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The biggest issue with the launch pads in my opinion is the lack of storage or holding items, your colonists just pile everything directly onto the pad.

In Dwarf Fortress, for example, the trade depot building is only five by five tiles. But the difference is that you can store things inside crates and barrels, and each can hold many many many items inside it. You can easily buy out a whole caravan of goods with your one depot of random fortress made stuff if they're high enough quality.


Until the launchpads get changed, my current "solution" to the problem is to build three of them. I have one pad that holds nothing but silver, a second pad where I pile all of the weapons I don't care about, and a third pad where I store things like food, which is set to slightly lower priority than my hoppers and food storage, so my colonists will always be properly fed before trading away their excess food.

Hauling/Storage

I think Tynan posted somewhere about equipment racks being placeholders for the moment, to be filled in soonish. I imagine container stuff will start to come along with that. Wheelbarrows would be great, as would those hover-dolly things you see in sci-fi from time to time. Also I've heard mention of hauling droids, to free up colonists to do more interesting things without adding to the 'who are you again?' factor; they would presumably have the advantage of being able to carry more. Also perhaps cargo containers - super efficient in terms of items-per-tile, but with the catch that you can only take things out in the reverse order you put them in? So they're useful for zipping up all your metal/potatoes/raider-skull ashtrays for trade, but it can't be abused to store everyday items.

Vehicles feels like a stretch, honestly, given the scope of the game... apart from anything else, the maps might start to feel a bit small once you can cruise around at high speeds. One idea - it might seem a bit forced, but maybe a system where you build a start point and an end point and the car/trolley/hoverboard or whatever can shuttle between them. To make hauling from your remote mining op to the launchpad a bit less bothersome without all the attendant complication that would come from piloted vehicles.

First off I'd just like to say that I'd love raider skull ashtrays, that made me giggle Wonderfully Dwarf Fortress idea!

I can imagine a hover dolly would just be equivalent to a wheelbarrow but with a splash of sci-fi. It'd be up to the developer as to which of the two fit better, but personally I think a wheelbarrow makes more sense as a simple, low tech carrying upgrade.

And I hadn't really imagined vehicles as being particularly high speed, I certainly wasn't thinking of them zipping around the map carrying things, just that they could carry a tooon of stuff at once and maybe be a bit faster. The drawback would be a high cost to make and probably some electrical / fuel cost.

Energy Storage

Would love to see some form of this, tho in my head the batteries are trade goods - some ultra-high tech method of condensing energy, such that one power cell could run the whole colony for weeks or more. So your options for power include solar - cheap and safe but depends on sunshine; geothermal - efficient and constant, but perhaps dangerous/temperamental machinery; then mega-battery - safe and reliable, but mounting cost. (A high-tech colony with an abundance of geothermal vents might even take to making its own energy bricks for trade. Or run an intense power operation in one corner of the map and run the main colony off cells.)

Personally I hadn't imagined that energy cells would have a big storage. I had thought they would be roughly equivalent to a single battery give or take. It seems a bit OP if you could charge up a single cell and run your whole colony off of it for any long amount of time. I had imagined these as some emergency fallback to use while you repair exploded wires or energy production so you didn't get stuck in the dark foodless.

Fridges

I don't know if decaying food is planned for some point, but if it is I suppose these are a given. I like that it bridges energy concerns with food concerns - a colony might rely on its vast stores of frozen food and casually sell the latest crop, only to find their power supply interrupted and their rations steadily rotting... all good drama. Tho if there's no rotting food, putting fridges in seems to lampshade the fact slightly.

Food decay was definitely something I had in mind with the idea of a fridge, but my initial concept was as a storage for prepared food. Colonists hate to eat raw food after all, and whenever I have a power outage or electrical shutoff, if it doesn't get fixed soon they quickly start to get really upset.

With a fridge, colonists could prepare food ahead of time, only paste for now but eventually better food, and that way if you DO have something go wrong with your dispenser for whatever reason, you would still have a buffer of prepared food so you could avoid the unhappy thoughts of eating raw food.

Liquids

It's just me talking, but I always liked Simcity more before you had to do all the piping as well as the wiring.. it exercises the same mechanics, without really adding much interesting - either you have enough and you ignore it, or you don't and everyone dies in a few days. Though of course from a simulationist perspective it's a critical resource, seems odd to leave it out. Hmm.

