Using the Squads screen for pre-set jobs to give special behaviors to characters.

[Vandala]

I would like to see an extra option in the Squads screen. I would like the ability to assign special pre-defined roles to squads.

The pre-defined roles would be something like: Gate-guard, City-guard, Archer, Hunter, Merchant, Miner.

Any character who gets assigned to a squad that has had its role set to one of those options will start to behave according to whatever parameters are part of that role and will thus run on auto-pilot while in that squad.

The benefit of this addition is not only the automated behavior of your characters that make your town come more alive (along with a bit or randomness due to characters moving in and out of the city on their own accord) but also the new ability to exclude interactions from characters not belonging to certain pre-set groups. By pre-setting a certain squad as a guard or a soldier or a hunter you now have a variable you can use to differentiate characters belonging to those squads in dialog or special npc interactions.

The behavior I would like to see from each role is this:

-Gate-guard. Members of this squad will automatically attempt to group at your city gate(s) and will be on the lookout for undesirables and contraband, they will attack on sight any hostiles they don't outnumber, if outnumbered they will attempt to get inside the city and close the gate and repair it, they will auto-haul any corpses for burning and capture any living but downed hostiles and throw them in cages.

-City-guard. Members of this squad will stay within the walls of your city, they will randomly walk around from building to container to npcs to etc, they will attempt to capture thieves and escaped slaves and other undesirables and lock them in cages, they will rally to any fight in the city as backup.

-Archer. Members of this squad will continually patrol your walls and fire down on any hostiles within range.

-Hunter. Members of this squad will travel outside your city walls to hunt for wild animals, they will engage any animal they find in combat and loot everything from any animal corpse they find to bring back to the city and place in the right containers. When not in combat they will always attempt to sneak. They will always attempt to fully recover their health before setting out for another hunt. (since we probably won't get livestock, hunters would make a good alternative to get meat, leather, and cats)

-Merchant. Members of this squad will gather as much merchandise as they can and attempt to reach a neighboring city to sell their wares.

-Miner. Members of this squad will attempt to find mine-able spots outside your city walls and bring back what they can find/carry. They will attempt to find the closest spots first but there is no limit to how far they will travel other then starvation. Perhaps an extra option could exist for this squad to set the ore you want them to find (iron, copper or both).

Extra note, on mining. Currently all mining spots provide an endless amount of resources. Perhaps it would benefit the game to limit the amount of resources any one spot could provide before running dry forever. This would put less pressure on players to find the perfect starting location since all locations would eventually run dry of certain resources like iron and copper, players would then be forced to go further afield for these resources, or trade for them, or equip their miners for longer trips.

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There is another option I would like to see in the Squads screen. The ability to set/assemble an outfit for the squad.

Once an outfit has been set, members of a squad whose outfit was set will attempt to adhere to this standard and change their clothing, weapons, and other items accordingly.

All worn equipment (clothing, weapons, tool belt, backpack) can be set, as well as extra items that must be held in the inventory (like food). I would like the ability to set the quality level of the equipment as well, like forcing them to take the highest quality available, or the lowest quality available, or only take the exact set quality

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It might be a nice idea to also allow us to set a paint job for the outfit. I don't know if you're ever going to do anything with painted clothing for the player or how you'll implement it. Perhaps we can set the paint job of the outfit and it'll "magically" turn the clothes into those colors or perhaps it'll work like the setting of a quality level and the characters will instead search for clothes that match the set colors, or perhaps setting the colors somehow triggers the job of painting the clothes by having the character get the clothes and then paint them by whatever means that is supposed to happen.

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To be honest I don't expect all this to be implemented, it would be nice but I don't know how much use we would really get out of it for the amount of effort it would take. Hopefully I've given you guys some ideas. I'm just hoping for a little more life and diversity and randomness for our cities.