Hello,
i bought the game a couple of days ago and was quite fascinated with it and had a lot of fun.
But there is one point which started to annoy me. Like mentioned sometimes before, there are certain tasks that are quite repetetive. Especially in the phase 6, where is so much to do, but it seems to me, that everytime i want to do some longer EVA like exploring, taking probes etc, i always have to go back to base, and do a lot of routine work. I'm talking mainly about cleaning solar panels, watering and fertilizing plants, check the fish and worms, etc. Don't get me wrong here, i love the concept of this in deep simulation, and definitively want these things in the second game. But it seems to me that i can't focus on one aspect of the game for a longer period of time because i have to to some this routine work. And after a while, this starts to take the fun away, because i'd rather be doing something else, but have to keep the base running. I know this is supposed to be a simulator and tries to be accurate with builiding a base on mars. But in my opinion, i should also be having fun doing it, and sadly, after a while, this game feels more like work and less like fun. I hope you get what i'm writing about.
I like the idea of the player choosing his/her playstyle. In order to give everybody the opportunity to do as much or as little work themself as they like, i suggest, you add some kind of AI collegue in the game. You most probably wouldn't be building this base alone, there would be at least another person with you in this base. So your AI helper would be in the base, first taking care of his/her needs like food, water, etc. But you could assing specific tasks to this helper via a GUI. For example, at the moment, i don't want to do all the biology stuff, so i could assign my helper to these tasks. He/She would be watering, fertilizing my plants, feed the fish etc. If after a while, i wan't to do this task again by myself, i could just tell my helper to don't do anything at all, or just clean the solar panel.
Unfortunatly, i don't have much expierence with game or AI design, so i don't know how hard it would be to implement this. In my opinion, it doesn't have to be fully animated, it would be perfectly fine if the helper would do these task when nobody is around.
I also have read somewere that work on an AI is in progress, but i couldn't find more information about it, so i decided to share my thoughts about this.
I know that you can already share the work via multiplayer, but you don't always have somebody around to play with, or everybody wants to do the mining stuff, and nobody wants to clean the solar panels.
To sum it all up, you could have a helper in the game to delegate tasks to, or you could choose to do it all by yourself. Everybode can adjust their own playstyle, if something starts to annoy you, you could easily assing the task, and if you want to do this again later in the game, no problem here as well. For me, this would significantly improve the long-term expierience with the game.