Liquids are another idea that I was a bit iffy on adding because it would add more busywork for a colony, but water is a huuuuge resource for survival, especially on desert planets like we currently only can be on, that it seemed like something that should be on. Obviously if other biomes get added, water won't be as much of an issue, though contamination and purification could be a mechanic too.

To be perfectly honest, the whole idea started with the idea of adding in oil reserves to the map and fuel refining for selling or advanced machines, and since a pumping and storage mechanic was already worked out, water seemed an obvious extra use

Defenses

I think there's two lines of thought here - traps and AI defenses. Would love to see more traps, DF style - always the most entertaining way to defend yourself. Also gives you more control over capturing instead of killing - from stun mines to snares, lots of ways to incapacitate with a bit of forward planning, and options at every level of technology.

Automated defenses seem like they're always tricky to balance in games - too strong and it becomes easy to turtle up, too weak and they just become pointless and a waste of resources. I think part of the problem is quantity - if they're good in small numbers, they're amazing en masse, and if they're only mediocre en masse they're useless in small numbers, making it an all-or-nothing thing.

My suggestion is to give them the potential for great power, but make them scarce - requiring special parts to build and significant expertise to optimize and maintain. So if you take the plunge and go for a turret network, you have a hefty upfront cost in terms of buying the parts and building it, but also a continuous time investment; if the engineer was too busy putting out fires or banging his head against a wall, or god forbid got killed without training a replacement - your investment slowly degrades, starts to malfunction, and eventually just becomes a giant paperweight, worth its weight in scrap. Conversely a decent engineer might make a good thing even better. It could be a full-time job; as the researcher goes to his desk every day and fills a bar, the engineer goes to the turret (or turret control console?) and does the same, improving the rate of fire, damage, tracking speed, acquisition time etc. in discrete levels.

The more traps and the more creative ways you can defend and fight back against raiders the better I say! I love the idea of stun mines and snares, those would work great as ways to increase your chances of catching people alive. Making turrets more expensive but more effective would also be nice, since we all know by now that turrets arn't worth your time unless you make a special kill field for them. A dedicated engineer job might be an interesting idea as well, though i think it might be better if you just had your engineering tied into one of the preexisting skills, either construction, repair, or research, or possibly a combination of the above three. One of the professions for a colonist could be Engineer, which gave some perks to those three.

Perhaps the various types of traps tie into your fear rating? If you focus more on sandbags and pitfall traps and stuff, you're less frightening, but if you use lots of stuff like razor wire or horribly injuring grenades or surround the place with turrets, that would make your base more frightening. The higher your fear is, perhaps raiders attack less often or have a higher chance to retreat, but those that DO invade are much stronger; I.E. only the hardened toughest, baddest-of-the-bad raiders want to mess with you. Maybe even intergalatic police!

I would really like to see a crop modification system in place that was based on your colonists researching and growing skills, both of those don't seem to have enough use in this game yet. Once you research everything in this game, is there anything to do with your scientists? And once you get hydroponics you don't need hardly any growers to feed a whole happy colony. My more developed colonies almost always end up just turning those character classes into dedicated cleaners or haulers.

However if you're able to develop food that grows faster or feeds better, this game had better add some sort of system to counterbalance it, since it's way too easy to feed a colony right now. Either make colonists eat a lot more, make certain kinds of food less filling, add a food spoilage system to the game, or some other system to motivate players to invest more into foods than we currently need

Some great ideas in here. Razor wire especially is something I want to see implemented. Maybe also some 'heavy' weapons like MGs, mass acceleration guns, beam lazers and the like which could only go on turrets or gun posts (Like a turret, but needs to be used by a colonist) or maybe even mechs, if your among those of us who want them.

