Player Features and Ideas Discussion

First of all, apologies if this has been said before. I've had a quick search in the stickies and existing forums and found nothing relevant to my suggestions.

And now my suggestions:

I believe we can all agree that setting up P.I. is quite a tedious task. To make it a little bit easier on the user I suggest a couple small mechanic changes that will work a little like your average RTS game.

Take for example a basic extractor setup with processors to produce P1 mats from raw material. One way of doing this is setting up 1 extractor with a bunch of processors. Now currently a pilot will have to select the processor, click a location, select another processor, select new location, etc.
A simpler way to do this would be like in RTS games, hold down shift and clicking locations to plant processors.
For those unknown with RTS (real time strategy) games, if you wish to place a multitude of the same building, all you have to do is hold shift and click locations where you want these buildings.

Another suggestion also adapted from RTS games. Consider we have the processors and extractor setup above, it is tedious to go to each of those processors and select what they will make and where the output should go. Can we instead of this, select all processors at once, select one time what we want to build and where it should output and have this automatically apply to all processors?
(RTS games: select multiple barracks, set rally point, train warrior will do pretty much that)

Lastly what I can come up with at the moment. In my setup I let my extractors move raw material to a launch pad, and then I manually move 3k of raw material to each processor. A simpler method to this that I see is instead of saying where the input should go to, is to tell the processors where to get their input from.
So rather than having the launch pad SEND input to processors, we have processors REQUESTING input from a launch pad...a small change but combined with being able to select all processors and having something apply to all of them at once...It will save a LOT of clicking.

Well, that's all the ideas that I have. Looking forward to see what people think. By the way I am in no way a PI guru and I do claim not know the best ways to run setups. This is just what I see that would help.
(Personally if PI would become a sort of time-turn-based-semi-RTS mini-game....that would be awesome, and probably attract more players ;) )

this covers everything and then some. if not, suggest it!

the threadnaught is working on being a threadtitan!

I like your suggestions, but would like to add following: possibility to select a group of extractor heads in their current formation and move the whole formation to an other spot on the planet. I am sure many of you will have this lovely flower shape setup of 7 extractor heads on a white spot on the planet, or extractor heads lined up at the outside border/reach of the extractor unit. Woudn't it be nice to pickup that whole group and move it to a new spot, not having to move the heads one-by-one and create the next flower shape setup.