Assembly Hall

I think I'll try to post it in these forums too.

UI for setting PI infrastructure needs some attention desperately. This clickfest is mindnumbing. Four little things would greatly ease life of production planets' owners (I'm shure someone already has mentioned all those, but can't remember where I saw it and who did it):

1) Stop binding routes to specific type of product, manufactured at some factory. Let it be just generic route, going from this factory to some storage - so if you change the product next month for some other, it would start to use routing scheme already in place. Currently we have to go to each factory and set all routes anew every time we decide to go for some other product.

2) Add ability to set a common routes' destination for products created in several factories. Like, you select several factories, then press some hotkey, then select storage - and all the products from all selected factories now are routed to this storage. Again, atm we have to click each factory, then click some buttons, than click storage - 16 times per planet.

3) Add ability to set production scheme in batch. Like in previous one, you select several factories, press hotkey, select a scheme from dropdown - and all these factories seeded with this scheme now. Again, clickfest atm.

4) Ability to set up routes from some storage to input lines on factories in batch is also in dire need. But this one is somewhat more tricky, as, unlike in case of routing the single output product from factories, we have 1 to 3 input lines on them. I see the most straightforward way to implement it as that: first, you select several identical factories at once; upon doing this, new control panel appearing, it has three buttons: "route output product to one destination", "set production schematics" and "route input product(s) to selected factories"; you click batch-set production schematics button, dropdown list appears and you sellect some production scheme; then you click "route input product(s) to selected factories" button, select source storage facility and select some material which is stored, or being routed here - and UI creates routes to all selected factories, that has schematics that need this material; then you are using "route output product to one destination" button to finish the setup process.

By implementing it this way, switching to generic route approach, as proposed in 1), may become not necessary, as reestablishing routes will become much easier. But still, would be nice to have it too.

Of course, previous "one facility at a time" way of setting scheems up should be preserved too.