Oh yea, I definitely want some more OP and crazy weapons too, it's a sci-fi game so we should definitely have laser canons and other insane alien weapons, but I'm just not a fan of the basic linear upgrades for turrets that a lot of games have.

as long as the land-mines aren't OP as heck. (like the current ones are)

I figure you'd need to research the land mines first. You could research an Explosives 1 tech that unlocks the mining explosives, and then that unlocks Explosives 2, which gives you land mines. Make the mines less likely to destroy terrain and the current explosives less damaging but better at blowing up rocks, and that would be good I think

[Hauling and Clearing:]

Before starting this, I'd just like to say ahead of time that I'm sorry if any of my ideas have been brought up already; I saw some overlaps, but none quite in the way I've been imagining. I may have missed something though! I purchased the game about a week or so ago, maybe two, and I've been playing quite a deal, these are all the things I've come up with while doing my best to survive the waves of bandits and insanity. I'll start from the top, and I'll try to explain why and how I came up with each idea:

Hauling and Clearing:

While playing, I frequently found myself very annoyed by how long it can take to even clear a small area of all the rubble and resources and messes that build up in a base. Especially when we start with only three people, it takes forever to clear away all of the rubble, collect all the scattered resources, and sweep away all the messes. I figure if our characters are smart enough to make advanced machines like solar panels and paste dispensers, they better be smart enough to make some basic hauling equipment!

Baskets and/or Backpacks: These would be the most basic of hauling enhancements, available right off the bat (After all, these are about as low tech as you go). These would be cheap to construct, and either your characters would passively use them when they go hauling, or they would be equipable similar to weapons, and would provide whoever is using them with a small boost to their carrying capacity. Perhaps they would allow your characters to carry two pieces of rock/rubble/debris at once. I assume other resources and crafting ingredients will eventually be added to the game besides metals and potatos, so these would probably be made out of cloth or plant fiber

Wheelbarrows: These would be the next stage of hauling, and probably they would need to be researched, but they would offer much higher capacity than the baskets, possibly twice as high as a regular unassisted character. You'd need to craft these out of metal, but they'd greatly shorten the time it would take to finish hauling tasks. Depending on how in depth the storage and hauling system is in game, you might be able to assign wheelbarrows to be dedicated to specific stockpiles in the same way you can assign priority, so certain stockpiles get filled faster than others.

Vehicles: I know this one miiiight be a bit of an extreme idea, and I'm a bit iffy on the idea myself, but I imagine as a very VERY end game sort of technology. Obviously this would need to be researched, and it would probably have prerequisite researches before you could unlock it. Possibly, if you'd like it to be very rare, vehicles could be obtainable only from the occasional trader. It'd cost a LOT of resources to make a truck, but obviously you could carry a huge amount of stuff with one vehicle. As an added cost, a vehicle would probably require some sort of energy to run as well. Either use fuel if that gets added like I discuss later, or it'd be an electrical vehicle. It would need some sort of internal battery or fuel tank that would be charged up, and periodically refilled between runs of carrying things. Fuel efficiency might be a researchable upgrade.


Storage:

Before starting this section, I'd just like to clarify that I'm pretty sure that storage devices are already on the planned list of additions to the game or have been suggested before, but I had a few ideas that I felt should be brought up because they relate to some of my other ideas.

Pots or Jars: This is the same basic idea as baskets from my hauling idea, a basic and relatively easy to construct object that will allow additional storage capacity in a single tile. It would only increase storage by a small amount, but given how few things currently fit on a launch pad, every little bit helps. To help differentiate these from carrying baskets, they could only be moved while empty, so characters would be forced to empty the pot before putting in a new area

Barrels and Crates: An enhanced storage unit that would need to be researched before you could construct it. Barrels would be made of metal, and crates would be made of wood, assuming wood is added as a construction resource. Like the pots, you could only move a barrel once it's emptied, which would help encourage players to use baskets and wheelbarrows.

Portable power: While playing the game, I've learned the hard way that it's a bad bad idea to build your solar panels near to your base, because bandits love to take cover behind them if they're right near your front line defenses. Sadly, I've also discovered that the further away buildings are, the more of a pain it is to fix when your power lines get blown up. Because of this, I've also gotten in the habit of running two or three lines spaced apart for fail safes and I build small caches of batteries around my base. To help fix this problem, I think we need portable energy sources. Imagine something essentially the same thing as the current battery, but possibly with less storage capacity, and can be picked up and moved around by your characters.

