There is usually a balance. I am probably more sensitive to it since age is starting to hit my hands.

Preface
I decided to write this up after one small change in test UI made me overly frustrated. It did increase micromanagement, and the one piece of info to help is not very visible on small UIs with many pawns. I think I overreacted to that one thing, but I realized I did it because I was playing unmodded to test and the overall amount of unfun management was much higher than before. Many fantasic new things and systems have been added in Royalty and 1.2. So my frustration isn't that the tools didn't exist before, but that they have not kept up.

But there's a mod for that. Yes! With great mod support from both the game and wonderful modders there probably is a mod for what annoys me. So, I counted my mods by category:

(Tools for Mods)
(aka Harmony)
4

Cosmetic & Customization
(Hairs/Textures/New Variantsd of Existing Items)
18

Additional Gameplay Elements
(aka Duns Bad Hygiene)
12

UI Pawn/Item Control Helper
(aka Reverse Commands/Locks/Complex Jobs/Cleaning Priority)
15

UI Added Info
(aka Bionic Icons/Menu & Info Panel Replacers/ Overlays)
18

The base tools are neutral, customization and new gameplay categories are always fun ways to expand. But about half of my mods address either micromanagement, or the need for non-frustrating access to the information to manage. That's ... a lot.

So now for ideas, or other game UI's to look at for ideas. I am not plugging the games, or their mechanics, just pointing to potential UI/AI/Info options.

AI can be a way to help limit micromanagement. Managing animals is one such. Dawn of Man will let you set limits for any animal type. It then generates jobs to slaughter the excess. Sometimes if the limit is low and misfortune kills your last male/female you have issues. Which is perfect. I would suggest perhaps a category of jobs on the butcher table. Or a bigger redesign of the Animals UI. Or rework their "Limits" system for Rimworld, they do it for items like the "Make Until You Have X" jobs on production stations. Where in Rimworld the limit is set per job per production item. They set the limits globally. So there is no redoing them when you add a new production station, or finding all the stations to reset all the limits manually. Same amount of management, much less clicking. What is odd is that Drug Usage is already this way in Rimworld, centrally managed.

Overlays. Starting to get bottom right bloat. Add useful mods and its bigger. Civ 6 Lenses is an overlay sub-menu for the map. Also they have a "Map Options". It may be time to make overlays a sub-menu. ONI's overlays menu is also good organization. While the room info has improved greatly in 1.2, it still lacks some information.

Better organization of ingame facts than "i" tab on everything. And/or links to wiki. ONI has in game database now, other games link to wikis. The "i" tab has a habit of telling me all the details except what I wanted to know. Like does a goat give milk? More than a yak? (and the wiki omits them too). Usually I rely on alt-tab and internet search to modders that parse files each update.

Sub-Menus off the Pawn control button in the bottom. Wow it's big now. Draft, Pyscasts two obvious candidates.

Where's the thing issues?
OK who's the pawn that has X Psycast, and is he drafted? click, click, click - Tribals and their tree ... everyone has many.
Prosthetics, labeling? how many of X do I have?
Where's the clothing, weapon I want? Do I have one? in a what materials?
Where are dead animals on the map? a red x is there but the small size and much scanning is ugh.
Who's drafted? windowed with many pawns that underline is just not visible.
Need some search functions, better labeling, more clear marking schemes in general.

Better selection of kind. You already have this as a UI scheme for selecting items on the ground. How about things like: double click a drafted pawn and select all other drafted pawns with same category weapon? (melee/ranged/none).

New games and resetting up all your drug schedules and production item job lists. Some ability to save across games and making production limits more like Drug Schedules and saving common lists.

So now I see why I went ARGH at just one tiny UI change adding some clicks. Catching the UI/AI/Info up to all the new complexity isn't a quick bugfix and is very unsexy coding. I know. But I'd love to see something to cut my mod list down in future QoL upgrades!

Any other specific ideas on handling UI, info availability, and organizing/removing the more repetitive management tasks?

There seem to be at least three variants of the deepsave/pawn structure not happy errors. Two are warnings, one is error. All three if the game is reloaded can cause issues with mods.

Also, if a mod touches a NPC pawn, or PC pawn with NPC social relationships to an NPC pawn after one of these messages, and before a full manual save and reload it will give more errors and those errors may cause the mod to misbehave. How depends on mod.

