Suggested Improvements From My 1000 Pop Playthrough

[player_feedback]

• It’s tedious to select “Slaughter” on excess cattle every year. Maybe it already auto slaughters if you wait long enough? If not, let us check a box to auto-slaugher above desired herd size.

• Let me set up recurring fertilizer applications. These are also tedious.

• Levelling of terrain is a disaster. Regularly get unintuitive results. If I’m placing a building and would get the message “slope is too steep” - instead queue up a job for the whatever levelling is required to let me place the building - show that extra work in red or something in case it’s astronomical.

• Please let me manually assign either jobs or housing to a pop. I can find no interface to do this which in large cities (I’m at 1000+ pops now) creates extreme inefficiencies.

• Give the wall tool the option to add a priority flag on rebuilt walls.

• Auto-connecting feature of roads more often gets in my way than not.

• Give me a map view that shows occupied tiles without having to hunt through the graphics. It can be hard to see where exactly I can place a small park and similar.

• Give me a search option for building types. You can click on the colonists who work there to see where they are but in very large cities where the pops spend inordinate amounts of time away from their jobs, it can be hard to find the fletcher building to increase arrow production, for example.

• If I build on an orchard site, queue up a culling job for me. Don’t make me hunt around for every tree and click cull. Some people may lose some fruit trees accidentally, but it’s a huge number of individual clicks I don’t want to have to make. Worst case, offer a confirmation and auto queue the cull after a yes. But trying to move the camera to track down every fruit tree is tedious.

• Would prefer a minimap to the camera hotkey system that I think must be intended to help navigate large maps.

• Wagons are unintuitive. Reddit helped me understand the mechanics here, but I find them uninspired. I would much prefer a “stockist” style of job where storage facilities and markets could receive target stocks of goods and it’s the job of wagons or stockists to keep those items in stock. Much like the trading post works now. Markets try to do this and fail badly in large cities with only 2 workers. Storage facilities have no option for this short of the clumsy check boxes.

[vlf4230]

I think “auto-slaughter” is now a feature. I’ve noticed this past week that, at the beginning of year, I’ll get that routine message about how much livestock was born…and then a few minutes later I suddenly have close to 4,000 slabs of meat in my inventory. When I check my farms that should now be overflowing, instead they are all at capacity.

[Solo]

Some very good observations and suggestions, thanks. I concur and agree with all of them. I have most of these issues and several of these I have suggested similar remedies.

I don’t know if you want to wait, or try mods. I struggled with the game mainly due to the ridiculous building decay and the desirability decay and mass housing being condemned and many of the issues you mentioned. Then I modded the game with several key mods available on nexus, and since then I’ve rocketed with comparative ease to hit the 1000 pop cap and it’s all running well since desirability was removed as an issue. I think I could run a larger pop, given my PC performance and in fact there’s a mod to try that which I might experiment with soon. As regards your points:

Herds. I had bad issues with barns the same and best NOT to upgrade to Barn Level 2 I found. I went back to level 1s. After the recent patch this allowed the auto slaughter (set herd size) to work in 90% of the cases and as long as you have two workers, generally most barns (I have 12) now seem to slaughter automatically just after new year, but now and then have to manually change. The annoying thing is having to turn milking on and off in EVERY barn separate and not being able to mute the damned ‘moooo’ sound every time you click on one.

There’s a great working mod for auto-fertilised fields I use which takes all the effort away entirely. Go here: Auto Fertilise

There is a mod for levelling of terrain. I have not used this one: Terrain Helper

To match villagers housing to their workplaces I use this mod which works well. One simply key to use in game: AutoCommute

I totally agree on wall tool lack of prioritisation on wall and fence builds and have moaned about this too many times; maybe they listen, maybe they won’t. It’s my pet hate.

To search all building types and scroll to each unit in each category I use this mod:
Building Helper I can now find all remote mines and camps etc with ease

I am using several other mods that have revolutionised my game but they do not specifically relate to your points but are available on the nexus site. The vanilla game was getting unplayable before but now it has become very enjoyable. As usual talented modders are able to do, in no time what it takes devs months or even years to do in games… this one is no exception. My game runs faster, easier and better even than the vanilla version did and much of the AI’s nonsensical behaviour is offset by adding the mods. Of course you may prefer to wait for updated versions of the vanilla game, but there s a choice.