Workers are weird. No matter where you are in the galaxy, there is an unlimited supply of workers that will show up the moment you build housing for them. There is no discussion of ever paying one’s workers - all they want is food and water (and some coffee if you’re feeling generous). If you stop feeding them, they go into hibernation, and when you bring more food they immediately pick up where they left off without resenting you the least bit for letting them starve.
Treating workers as individuals might make the game more interesting and open up new playstyles. Players could compete for the best workers through good work conditions and compensation, or just squeeze them for all they’re worth. You could even create ways to upgrade workers into Experts or upgrade pioneers into settlers.
Workers feel so alien that it’s hard to empathize with them, and that makes the whole economy less meaningful. I feel like I’m roleplaying as Ebenezer Scrooge.
We have an item like that on the roadmap called “Population Development”.
Just need to be careful here: Making this too complex really makes planning and development magnitudes more complicated than it is now. Imagine you start out in the game with zero workers and first have to “build up” a population. Or you go on vacation and once you come back, your workforce is gone and you have to rebuild it from scratch, possibly over weeks (depending on the model used). So need to be careful here not to go over board with complexity.
That said: I stand by the roadmap item…I myself would love to see more depth to base management.
I sort of like playing as Scrooge! Especially when I’m winding down production to go on a 10 day vacation, as martin suggested. (In the future I may have enough reserves to queue up production for this long but right now I’m only a few weeks in so don’t have that kind of cash to stock up on that many raw materials.)
One aspect to this, which may be by-design or a bug, is moving essentials to my ship to prevent their consumption by workers. This seems to work as workers will not consume essentials if they are in the ship’s cargo hold. However, if I purchase DW or RAT from the exchange, and select the storage location as my ship, they are immediately consumed by my poor starving workers, instead of going to the ship’s cargo hold. Again, this might be intended, perhaps because purchases must go through the local storage before getting sent to the ship. (I can visualize my protesting workers at the local storage facility breaking in and taking the goods before they are sent to the ship, lol!)
Anyway, thank you devs for creating such a fun game! PrUn reminds me of the first ‘MMO’ I played when I was a kid, way before the internet. In fact, when the internet came out, I hated it; my beloved BBS’s were all becoming ISP’s and I could no longer play Trade Wars!
