Colony-Wide Priority Profiles

[Nico_e]

Dear Klei,

I'd like to see the addition of a Colony Priority Profiles option.

DISCLAIMER: I need to mention that I haven't completely grasped the priority system yet, so this option might be somewhat unnecessary for those who have mastered it. I wouldn't know yet, pardon my ignorance. Also, it might go against your vision of the game in terms of difficulty and learning curve. But here's the suggestion anyway:

Problem: Sometimes I find myself messing up my duplicants errand priorities, and would like to revert back to an earlier priority setup-up that I found worked better. but I didn't write it down or take screenshots. Also, at times find myself thinking "EVERYONE DO THIS NOW, NO MATTER WHAT YOUR REGULAR JOB IS". Say I want EVERYONE to do an emergency digging operation to find water. Now I would have to go into the priority tab, disallow everything on everyone except digging and building(for ladders/poles). Easy enough, but once this job is done I need to revert back to my earlier priority settings. And if I haven't written saved the setup with screenshots or writing down, I'm out of luck. Save-scum. If I do however have them saved somewhere, it's a somewhat tedious process to click myself through every single duplicant's errand priority back to how it was. 

Solution: Give the player the ability to save priority profiles in the Priority Tab. It could be a button called "Save Priority Profile". Let's say you could name, save and overwrite 5 different profiles. And this would be for all duplicants i.e. colony-wide, not 5 profiles per duplicant.

In the priority tab, each duplicant have 15 different errand types, each with 6 different settings. So a colony of just 10 duplicants will basically have a gazillion different priority combinations to pick and choose from. It would be nice to be able to just save a nice working setup before messing around. If you're like me, 60 hours into this game I'm still learning the priority system, and I'm constantly trying out new settings for my duplicants. And sometimes I just want things done very quickly. A couple of profile examples would be:

Default Priorities (my current best working setup)

Test Profile (here I can experiment with new settings without worrying about messing up my default profile)

Tidy Base (most/all duplicants prioritize tidying, storing and supplying, while disallowing everything else)

Emergency Dig/Build (all duplicants prioritize digging and building, while disallowing everything else)

I do realize that I could take screenshots or write down/make a list on my computer. However the priority tab shows only 6 duplicants before you have to scroll down, so you'd have to copy/paste and fool around in a photo editing software to make a nice looking list. I could also make a list manually in let's say Excel. But hey, a couple of clicks and naming a profile is faster than spending half an hour setting up an Excel sheet(instead I'd like you to spend hours setting up a profile system. LOL).

Other than that, absolutely love the game. Good job! I do have some other thoughts on efficiency when it comes to the UI, but that's for another post.

Regards,

Nico

[Sasza22]

Outside of personal priorities you got the normal priority setting. Setting something on 9 will make sure it will be done first (unless there are other prio 9 jobs) by the dupe that has high personal priorities in that job. Generally you should have dupes with high prioritis for any job so that setting one high will guarantee someone will do it.

Now we got the emergency priority as well. Using it sets the base to yellow alert and forces dupes to ignore basic needs. I`m not 100% sure about it but i think it also makes them ignore personal priority and do the emergency tasks first. Anyway for emergency jobs this is the way to go.

For stuff like tydying the base most of the time setting it on higher priority(7-8 when most jobs are 5-7) works for me. If it goes too slow it means there aren`t enough dupes to do all the jobs. After all if a dupe does all his high priority jobs he will do the lower priority tasks.

That said i think saving the priority settings is not that bad of an idea. Similar to what i suggested a while ago with dupe groups that have set priorities, door access, food permissions and schedules. An emergency group you could add dupes to in case of danger would work just as good. Or a tidy group you move dupes to when you need some base cleanup.

[Nico_e]

Thanks for replying.

Your description of the priority system seem to confirm my understanding of it  Except for the yellow alert bypassing personal priorities. It does not. It only overrides base priorities i.e. from what you set with the priority tool: If a dupe has farming priority +2(two arrows up) and tidying/storing at +1(one arrow up), and I set a yellow alert for a sweep job, the dupe will do all farming first. Even a farming job set to 1 will get priority over the !! sweep job. Personally I find this a bit unintuitive. I wish yellow alert would override personal priorities for the said job(except for the DISALLOWED setting) that way I am a 100% sure it will be done right away. And the only difference between yellow and red alert is that red overrides schedules as well i.e. sleep. 

Anyway, most of this would be easily solved with priority proifiles

[Tobruk]

yes, please klei, implement the OP's idea!