Welcome, you amazing community of The Amazing Game, especially you Wube Software lads!
So I haven't been following the amazing game for a year or so; only downloading latest update every few months but not the forum, so some suggestions are already or to some extent implemented, at least in some mod.
1.
TL;DR
note: this was thought of before Space Age platforms, where this is somewhat implemented
note: also, I have no idea with spoilage means, so maybe this didn't age well (pun kinda intended)
What?
so let's punish that approach by giving items a spoiling time if in claws of bots, but not belts, inserters, chests or machines. What happens after it gets spoiled? Make machines require a 100% of a components so spoiled items are practically half their healthy counterparts? Didn't think this much but I think it has potential
can make worse by limiting time on belt as well (more circuit wizardry is going to be needed to limit input unless it's going to be processed in reasonable time)
Why?
2.1
TL;DR
What?
Some like health may be visible, but content (like chests) and recipes should be blurred. Obviously can look at belts, but even that could be blurred or something, or needing advanced scans that personal chacracter scan can't reveal.
And to add additional layer of ambiguity, I suggest instead of revealing entire entities, to instead show the chunk as foggy, listing only the positions of revealed entities (with some predefined entities such as belts, but not their content/what's on them, poles and assembly machines, to be easier to reveal the locations of than say energy and defences, engines and nuclear reactor and defensive turrets). And to prevent inferring blurred entities as defensive/energy, to make these entities increase a value of the chunk such that that chunk gets entirely fogged or mostly (have no idea how that might be done without being inferring the layout of some defenses).
Why?
2.2
TL;DR
What?
Why?
3.
TL;DR
What?
keep track of the positions of last kills (from and by both, enemy and team). Think of (where have I been attacked from the most in the last 5 hours). While one might say corpses (if set to last for 10 mins or few hours) is an alternative, but first that's computationally expensive, and secondly hard to differentiate between say 20 corpses from 1000 ones (think of some heavy enemy mods like rampant or doubling small biters from medium and so on).
For now, I only think of where, what and how many enemies, but what and how many turrets killed and which of my entities (pipe or an assembly machine) are destroyed are irrelevent to me rn. The display could be another surface, similar to pollution map, of how many destroyed entities were there in the last X units of time. I recommend the scale of kills (a mild area is 20 or 500? Hot area is 100 or 2000?) be also customizable or at least dynamic like how production stats update grid based on min and max values. It would be relevant which force (i.e., was it me by mistake or an enemy force) that defeated these biters, but which unit is by large irrelevant now.
Why?
4.
TL;DR
What?
Highly expect this to be a mod
Why?
5.
TL;DR
What?
Why?
6.
TL;DR
What?
In simple words, if a requester chest asks for 50 copper, it should display how great the logistic network the chest is part of, is doing on the copper department. OFC as humans we know it's either we're lacking ore or not smelting enough, but basic diagnostics mods can manage would be like if there's enough copper plates in the network should be relatively easy to implement, I think; It's simply the entire list of logistics filtered through the requests of such entity. The display may be on chest GUI only, or a similar green, yellow and red light like it's with miners an belts.
Why?
7.
TL;DR
What?
The game would likely assign a default tag, but can be overriden individually by every player, local to each save of a global dictionary, to define what item goes under each tag.
Let me exemplify it: we know inserters and belts go hand in hand almost all of the time when building or supplying. So I as a player can adjust the way chests (and my chacracter's inventory by extension) are sorted by (instead of the sorting way player's inventory is sorted by). One might interject, but inserters and belts are already in the logistics tab, and sorted together already, but say for some reason I want combinators to be together with pumps, or steam engines with burner inserters, or artillery with turrets. That's a custom grouping.
So say I'd like to see the logistic stuff in the chest first, then industry ones (like machines and modules), and lastly military stuff. As a multiplayer thing, the content of each container won't be unsynced; it could have in-game an alphabetical order, but player sees its content in different order.
Speaking of the adjustment menu, I'd expect it to look like the GUI of upgrade planner, but with headlines of tags (default ones ofc), underneath which are the items that go under that tag, that have slots that expand as more items are defined under each tag.
Why?
8.1
TL;DR
What?
Why?
8.2
TL;DR
What?
Why?
9.
TL;DR
What?
Since I don't know if it's possible to visually compare red wire network (which I use a LOT) and train conditions, I had to compare the BPs exported strings before inferring duplicability, which is as everyone knows is too slow, even for few 20 BPs.
So instead of a complicated visual display, I suggest a simple and a somewhat complicated approach.
1- simple approach: show first X (maybe 20) chars of their exported strings, that one can compare without copying and pasting, and better, make a new thing like a book to insert BPs into and export their strings and names to a single string of multiple lines (line per BP).
2- bit complicated approach: use a super-imposed view of a BP over the other. I know it would only work on BPs whose dimensions are identical and of same offset, but a simple semi-invisible and red-colored entities would indicate which entities don't match, either in type or conditions, whose tooltip shows the index of those BPs (1 and 3 match, but 1, and by extension 3, differ from 2 and 4). Oh, you consider 2 as the frame of reference? It differs from 1, 3 and 4 (like it's not like this entity in 2 and 4 are the same).
Why?
10.
TL;DR
What?
Why?
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Finally, I don't expect these to be coded in a year nor at all, but I had those while playing and felt would help someone if were implemented, so I saw sharing them better.
