Watched your dev diary today and thought I’d share a few suggestions I’ve come up with while doing my Let’s Play series.
1 - Planning tool. It would be really nice to be able to draw out on the floor and plan ahead for building. Either allow boxes (preferably with multiple shades/style ala Prison Architect) or allow like shift-click to lay down a ghost ala Factorio. I’ve longed for this every time I break down an early station into the more specific stations. Would be real nice for planning ahead as well. Having multiple visibility options would allow for planning resource conveyors as well.
2 - More hotkeys. ESC closing the construction menu, for example, and space pausing the game. Maybe something for conveyors (C?) and resource conveyors (V?) which are frequently used. Getting into the research screen through a hotkey would be cool too.
3 - A longer-lasting pie chart breakdown of time use. I love the idea of the current system, but being able to watch the pie chart move from entirely waiting for components to entirely in production over the course of thirty seconds or so doesn’t tell me much more than what happened in the last twenty seconds. Being able to see it broken down in the same way as the other pieces of data (hour, 24 hour, lifetime) would be real nice.
So I am not sure how to categorize those - UI improvements? Right now when I play those are the things that most stand out to me.
Improved business simulation overall sounds great tho, right now the game definitely is a one-difficulty level sandbox.
It would be really nice to see which assembly stations have available upgrades. Like an overlay or something maybe? Perhaps excluding the various robot upgrades, mostly I’m looking to be able to see where to add various accessory upgrades to the line. Right now, when I discover heated seats and automatic wipers I have to search out the seat assembly and windshield areas to put in the upgrades. Or I’ll discover a few upgrades and then forget which ones they are and have to manually work through each section of the line to get the going - or just do without. Considering the dozens of unique upgrades currently available - and speedy research - I’ve frequently found myself with a queue of unused upgrades and a reluctance to go through my lines and find all the slots that need to be improved.
Continuing to add suggestions as they come up while I play…
It would be great to be able to paint the floor with at least a couple of different tile sets. Red/blue/green/yellow for example, as well as striped yellow and black sections.
Additional suggestions - some of which may not be a very high priority but still …
1 - Being able to queue research. Like in Civ, just shift-click to set up additional research priorities. It’s frustrating to have to go to that screen so frequently, I’d like to just set up five or ten continuous researches and let it run.
2 - Improvement to the upgrade of stations. Currently the stations will list installed upgrades which is nice, but it would be great if maybe it listed all available upgrades and then had like a checkmark next to those installed and an empty space for those uninstalled? Better yet, no need to go into the upgrade box, maybe just click on the empty space and have it install them from the station screen. Also perhaps a visual indicator of those stations that have upgrades available from the zoomed-out screen. Like, those fully upgraded can have green outlines, those with robot upgrades have yellow, those with feature upgrades red? Upgrading cars for new features is really the only tedious feature I see in this game.
3 - Summary screen of manufacturing/assembly stations. It would be really nice to be able to just see a list of all stations, how long each one is taking, potentially available upgrades. This is probably easier said than done considering the potential for duplicate/multiple versions of each station, multiple production lines, etc.
4 - Ability to stop/hold production/assembly at stations. Currently it’s not the end of the world to have to delete a conveyor segment to stop the flow of vehicles, but being able to toggle it at a station would be nice.
Thanks as always for your consideration, keep up the great work!
Today as my current factory has grown huge, I realized it would be a lot of fun if the game made a time-lapse video of the progress of the factory as it is laid out. I don’t know how, but Factorio does this and it would be incredible to see here too.
In 1.11, it’s really great that time timelines have been changed to match up with game time for the assembly stations. However, in the research screen it still lists X points per second. Could this be upgraded to list X points per (game time)?
Thank you Cliff! I definitely have noticed some of the improvements but I didn’t really take credit for them myself since I’m sure others have suggested them as well. Anyway you’ve mentioned you read most everything, so I figured you’d at least seen them and I didn’t expect much response. You can’t write “good idea!” like 100 times a day.
Have I mentioned that a planning tool would be nice? Because it really would, like in Prison Architect or Rimworld. Definitely would be handy when expanding or upgrading, since building then deleting something is expensive.
