Switchable Task Groups and Task Group Timing

[Kilyle]

Okay, maybe it's just my ADHD, but after many playthroughs (my latest to over 300 cycles now), I keep finding myself in the same quite frustrating situation: I need to do several things, I don't have enough hands to manage them all in a timely manner, I can't add more people because I'm running short on supplies as it is, and I completely lose track of specific tasks until I wind up setting every task to Priority 9 and using Yellow Alert to get specific things done.

Suboptimal at best.  Really not how it's supposed to work, but since I've done the same pattern on many, many playthroughs, I figure I would like a mechanic to help with it: Task Grouping.

Specifically, I'd like to be able to create a group (e.g. "Build the Upper Chamber", "Move Dreckos to Pasture", "Clear Debris in Main Chamber", "Set Up New Ventilation System" or the like) and set up tasks within that group, and then turn certain groups of tasks to various priorities, including "Pause" (as in "don't do this even if you have nothing else to do").  I'd also like to be able to set certain tasks to recurring (clean ladders, move animals, run in gerbil wheels), or a type of task to happen within a given room (e.g. "clear the great hall of debris" or "clean all ladders in this area").

Then I could toggle this or that set of tasks to be the most important set right now -- ideally a list I could swap around.  So the game would help me keep track of what I was trying to do, and also have the group work together on a given task instead of inefficiently running all over the place doing everything I happened to mark as important but in a really haphazard way.

Let's fix the ventilation area!  Wait, we need to clear that swamp!  Wait, we need to go fix the animals!  Wait, we need to move all the food to storage!  Now go back to clearing the swamp!  Now go back to fixing the pipes!  -- but where I don't have to run around carefully fiddling with each area's priority settings, or setting it on Yellow Alert to get a particular task swiftly done.

 

This next part, I realize there's likely some way to manage this with the individual character priority list, but as of yet I have seen no evidence of these guys actually doing this in a way that makes sense to my brain (e.g. setting a guy to love animals as his most important task does not guarantee that he'll make sure the animals are well cared for, or at least not in my experience).  Anyway, I would like to be able to set schedules using task groups, so that e.g. the morning hours have chores (a different set of chores for each schedule group), then after lunch they move to construction and digging, and near the end of the day they run the gerbil wheels to make sure it's charged up before bed, that sort of thing.

But like, here, let's have the Red Group's chores be to clean things, and the Green Group's chores be to farm, and the Blue Group's chores be to clear debris and move supplies closer to where they're about to be used.  But once lunch time hits, the groups stop their chore activities and once they're active again they move to construction zones: Red Group is fixing up the area near the steam vent, Green Group is clearing the western swamp, and Blue Group is building the new housing unit.  No, wait, the lower swamp is more important right now because we need to get to the cold area, let's switch Green Group to the lower swamp, and Blue Group can open up the area toward the chlorine pit.  But without losing track of the less important task groups (western swamp and new housing unit), which I can then switch back to as soon as the groups have managed their more important tasks.

This kind of task group based management would make a huge difference to my ability to keep track of what I'm doing and set up useful categories for progress.  And it would require far less fiddly priority setting.  I would vastly appreciate it.