This is a crazy idea i had, not sure if its been posted yet, but ive been thinking about building management and how to make it easier to make sure your constantly expanding with less micro management without a full redesign of the mechanics in place. So the current problem i've had for a while is when you have say 25-50 enginneers, and you need to keep expanding, but you cant find your idle enginneers on planet, frustrating right? Furthermore your wasting time trying to find them. What if at a macro level, a player can grab a structure from a expandable building panel at the bottom of the screen, drop down what they need, and any idle or soon to be idle enginneer will begin construction. AI prioritization would work like this when a building is placed: check the distance of all enginneers and their current tasks and calculate the time it will take to reach the location, the one with the shortest eta will move to the location and build after its task que is complete. the structure could have a prioritization option when selected, allowing the user to define if it should be completed asap (commiting the enginneer with shortest eta and idle engineers) only commit idle workers, or only commit 1 engineer to the job. when an enginneer is moving to a non asap priority structure with multiple engineers assigned to it and another structure is placed, the enginneers may split off to the new structure if its eta is shortest. This wont remove building micromanagement, because if a player is on top of everything they might be able to squeeze out more efficiency by not using this automated system, but it will help less experienced players stay competitive and give more time into the thought of base design rather than, 'just hurry up and put down more stuff'. Thoughts?
Or just press f to find idle fabbers. Or grab a few from the group you surely have clustered around something.
