Holy crap, there's a whole lot of great ideas in this thread. What usually happens in these threads is that the idiots gravitate in here and overload the place with useless, totally impossible crap. Fortunately, they're fairly few and far between, and most of these ideas are pretty awesome.
I won't try to suggest anything new, but I'll try and summarize a few that seem like really great ideas that need more attention.
I'd like to second a "turrets shoot at animals" option, preferably with an option to choose which animals they gun down, so they're not shooting down harmless squirrels for no reason (or, knowing me, are doing exactly that,) don't gun down boomrats which will start a fire (unless the boomrats go hostile,) and don't gun down dangerous muffalo unless I feel like thinning the herd.
I'd also like to second "extinguish burning colonist" trumping everything except rescuing/arresting/capturing. And for the love of god, don't have it be someone on the far side of the map who gets the job; make everybody nearby pile onto the guy to put him out. (Raiders should have this behavior too.)
Having multiple colonists work on the same task is pretty important. Whenever my units put out large fires, half of the fire response team ends up walking straight into the flames, and I always have trouble finding that one colonist on the other side of the map that has suddenly called dibs on punching the flamer out.
Allowing turrets to target insane/non-insane animals is also important, since having to find a particular hostile boomrat and forming a tactical boomrat defense squadron around them is always a pain.
I want a 'planning' object, which allows me to plan out walls and internal cave rooms without actually ordering people to mine or build yet. The 'planning' object would do absolutely nothing except appear visually on the map.
It'd be like the 'order colonist to mine here' system, except it does not actually order them to do anything. Copy and paste and change a color hexcode and remove a line or two of AI-orders code.
Really, the main thing that it would do would be to occupy your time while the
dwarves colonists continue to work. It would certainly help with immersion, since you'd be literally taking the role of community planner/base commander. It would be great for me, personally, but I don't know how the reception would be for most players. Then again, most players default to the most "degenerate" option, anyway, so it wouldn't quite matter for them. Ideally, it would be great to have an entire series of "planner" functions, or even colony graphs and data sheets that are based on the game's debug info. A game that mixes a Sim City feel with tile-based tactical combat is definitely one worth putting effort into, from a consumer standpoint.
Chance for two raiding parties to come at once, and they fight each other as well as you.
There needs to be more of this. I can't emphasize enough how much I want to see this happen. In the event that future raiding parties include neighboring colony forces, Galactic Federation "Rimworld Outreach" teams, or even giant dragon creatures, the idea that they'd come at the same time, fight, and let you break out the popcorn while you watch them turn one another into smoking craters is something that practically anyone would enjoy, even if it causes balancing issues when they leave most of their loot behind or decide to join forces and light your metal walls on fire.
Just a few suggestions:
-cancel button (example like right click)
-natural events further apart (the game hates me)
-for the future, I would like to keep the current art styles instead of it being by professionals, perhaps it could be an option? (when art is updated)
-infinite generated levels(probably a bigger project there)
Overall, I love the game, and can't get enough of it! Please continue making this awesome game!
P.S. I am a noob to programming so each one could take weeks and I wouldn't know.
The first three are pretty simple. I'd expect them to be simple, anyway. Adding a "Cancel" function to right-clicks would probably take a few hours and a good amount of copypasta so that it appears in the command list of each of the game's menus, depending on how the game is written, but I wouldn't expect it'd be too much work.
For the artwork, unless there are already professionals lined up for the job of making the game look prettier, I think that most of the effort really should be put into making more items, expanding the tech tree, and implementing an armor/equipment system. What I'd really like is a Dwarf Fortress level of equipment complexity where I could put a magical amulet or rune engraved pair of boots on a superstitious person and cause their happiness to go up significantly.
Infinitely generating levels seems like a good idea, but I think that it'd be a bit too much effort to implement, not to mention the strain on the user's computer if the coding isn't optimized properly. Dwarf Fortress, the benchmark of all of this, uses some kind of heuristic formulas to turn the generated world into a simplified series of algorithms that accurately estimate the existence of local towns, raiding parties, trading visits, and everything else that happens in Fortress Mode without having to have the entire world run simultaneously in order to keep the game running.
Like the home zone, for fire control, the DNL zone is for "Do not leave", if a colonist enters the DNL zone, they cannot leave unless drafted(or on fire, but not to, put out a fire.
The main advantage of this is during raids, to ensure the colony can continue to function without drafting everyone. If a fire in the home zone cannot be reached due to a lack of overlap it will be ignored, as will any other tasks given to that npc.
Perhaps NPCs may leave the DNL zone for priority 1 tasks only. After which there is no reentry obligation. You could have several layers for this, and add it to the overview and tag NPCs to their layer, for example, non violent warden cannot leave cells and* food dispenser, expert grower cannot leave base (which contains hydroponics, food dispenser home) etc.
* Link must exist.
-- Manual Prioritization - Prioritize nearest task:
...
Currently in the case where we just want to send one colonist on a specific job, we have to designate, find the colonist again and select him and then prioritize. Also this pretty much has to be done while paused, otherwise another colonist may take the job.
Zoning is pretty important, since I oftentimes find miners walking over to the other side of the map, mining a single square, then walking all the way back to sleep or eat or haul something. Having to sell off their bed so that they stay around the mining camp bed/dining area is always a pain, especially when the mining zone is depleted and they're moved back into the regular colony. Having separate fire zones, cleaning zones, or even designating certain zones to not be repaired, like peripheral giblet cage farms to demoralize raiders would definitely help to move colonists around to where they need to be without having to resort to second-by-second micromanagement.
Alot of these ideas seem fairly cheap to implement, but I'm not sure if many of them can be implemented in the course of a few hours, much less an hour. We really need someone to come in here every now and then to summarize the pages so that the devteam can sift through the suggestions more easily.
