Currently in Planetbase I there are five very generic roles: biologist, worker, engineer, doctor, & guard. These roles are very general and encompass a wide range of responsibilities. Which is fine. It's the way the game is intended to be. Simplistic. However, I believe that a couple of these might be considered too general. Meaning that the possible set of game mechanics is limited by the generic all encompassing nature of these roles. And that breaking them up into more specialized responibilities might lead to more playable content and variety in the base building. So, I am suggesting some ideas to expand this area of the game for Planetbase 2.

Roles and Expanding them
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Guard, Biologist, & Doctor - sufficient just the way they are. These roles to me don't make sense to break up into any smaller chunks. There is not enough variety in the responsibilities that guards, biologists, & doctors perform to warrant breaking the role into more than one specialization. Guards should make the weapons. I think currently that's an engineering task. Gives guards more to do and engineers less for better balance of responsibilities.

Worker - Current responsibilies are: mining, refining, logistics. Probably fine as is...maybe have two roles to separate up the mining from the refining. All roles do logistics (hauling) in their spare time so I don't see hauling as a specific dedicated role, but maybe it could or should be, I dunno.

Engineer - Current responsibilies are: electrical, plumbing, repair, building, robotics, maintenance, operating telescopes & radar, logistics. This is the one that can best be broken up to add some variety. The engineers handle more tasks than is reasonable to expect from a single role. I suggest breaking this up into more than one specialization as follows:

Facilities: everything but robotics & aerospace (* keep reading), would handle building, repair, production of spares & circuit boards

Robotics: everything related to automation (currently only building robots), probably makes more sense to have these guys make the circuit boards. I see vehicles are going to be a thing, so I feel this role would best fit that for land-based vehicles (* keep reading).

Aerospace: everything related to flight and ship construction (* keep reading).

Operator: for dealing with telescopes & radar mechanics.

Repair?: possibly have a role dedicated only to repairing things and hauling in spare time.


*- Aerospace Expansion
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Regarding flight. In Planetbase 1 there are spaceships that deliver new colonists, and merchants which simulate a marketplace. This is an area that could benefit greatly from a tiny bit of role expansion, thus adding space for new and varied content.
First, the delivery of new faces to the colony is perfect and fine as is IMO. The elbow room here exists with the marketplace mechanics.

I suggest instead of having ships come to buy and sell, that the colony be responsible for constructing trade vessels which are loaded and launched to, say, an orbiting trade station or to trade ships that happen to be passing by. They launch, go to the trade station, sell/buy, return to base. Doing this will open up the following:

Pilot Role - Deliver and retrieve supplies from space-based trade depots. Also responsible for shuttling colonists & freight between bases on the surface.

New Buildings - aerospace engineers primarily build and maintain the trade & shuttle vehicles. This can be things such as a Vehicle Assembly building, maybe workstations for constructing rocket engines, hulls, guidance system, crew cabin, etc. Whatever level of detail is appropriate. Perhaps have instead of just one aerospace engineer role, you break it up further into two roles, one handling propulsion and the other ship construction. Shuttle pads to facilitate transportation between bases as distinct from the pads used to get to/return from space. Repair facility for maintaining vehicles. Workstations for producing rocket components. That sort of thing. Separate pads into launch towers and landing pads.

New Vehicles -
transport & freight shuttles (surface to surface between bases),
trade ship (surface to space)
a "crawler" type vehicle for moving trade ships and shuttles between vehicle assembly buildings, repair facilities, launch towers, and landing pads.

New Robots - Robots with aerospace engineering specializations. Maybe robotic pilots? Maybe robots that can build robots?


Training Center Expansion
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Have a generic role called trainee. They can't do anything except haul...slowly. Then you can have a training facility where the player can select which role they want to educate the trainee to perform. Maybe have an instructor role to go with it. As trainee, their main duty is to attend class. When finished, they transform into whatever role the training center prepared them to do. Training centers can also be used to re-educate colonists for re-purposing to another role. Like when you finally get enough mining robots that you no longer need to have colonists mining and potentially getting injured, you can send them to be trained for another role instead of wandering around the base with nothing to do.



I think these suggestions are sufficiently generic and general to still fit in with the simplicity theme showcased in Planetbase 1, yet will permit plenty of room for new varieties of mechanics and structures to bump up the interest level some.

One of the problems with Planetbase 1 is the repetition of structures and roles in large bases. There simply is not enough variety to hold my interest. I always play Planetbase 1 scenarios never sandbox because of this lack of variety. Sandbox mode is boring, repetitive, and has no objectives to shoot for. A large base is simply a bunch of small bases linked up together. There should be some sort of differences between large and small bases to force them to be distinguishable. Maybe structures you can't unlock until the base gets big enough or something.

Also the overuse of the engineer role to handle so many things makes that role awfully critical compared to the others. If you lose all your engineers often times you're just screwed. Breaking it into two or more specializations would help to alleviate this problem. I imagine there is similar room to expand the worker role at least a little bit, but I didn't spend much time brainstorming that. I mostly wanted to suggest this new pilot role. I think it would be a cool addition that fits in nicely with the general focus of the game. And it is simplistic like all the others.

Another good reason to make these expansions real is that if you do not, then I ain't buyin' ♥♥♥♥ from you outta spite. Anywayz, I hope you can get some ideas outta this.