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Normally, when playing, I have a default set of priorites that I set my colonists based on what skills they are good at. Pawns with high skills in some areas will have high priorities in that skill.

but sometimes, certain situations occur that require me to override this default behavior

-I want to mine deep into a mountain
--now I gotta go down my list and prioritize everyone to mine

-oh my god there are rock chunks all over my mountain base
--now I gotta go down my list and prioritize hauling

-toxic fallout just happened.
--I need to make stop all my colonists from hunting


what would be great is a row of checkboxes above the list of colonists that is an override list.

first, they will all be red Xs signifying that no overrides are active, but you can set any column to any priority level and it will override all pawns to accept whatever prioritization value you set.

when you change that override back to a red X, pawns will revert to their default priorties

screenshot example:

I dont know if its just because enemies are buffed, doors are nerfed, or my base this time around was unorthodox, but since Alpha 5, Ive been having very poor user experiences with time control in combat situations.

It feels like time is forced to slow in situtations where it shouldnt be and is not forced to slow in situations when it should.

When a squirrel decides to attack my colony, it is painful to sit and watch the boxing match between a colonist and the squirrel. This poses virtually zero threat. Why am I locked to 1x speed?

similarly, when being seiged, sometimes I have higher priority construction I need to handle before I can take on the besiegers. being mostly locked at 1x speed is kind of painful when 90% of the time they are waiting for their mortars to reload.

in contrast, raiders just drop pod'd into my base. I am currently in the middle of mass construction jobs and am running at max speed. In less than a second (or at least before Ive had time to notice the flashing red envelope), the raiders tear through my doors, run amok in my base and start beating up my colonists. And then NOW the speed drops to x1 when its already too late. My colonists are all spread out around my base and one of them is likely almost dead before I even notice they are here.

I suggest some freeing up of the  time options and more helpful  notifications.

Perhaps when a critical notification occurs (red envelope or notification that raiders are done preparing and beginning their assault), the game pauses. This ensures that the player is aware of what just happened and has time to decide what to do. At this point, the player is free to resume the speed they were previously playing at, or just it to their preference according to the situation. This provides the user with both the notification they need, as well as allow them to decide for themselves what the threat level is. If its a squirrel, the player can draft a single colonist to punch it to death and then go back to full speed to get work done. if its an angry raider ball of death, they can take it slow.

I assume the reason that it is forced to 1x is to ensure the user is aware that combat is occurring and to allow the user a slower pace so commands can be issued. Having the game pause but unlock the speed settings gives us the notification - the pause - yet the ability to go back to whatever speed we find to be most convenient or useful to us. Sure, we could resume at 3x speed and the murder ball of raiders could trample us, but we were aware of the threat when the game paused. We lost because of a decision we made. Not due to game unfairness (drop podding at 3x speed and blowing through base before human reaction can kick in).

That was a bit longer winded than I intended, but has anyone else had this experience?

Since this was Randy and I did not last 50 days, I did not post this in the difficulty thread for 4e, but I found this amusing.
This is day 2

One thing I noticed is that haulers will tend to drop off materials in stockpiles in such a way that I seem to have a lot of small piles of food instead of filling a stack to 75 before starting another stack. This causes the chef to make two trips to my food storage pile - even when I only have potatoes in storage (e.g. I have lots of stacks of < 10 potatoes. The chef will grab one pile, bring it to the stove, and make another trip to grab more potatoes).

I think there are at least two ways to improve this.

1) have haulers prioritize in maxing out a stack in storage before starting a new one
2) have chefs pick up all the materials they need before going to the stove (similar to how haulers will grab multiple stacks of materials until they are full before they go to storage). However for the more complicated meals this might not be possible since they require two different ingredients and I think colonists can only carry a single type of item right now.

[Oafs]

I mentioned this in a small topic about showing equipped items on the overview, but since I hear Tynan appears to already be on that, it seems that topic might be low visibility.


I think it would be great to be able to sort and group by their "Jobs" on the overview.
That way we can get all the miners in the same group and give them all the same priories. and if you can click on a colonist or group header to select that colonist or group, we could then select all marines, and draft them.

Example:

Oafs   <-- click this header to select all oafs
Bob
Jim
Sarah
Joe

Marines   <-- click this header to select all marines (useful for drafting)
Raynor
Tychus

Con Artists    <-- grouped so you can select one of them to do comm stuff, or just group them and get them out of the way because they cant fight
Booth
Benedict
Wilkes