Organising colonists in times of strife

[axefrog]

I know there are various messages scattered through the archives about this kind of thing, but I'm curious if anyone knows what the current plans are regarding the following (with full appreciation that the game is alpha and there is still a lot of work to do):

1) Stopping my idiotic colonists going out to do hauling/harvesting things and in the process wandering across battle zones, completely oblivious to the danger they're in. To me the obvious solution is a simple alarm toggle that tells all colonists to return to the home zone and prevents path finding outside of said zone.

2) Allowing me to assign a set of colonists to a squad which I can draft instantly and assign to predesignated defensive positions. I know micromanagement is part of the game, but having to pause the game, cycle through my colonists one by one, try to figure out which ones are the soldiers, draft them individually and send them to their standard defensive position is kind of tedious, as is having to draft my non-combat colonists and force them to go hide in the kitchen while the battle takes its course.

I think both problems above are best solved via a new "safe" zone type. You could designate as many of these as you like, just like you can with other zone types. Any colonist could be assigned to any number of safe zones, either from a zone's interface (allowing you to add many colonists in one go), or from the colonist's own interface (allowing that colonist's preferred zones to be set, if desired). Ringing the alarm bell would force all of your colonists to go to the nearest active safe zone that they are assigned to. To help with combat, you'd designate some additional special "safe" zones that you only assign your soldiers to, which means ringing the alarm would cause your workers to run to the nearest civilian safe zone and your soldiers to run to the nearest safe zone you've created for defense purposes. Once your soldiers are restricted to their safe zones, you could easily select them all as a group and draft them with one click. I can envision assigning a bunch of single-tile safe zones behind defense pillars, with one soldier assigned to each zone, giving the effect of rallying your soldiers to their assigned defense positions, ready for incoming enemies. The home zone would be the default safe zone if a colonist is not assigned to any, and you could temporarily disable certain safe zones as needed, depending on the situation. Clicking the "alarm" button would also play some kind of "red alert" sound effect too maybe? I can totally imagine building a few bunkers around the map and setting them as safe zones for colonists to hide in if they're out on a field trip and unlikely to make it back to the base safely in time.

[Kegereneku]

In my mind if you aren't drafting 90% of your colonist and voluntarily micromanaging them to defend the base in desperate time, you have been using killbox for too long.

Right now raid are one of the main event but myself I would like them to be far less frequent.

Hence, even if I had over 10 colonists I would micromanage them, especially since I'm hoping Tynan will make a way to change into combat clothes. We don't want our colonist to live in Power Armor all the time.

[axefrog]

In my mind if you aren't drafting 90% of your colonist and voluntarily micromanaging them to defend the base in desperate time, you have been using killbox for too long.

Right now raid are one of the main event but myself I would like them to be far less frequent.

Hence, even if I had over 10 colonists I would micromanage them, especially since I'm hoping Tynan will make a way to change into combat clothes. We don't want our colonist to live in Power Armor all the time.

What you say is sort of true, but still doesn't take away from what I suggested. There is fun micromanagement, and tedious, repetitive, unnecessary micromanagement. i'm advocating the former and suggesting ways to avoid the latter.

[Boboid]

I just wrapped up a game with 41 colonists, by the end of it the " Micromanagement" boils down to " Box-select all colonists, draft, move here, spread them out a little bit, wait for dead raiders"

I think you'll find that regardless of the systems in place that's what it's going to boil down to inevitably.

[warden]

I have to say there's little as annoying as having your colonists drop whatever they were doing, and running to the edge of the map to pick up something i have *never* told them to pick up.

I mean, yes, i have haulers. But why do some travelers drop meals that are allowed by default? Dropped goods are usually forbidden until you manually allow them, so that your haulers can pick them up. But if a random traveler is consuming a meal and is then attacked, struck by lightning and i don't know what else triggers this, the meal is left on the ground and somebody from my crew immediately takes off and picks it up. I've seen this happen on the last squares at the edge of the map, indicating that somebody left the map and dropped food in the last square they were in before departing.

"Browning was beaten to death" was my first alert to such behavior.

[Monkfish]

I have to say there's little as annoying as having your colonists drop whatever they were doing, and running to the edge of the map to pick up something i have *never* told them to pick up.

I mean, yes, i have haulers. But why do some travelers drop meals that are allowed by default? Dropped goods are usually forbidden until you manually allow them, so that your haulers can pick them up. But if a random traveler is consuming a meal and is then attacked, struck by lightning and i don't know what else triggers this, the meal is left on the ground and somebody from my crew immediately takes off and picks it up. I've seen this happen on the last squares at the edge of the map, indicating that somebody left the map and dropped food in the last square they were in before departing.

"Browning was beaten to death" was my first alert to such behavior.

I caught one of my colonists yesterday heading off to the very top of the map to collect a packaged survival/nutrient paste meal (I forget which one, but it was shit either way) despite my enormous freezer full of food being physically closer (but probably a longer travel away due to killbox/chunk field arrangement prior to building a colonist entrance). I'm glad I caught him as it was a long way away, he was already urgently hungry and tired, it was night time, and I doubt he'd have made it, let alone got back, without breaking down into a dribbling heap.

Not sure why the meal was unforbidden though. It was on the edge tile, so I assume it was dropped by someone leaving.