Manually saving and reloading, TWICE, fixes things up.

Here are three examples of the error messages, file is a copy of the inspection of error/message in the in-game console when you click on it, so you can see structures involved:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ZZ1yuL3dwjcbCps8NKFHdmKaP9OAYdeF
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FnGn5t3DG34_SJHL04xcfls7yLZRA2ng
https://drive.google.com/open?id=14Uo3ATyu4bROmpc1YlqGSRznWDMz6bcS
(all small)

Here is a full player log where I recreated two using a brand new game * running just Harmony, Core, Royalty, HugsLib. Could get errors (so mod wasn't causing), but no bad behavior as no mod also tried to use NPC pawn structures in unstable state. Log starts at game creation. You can see a couple of manual save & reloads.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1AKuwKSfhn23Q_FBaJnxZ3N0UQh3IMmUJ

This is a short video of how I created that game. PC pawns having relationships to NPC pawns greatly increases seeing this issue. "Left-Behind" pawns get used, so ...

https://youtu.be/yH20wmMHY4k

Triggers (several):
NPC pawn on map (visitor, raid, traders)
State change of NPC pawn (recuited)
State change of PC pawn with NPC relationships (death, error after reload with this 2x)

Gameplay Error Fires Delayed:
The trigger sets up the initial error/warning. But the fail ones happen after a reload, esp. if only autosave (aka running commitment which I do). Those errors look like this:

Could not resolve reference to object with loadID Thing_Human19758 of type Verse.Pawn. Was it compressed away, destroyed, had no ID number, or not saved/loaded right? curParent=WorkTab.PriorityManager curPathRelToParent=/Priorities/keys

Not to pick on WorkTab, that is just the first mod I saw it with. It became a ghost error, recreating on any mod that uses PC or NPC pawn structures based on if it tried to use one after a trigger but before a manual save and reload patched it up.

Also helpful in forcing it: Increase autosave interval!

trigger event -> error gen for data deepsave/pawn structure -> autosave -> game touches that item

You want that chain to happen.

Games continue to run, some mods may hiccup. As I said before manual save & reload 2x, forces cleanup and all is happy after that.

* This test game was run after unsubbing to all mods, and uninstalling RimWorld via Steam. Then going to Steam and AppData folders and deleting all Ludeon, RimWorld and workshop files. Then restarting PC, and reinstalling just RimWorld, Harmony and HugsLib. Should be zero change of artifacts near as I can control.

Update 1:
Running a new game with only Core and Royalty, I was able to get this error to show:
Reserving with maxPawns > 1 and stackCount = All; this will not have a useful effect (suppressing future warnings)

I have not seen the other two yet. If I run it longer through some deaths and more raids, and don't see them by later today this is maybe a combo base & mods bug. Where 1 of the 3 pops in base and the other two when Harmony/Hugslib are loaded.

Update 2: The no tools (Core Royalty only) eventually (hours) later gave me another deep save warn about load, warn at load combo. The array index one didn't fire, so that may be tool or tools after these. Here is full log, pretty boring for several hours. But you'll see the two errors like the ones I saw before.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=10IJFaWghAHzoP4VVMWiQSt9_XxOAgCZ3

The two food item errors are, I think boring, or amusing. Someone went and ate the food another pawn wanted to feed a prisoner. Twice!

I am unsure what steps bugged it, and since I play Commitment I no longer have a save with it borked. Also, a combo of remaking the area (same shape) and reloading game fixed the pathing issue.

Make a zone with this type of shape:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IEqiPwioiDWQ-Say2Bbu6JeYDoQ2R627

Restrict animals to it, esp. ones that need to graze. After some time some will starve and you'll notice they are only wandering in the small end and no longer pathing through the corridor part of area to the outside areas. I think some were sleeping outside too (animal beds were inside) but they weren't starving. Game was running several hours before it started. Construction was done in building area, but path was not blocked (no doors forbidden, etc) when I noticed the bug. Was in a bigger game than the one shown to make a sample shaped area, so also I had maybe 50+ animals in that game (bird spam) most not in affected zone. So my first guess maybe performance tuning pruning on pathing? But maybe contructing/deleting in area caused a viable open path after construction finished to not be detected?

No errors in logfile.

I suspect this may be hard to reproduce, but want to mention it shows again.