Automated overview

[Plasmatic]

I dunno if I can explain this well enough but here goes..

How about a less micro intensive job assignment overview, where you could hit a button and the computer automatically assigns jobs based on who is best at it, and what jobs don't already have people working them.

or even have it as a toggle that automatically assigns jobs to new joiners, and redistributes jobs if a colonist dies or something.

I realize that it would not be very high on the priority list if it is deemed a beneficial feature, I just figure I would throw it out there

It would be fairly useless early on when you only have 3-5 colonists, but as you get more and more colonists it could be nice to not have to worry as much about jobs.

[Thunder Rahja]

Strongly disagree. The point of the game to have a small number of colonists so you get to know them all well. Just mashing a "do what you're best at" button just skips over that.

Plus, with the addition of the passion system in Alpha 2, you might not want to assign colonists to jobs simply based on their skill levels, as a colonist with level 1 mining and burning passion for it will eventually outclass a colonist with level 7 mining and no interest in it.

[Plasmatic]

Strongly disagree. The point of the game to have a small number of colonists so you get to know them all well. Just mashing a "do what you're best at" button just skips over that.

Plus, with the addition of the passion system in Alpha 2, you might not want to assign colonists to jobs simply based on their skill levels, as a colonist with level 1 mining and burning passion for it will eventually outclass a colonist with level 7 mining and no interest in it.

That is a good point, I guess I just need to find a good system to allocate jobs, I prefer having all colonists able to do everything with manual priorities, but I can't seem to set it up where jobs are always being done with the correct priority.

[Thunder Rahja]

I find that, most of the time, manual priorities aren't necessary. However if you must, manual priorities are assigned 1-4, with "1" being done first and "4" being done last. If there is more than one "1", for example, then the "1" to the farthest left will be done first.

[Plasmatic]

I find that, most of the time, manual priorities aren't necessary. However if you must, manual priorities are assigned 1-4, with "1" being done first and "4" being done last. If there is more than one "1", for example, then the "1" to the farthest left will be done first.

I like having manual because it means I don't have to find a specific colonist if I want to prioritize something, but at the same time, it can take some time to set up..

[Darker]

I always use manual priorities. And I often modify them to make my colonists do what they should.

[Utterbob]

If it helps, I use a system based on the Passion feature.

If they have a 'Burning' passion I set that skill(s) to priority 1 and 'Interested' skills are 2. The exceptions are fire fighting and doctoring. Fire fighting needs an all-in approach if you don't get to it fast enough (e.g. Molotov fire spreading while you finish a firefight) and doctoring because I don't like colonists dying at all... let alone while there is someone in their room watering a Daylilly >.<

Once you have that you can add/subtract priorities based on this that are under/over manned.

The reason is that this makes it far more likely that someone who will benefit more from doing a skill is the one to do it, followed by ones that benefit slightly less. This way I get the maximum amount of skill ranking out of my guys short of manually assigning every task to the one I want to get the practice. The ones that learn very little are normally unlikely to attempt a skill unless there is a lot of it going around, I normally get many more workers than my 1/2 priorities replanting after a blight, for example but this helps in those kinda times and gets the colony back on track nice and quickly while not overriding every single job of lower priority as it would on non-manual version.

[Thunder Rahja]

Colonists now start out with the work types they're best at enabled, instead of everyone having the same settings.

Looks like this got added to Alpha 3.

[Monkfish]

Now that's surprising. Although part of Alpha testing is to add as many features/ideas as possible and bin the ones that don't work/can't be balanced/are just shit. It may be that this is being added to test the community's reaction.

[Plasmatic]

Colonists now start out with the work types they're best at enabled, instead of everyone having the same settings.

Looks like this got added to Alpha 3.

I like this idea, it's not as automated as I was trying to explain in the OP, but this does nicely for starting a new game where you more or less hit random till you find a good mix (at least I do)