You could build a charging station and plug one of these cells in, where it'd slowly soak up power just like a battery. Then, once it gets filled, your characters would unplug it and drop it off in a storage area. If you get an accidental power outage or a break in your power lines, your characters can carry a charged cell over to an empty charging station and plug it in, where it'd send power out into the system. In addition this would let you make "free" money over time, by storing your excess power in a cell and selling your electricity to trader ships, though it likely wouldn't be too valuable to keep it balanced

Refrigerators: I know there's only potatoes and paste in this game so far, but I know that fancier types of food are going to be added to the game eventually. I imagine the fridge as a type of specialty storage that can only hold food, but it could allow something for your cooks to keep food in so you can have a buffer of prepared meals. Currently the only way to have a buffer of food is to have a lot of hoppers attached to your dispensers, but with a fridge, your cooks could automatically create paste (And later better foods obviously) and store it in the fridge, where your other characters would have a preference for getting the food from over a dispenser.

This allows you to better differentiate between haulers moving food to the hoppers, and cooks "cooking" the delicious paste. The fridge might also have a low electrical draw, and I imagine it might also give a small extra happiness buff to encourage use, for 'eating well preserved food' or something similar.

Mass graves: The longer a base goes on, the more corpses of raiders and wild animals you inevitably accumulate over time. Of course, you CAN dig a grave for each and every one, but from what I've seen on the forum, everyone just ends up blowing up corpses with explosives and fire after a while. To me, this seems a bit like an exploit, but the problem is that digging a full graveyard takes forever since you need a grave for each body. An individual grave takes up a 1x2 tile and can hold one body, but a mass grave would occupy perhaps a 3x3 or 4x4 space but could hold more bodies per tile. This way, all your enemies and monsters get put into the mass graves (Or eaten when that gets added to the game, but I imagine a lot of people would be unhappy to eat raider corpses even if they are turned to paste!)

in reality, using fire or explosions on bodies would create lots of nasty smoke or piles of gore instead of neatly cleaning things away, and these both could be modeled in the game to discourage players from ignoring graves by creating more unhappy thoughts when people dispose of corpses in this method, or possibly making bodies decay and give off miasma over time like in Dwarf Fortress. For added challenge, another unhappy thought could be added if one of your own colonists gets put into the mass grave, because they got an improper burial. So you'd end with a small graveyard of your own fallen characters, and a larger graveyard of burial mounds of raiders and animals.


Liquids:

Another resource for your characters to collect, this could range anywhere from water on the map, to coolants for machinery, or oil and fuel. Certain machines might take fuel to run as well as electricity, or coolant could be used as a 'buff' to keep machines from malfunctioning as often.

Water: Imagine water as being collected and transported essentially the same way as electricity currently is. Your characters would need to drink water, or water would be required to make certain food recipes. You could build Atmospheric Collectors to slowly create water wherever you place them, and scattered around the map could be pools or lakes, which you can construct Pumps over to collect much larger amounts in one place. Water would need to be transported through pipes, and it would be stored in liquid tanks. These would basically be parallels to the electrical systems; solar panels and geothermals for generation, and cables and batteries for transport and storage. In the same way you could make portable power cells, you could construct portable water tanks to move liquid around the base or sell to traders.

Oil and fuel: It makes sense that some machines might require fuel to run. Around the maps you could find oil wells and spouts, which would be tapped into with pumps the same way water is. Once you get a supply of oil, you could eventually build a Refinery to convert it into fuel and other resources. The Refinery would probably need to be researched before you construct it, but fuel would be a very useful resource to have late game. In real life, oil and fuel can be turned into a lot of byproducts (Like plastic), so fuel production could be a very lucrative trade by selling it to traders for large amounts of cash. In return though, fuel would be expensive to purchase, which would keep people from too easily obtaining it early on for powerful machinery.


Defenses:

Lets all be honest here, pretty much everyone admits that turrets suck after a while because their range is too short, and that explosives kinda break the game. Obviously, we need some balancing for turrets and explosives, but besides that we need other options.

