Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I have been very active in PI for about the last 6 months (any moderately active, on and off, for a couple of years before that) and here are a couple of changes that would make things so much easier.

Please note most of the suggestions here are about ease of use, rather than increasing volumes. Though the last suggestion does increase the potential throughput of PI planets.

Routing Mode
Currently there are 2 modes, Build and Scan that you can switch between when in Planet view. I would like to see a third mode, Routing mode. When active icons appear for the inputs, outputs and items in storage in the different buildings. I can then drag and drop these to establish routes. I have Electrolytes and Water in my Spaceport and 8 different Advanced factories set up to make Coolant. In Routing mode I can click on and drag the water icon from my Spaceport to each factory to establish a route. Same for the Output of the factory, drag and drop to the Spaceport.

Repeat Build
While in build mode if I select a building to build each time I click one of these is deployed, until I select a different building to build. I do not want to select a building, click to deploy it, click the building, click to deploy, click the building, click to deploy ...

Instead I want to click on the building and then click, click, click to deploy 3 of them.

Upgrade-able factories and Spaceports
In most of my setups I have large number of factories all doing the same thing it takes time to set up and makes the setup time consuming to manage.

As an example one of my common set ups is 3 spaceports, 2 with 8 Advanced Factories and 1 with 7 Advanced Factories linked to it. Instead I would like to be able to upgrade my Advanced Factories to reduce the time it takes for a run to complete (with an appropriate upgrade in CPU and Power) or increase it's input's and outputs to do the same result, so that instead of 8 factories I have 4 with double the output or even 2 with quadruple the output. Likewise for my Spaceport I would like to upgrade it so that I have more space so rather than 3 Spaceports each with 10,000m3 space I have 1 with 30,000m3 space. No I just import and export all my stuff into the 1 location.

In fact with the this setup I now have 1 fully upgraded Spaceport and 8 fully upgraded Advanced factories. Much easier to manage and setup. All my imports and exports go into the 1 Spaceport and all my factories are linked to that.

You could even make these upgrades linked to skills, operating the same way command centre upgrades works with each skill level allowing a level of upgrade.

Secondary Maintframe and Power station buildings
Most of my planets are either CPU OR POWER intensive not both. I would like to be able to deploy another building that converts spare Power into CPU and vice versa. So I can truly maximise my planetary output. It does not even have to be on a 1:1 relationship, but just some method of making use of the wasted resource in my command centre so I can 'do more'.