Hey, first post, I love cogmind and have some ideas that I wanted to suggest to help improve the game.
QoL:
- enable look mode with mouse: I've seen this feature suggested recently too, I'd love to have it as well, it always happens to me that I'll go into mouse mode to quickly compare items (since doing it on keyboard mode is far too slow and bothersome) and forget to go back, then try to look up something and meet this limitation, as suggested in the earlier thread we could automatically enter keyboard mode and exit it after having finished, though I don't see why looking even with the mouse enable would be a problem since we can use it while in keyboard mode to look at stuff, just without seeing the actual cursor, still great addition in my opinion.
- D for drop mode: The D key is bounded to both drop mode and to check descriptions, but like with X it often happens that I try to drop stuff while in mouse mode, It is not as annoying as look mode but I think that having two different keys binded to two different actions would be better and alleviate the control learning curve for new players, I was thinking to bound bound R or backslash as drop mode and D for looking stuff and I don't see why they shouldn't be on at the same time together, it's the same idea with the look mode where, in short, I think that keyboard only features should be usable in mouse mode too, mouse mode is basically mouse+keyboard mode in reality because I can still always utilize the numpad to move around, aim etc, hence even in mouse mode keyboard commands synergize quite well and are very usable in my opinion
- Alt-Ctrl-shift-/ + numpad, this would be really be something useful in my opinion, when I want to swap something using Ctrl I can use the numpad to quickly attach items from the inventory, but If I try to drop, look at or swap a part from the inventory with Alt, shift or slash (/) I can't use the numpad, which would be very intuitive since I always use it to move. I realize that alt+numpad is already used to move the camera in keyboard mode, perhaps those two command could be decoupled?
-Colour coding health when low, We already have warnings, but sometimes they are very easy to ignore, the health bar is also hidden in the top right,a bit far from the map and inventory, and the warning is even further near the top-right angle, I'd say that colour coding the health bar and having a cool effect could help bring attention to it when health is low (could be done with energy and matter too ideally)
-advanced GUI: Could we have an easy option to change how much the fighting log stays on screen?I can safely gain much of value from it because it goes away so quickly.
New stuff:
Allow moving your allies: The ability to move your allies precisely was removed because it incentivised micromanagement and was hence tedious, but having lots of allies and setting them continuously die and break stuff is tedious too, it should like a lose-lose, however I think I might have two ideas to make controlling allies an interesting feature. First the ability to control allies might be locked behind a RIF implant, so until you get that ability you don't have to micromanage stuff, meaning that you won't have lots of games where you are going to manage allies, instead you will have a few games here and there where you unlock such ability and have new strategic options to play with that you usually would not have, moving your allies becomes a non tedious feature because you will be finely managing your allies rarely and when you are going to do it it would be:
1) fun because it's an ability that you usually don't have and that unlocks strategic options that you usually can't use and 2) something that you do rarely instead of nearly every game, avoiding overuse.
The second idea would be to not have perfectly precise control, instead you could have an area where your ally is going to sort of be in (something like what you have when shooting a transfer launcher, a rocket or any AoE weapon) in this way you don't have to micromanage too much, instead you have the ability to tell your allies where to roughly go, you can send an administrator to a safe room with a terminal or your fighting robots to attack a certain area but you can't precisely place your friends in a perfect killbox around a door.
- observers: I really like the idea for an observer drone bay that you talked about in your RIF stream, it basically would give a reliable way to gain new drones with hacking, however even if this idea is not possible I've got a use for loose hacked observers, especially if paired with the ability to control your allies:
1) have the ability for your observers to trigger an alarm and attract nearby enemies(you could use it for example by moving an observer in a room, activating the alarm to attract a sentry on the opposite side of the wall, then after the sentry is gone to check the alarm area enter the room it was guarding loot, place traps and sneak back out before it returns)
2) FOV link, you can't see your allies except for the drones, hacked observers could be used to manage other friendlies that you can't see while you are on the other side of the map to then give them orders and check on them if they need help
-Engeneers:
I know that you can use engeneers to repair allies and items, and that after being hacked they do not go back to repair stations to refill, very cool in my opinion, could it be possible however to have serfs act as a way to slowly refill engeneers? The logic behind this would be that engeneers have a refill female port to get matter from repair station, because of the the way that they are constructed they can't get matter directly from the ground, however serfs have an M plug to give matter to repair stations after they have gathered it from the ground, so we could have serfs resupply a tiny amount of matter for engeneers, it would give a nice and niche reason to hack serfs in certain situations (like if your team is very damaged after a long battle and you have lots of matter around and a hacked engeneer around that is empty not able to do anything).
I had many more idea but I kind of forgot while writing, I may add them another day in a new post
Also did the ability to destroy walls by walking with momentum go away?I can never do it