Please make it easier to generate acceptable starting characters

[Polder]

It takes too long to generate acceptable starting characters. The game is very fun but generating characters is not.

Being incapable of dumb labor or violence is an unacceptably harsh penalty in the beginning.

In my opinion the following should be done:

1) Being "incapable" should reduce the respective skill(s) instead of making them unusable entirely.
2) Having a negative trait should increase the amount of skillpoints the character is generated with, and the reverse with an positive trait.
3) It should be possible to generate characters from a specific background.

The reason for this post is trying an extreme icesheet start and realizing that there's little point in even trying without a good miner, builder and researcher that aren't incapable in essential areas and have a least modest shooting skills. Yet generating these three takes far too long.

[stigma]

I feel you brother! I'm also a control freak, and I really want control over my starting characters.

I strongly recommend you check out "prepare carefully". You should find it in the mods section. Although the mod is now getting abandoned by the original author (it is being opensourced for later development) he managed to finish a version for A14 first. I'm using this and it seems to work very well.

This gives you complete control over all your characters and there is a rudimentary points system for you to gauge roughly how "powerful" your pawns + starting gear is - although you will largely have to police yourself here and set your own difficulty because you are allowed to do anything you want... A good idea can be to generate some random ones and then tweak them as you see fit while trying to not increase your total strength (or even go a bit lower to compensate for the fact that you are tailoring your starting team, which is powerful).

There is also a "haulIT" mod for A14 that enables hauling for any and all characters in case you feel that this particular restriction is a little bit silly. (personally I think that all pawns should be capable of this, but that nobles and the like shuld be mod penalized if set to those tasks ... after all it's not like they CAN'T, they just don't want to do menial labor).

I love this game to bits, but for us control freaks it is easy to get stuck taking hours generating characters (or maps) because you are looking to do something specific. Prepare carefully helps a lot with this. You can even save/load colonist or entire starting teams with gear for later use if you want to restart with the same team in a new colony.

Hope this helps!
-Stigma