Land Mines: Obviously this is what people currently use mining  charges for, but I think we should have a dedicated weaponized version. Once placed, these would automatically detonate once someone steps onto it. These could come in a few different varieties, which might need to be researched first. Something like a frag mine, which would have a higher chance of injuring people instead of killing them, or incendiary mines that would set fire to the area around them. You need to be careful with these though, in case your own characters set them off by mistake, or the local wildlife detonates one

Turret Upgrades: Personally, I'm not a fan of a simple direct upgrade for turrets. A system where you just have a turret, and a turret that costs more and is stronger feels way too simple and arbitrary. Sometimes I want to focus more on range over damage or vice versa, or other stats. So I propose a system of Modular Turret Upgrades. Instead of just having various turrets with different stats, these would be machines that would be constructed like any other building, and any turrets next to them would get a buff. This would allow you to make turrets that focus very specifically on the stats you want, would limit the number of upgrades you could have based on the area around a turret, and would also give you extra motivation to protect your turrets, because if they explode, they'd obviously take out any upgrades next to them.

For an example, imagine a regular turret surrounded with range booster upgrades. This would make a very long range turret, something like a sniper and good for getting the first hit in. But once enemies clear the ground and get into shooting range, you won't need that long of a range. So another turret could have boosts to increase their damage, or make them shoot faster or the like. There could be anything from increasing their range or damage, to modules that would increase their maximum health or defense, or even make them slowly auto repair over time.  Obviously they'd require research, a good amount of resources, and draw extra electricity.

Of course, there could also still be specialty turrets you could build, things like flamethrowers or laser turrets or rocket launchers. But I feel like this would give players a loooot of specialty control, though I understand this might be a pain to code. Long story short, each module would act like a buff to whatever turrets are adjacent to them.

Weapon Holsters: My own base defense amounts to lining up all my characters behind barricades and opening fire whenever people get in range, but I've found that this pretty much means all I do is equip all the longest range guns and never use any other items. When raiders get closer to my base and start bunching up by my barricades, I usually would like to start throwing grenades at them, but I never have time to run someone to equip explosives and back, and I never bother to keep someone with grenades because they have  such close range. If you give people weapon holsters though, a character could equip two weapons at once.

To keep things simple, characters would automatically just use whatever weapon is in slot one, but you can order them to use their secondary weapon. This way, you can keep your defense crew using longer range weapons, but then switch over to grenades and other short range things when the time is right. This would encourage players to stockpile and experiment with a wider array of weapons. This would be especially useful once melee weapons are added to the game, so you could have a slot for a melee weapon and a slot for ranged.

Firing Range and Dummies: Currently there is no dedicated way to train your shooting skill, so all you can do is order people to shoot at random bits or prisoners. If you build a firing range, people can use it to shoot at targets to increase their stats, possibly a bit faster than shooting at random stuff. As far as I know, there isn't ANY way to train melee fighting, so constructing a combat dummy would give your colonists something to smack.

These both could also be used to increase your fear rating as well, by using live prisoners for targets. By selecting a prisoner you could order them to be tied to the targets or dummies and they'd be left for people to train on, giving a fear boost to anyone nearby. Once the prisoners die from exposure or damage, they'd get disposed of like a normal corpse

Spiked Barricades or Razor Wire: Sand bag walls don't seem to do a good enough of keeping bandits away from your base, once they get into close enough range they just climb right over the walls. By researching and building these walls, it'd give you some better defenses. Of course, your own characters wouldn't run over these walls, but raiders would move much slower over these versus sand bags and would take damage from contacting them.

Nonlethal Defenses: Sometimes you want to "collect" some new members for your colony, but those darn raiders are so rude, dying instead of getting injured like you want. You should be able to collect nonlethal weapons, things like tasers or tranq guns to take people out at range without killing them, or have your colonists dig a pitfall trap to catch people. A pitfall would act a bit like a land mine, triggering when a raider walks onto it and dropping them into the hole. They wouldn't be very injured, so they could probably still fight back, but you could still flag them for capture and imprisonment inside a pit. They might also be able to climb out of the hole over time, or other raiders might try to fish them back out.


I know this is a lot of stuff to bring up in one post, but I feel like these would add a lot of depth and challenge to the game, along with just being practical in some cases. I tried to avoid bringing up any specific numbers for how much things might boost stats or weight, to avoid issues of it being balanced or not, but I'm curious what you guys think for specific details.