Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Anyone who has ever set up a PI colony has realized something: It's a bit of a click-fest. It's not too annoying to do once, but with the way that resources work on a planet, you need to move the colony every so often and that gets old. The main thing is that more than half of the clicking you do is superfluous - you click over in the construction menu to place another of the last thing you placed or you click on a factory to set up the exact same blueprint or you click on a storage facility to route the same product to a different place.

So here's my suggestion: Make the PI UI more like good old MS Paint. Paint is far from the best art program out there, but it's simple and intuitive and doesn't make me click five times to do something and PI could borrow a lot from it.

First, remove the tab for the scanning and just put the controls for it right at the top of the column. There's plenty of screen real estate down the side, so the tab serves no function except to make it harder to switch what heat map you are showing while trying to place Extractors Control Units.

Second, change the accordion groups down the side. All the items in the current one go into one group labeled "Construction" . We also add "Blueprints" and "Routing" as groups.

Third, instead of each click on an option from the construction menu only giving you a single placement of that particular structure, once you click an option you can continue to place another of that structure until you right-click or click on a new menu option. This way, you can place 12 basic factories with only 13 clicks instead of 24. With links, not only should you not need to click the "Create Link" option after linking two structures together, but it should automatically start creating a link between the last structure you clicked and whatever you click next (can be canceled with a right click). That way you can link a series of processors by clicking on each in series.

Fourth, the "Blueprints" accordion group will have three controls - a radio control with four options, a dropdown list, and a button labeled "Install Blueprint". The radio control's four options will be "P1", "P2", "P3", and "P4" (or whatever fancier labels CCP wants to put on them, such as "Advanced Comodities"). These will filter the options in the dropdown list to the appropriate type of blueprint. When the "Install Blueprint" button is pushed, any factory you click which can produce the product selected in the dropdown will switch to producing that product until you either right-click or you click a new menu option.

Fifth, the "Routing" accordion group will have a second accordion control inside it. Each accordion group will be labeled with one of the products for which a structure on the planet could create an outgoing route. Inside each of these subgroups will be a number of items, one for each individual structure that can route the given item somewhere and a "Route All" item. Once an item is clicked, any structure that can receive the product that is clicked will generate a route between the two structures. The "Route All" item will create a route from all applicable structures to the target receiving structure - useful for taking all 12 of those factories producing P1 and routing them to storage.

As an additional convenience, perhaps add a fourth accordion group labeled "Focus" with a single button inside: "Choose Focus". You click a single structure and that's where the camera will zoom when you view the planet in the future. If that building is decommissioned, focus returns to the command center, where it starts for all new colonies.

Thoughts?

That would require rebalancing the whole system. This would just be about removing the tedium from the system.

I really don't think you could do one without the other. PI needs re-balancing anyway once the citadel stuff is done so why not work it into the same plans.