Lets Talk about a Follower Control Panel

[Mikeloeven]

So I feel like this is probably beating a dead horse and has more than likley been brought up already however the lack of any interface for controlling followers is a major design flaw that has been present since day one.

Now the current follower system is limited to

• feed creature and it starts following you.
• start attacking something all followers start attacking your target (often leads to suicide).
• start to harvest something any follower that can interact with the resource will start working.

the thing is that this is ALL the AI that followers possess and this leads to major issues the biggest being that there is no way to dismiss or tell a follower to wait in a specific location. which causes no amount of problems

• allied creatures cannot be left to guard a base
• you can end up with too many followers and no way to reduce the size of your army until they time out
• creatures your keeping as pets like baby tall birds will always follow you and get themselves killed because you cannot protect them and cant keep them at your base.
• rock lobsters infesting the over-world after following you out of the caves
• large armies decimating beefalo herds because they WONT STOP ATTACKING AND YOU CANNOT CALL THEM OFF!!!
• large armies being decimated by boss monsters BECAUSE THEY ARE TOO BRAIN DEAD TO FOLLOW YOU WHEN YOU RUN AWAY

the list goes on forever and the simple fact remains that the game needs an interface for issuing commands to followers because as it stands right now the current configuration of follower brains makes them not worth using as its easier to kite the monster into a area with non followers than it is to wrangle an army of poorly designed AI. I mean FFS followers may be mostly animals with limited intelligence however most animals can be trained to understand simple commands like STAY and HEEL