Lo-Fi Games

1. Proper player slavery with all that it involves. Proper reactions to slavery.

2. Characters have morale. Is character fed/starving? Does you camp have large food stocks? Does it have walls to make you feel secure? Have you won/lost battle? Anyone die? Lost a limb? Squad leader leadership? Love/dislike of other party members (personality based. Actually tracking relationships between character would be even better, but more complex intensive)

3. More ways to interact with factions. You are limited to destroying or supporting. How other different sub-factions within a faction?
Take for example the Holy Nation - why not have different sects that have slightly different interpretations of the faith (think protestants, orthodox, catholic), and you can support them to help them gain influence? Perhaps play all sides and cause a civil war?
Perhaps one faction might be accepting of Shek and other humanoids (as long as they follow the faith)? Another might be for full freedom of women. Another might be for limited (not allowed to hold positions of power, but otherwise free) emancipation. Etc..Same for other factions.

4. Given the players position and time scale, it makes little sense for them to create their own nation and challenge the big powers militarily. Rather smaller-scale operations (sabotage, assasinations, false flag raids), subterfuge and alliances make far more sense.

5. Modding modding. Modding - Cannot stress this enough. THE most important point. Period. Whatever you do, make sure to implement things planing ahead for what the players will do. Example is adding new races with extra body parts, like tails and ears. In Kenshi1, mods do hack jobs by basically adding fixed heads which limit what you can do a lot (and also results in loss of ears/tails when enslaved). A good fix for this in Kenshi 2 would be body attachment slots which would never be stripped, where you could attach a cat tail or bunny ears. Equipment could also have a checkbox on how it affects them (hide/don't hide). A helmet with ear holes wouldn't hide bunny ears (example - hide bodyheadslot1 is false). As a bonus, since these could be treated as body parts, they could also be amputated/lost and have their own HP.

5b. A possible solution to headgear. Slots in Kenshi1 work as mini-inventories, they have a grid. So allow more than 1 item per slot. If a face "slot" is 2x3, a ninja face mask or rebreather could be 2x2, different googles 2x1, so you can place them both on the face. A full gas mask would be 2x3, for example.

6. Talking/trading while in disguise. It's sad that it requires a mod in Kenshi1.

7. Tied to that, attacking while disguised should have a chance to add negative rep to the faction you are pretending to be (dress as holy nation, attack another faction and the holy nation will take the rep hit. Could even start a war). Would get progressively harder to do repeatedly.

8. Another change to disguises and bounties. In the world of Kenshi, without fast communications and video recordings, news of a crime would spread slow and it would be hard to recognize you based only on vague descriptions. Also, the idea that every member of a faction knows every other, so they can easily tell you are a fake is silly. Hence, a variable tied to a location/are/region - call it suspicion or heat. It would tick down with time and would increase with suspicions actions, and it would influence how wanted you are and how likely you are to be recognized.

9. Dynamic faction relations. Factions can make peace deals and engage in warfare. Depending on their strength, number of enemies and relations. for most part it would be minor border skirmishes, engaging in full-on war would require really bad relations. Also traders of the faction might be allowed in until the conflict reaches a certain severity?

10. Re-attach limbs. The severed limb would have to be in a good state and you'd need high-grade specialized surgery kits and
high medical. Would apply a rehabilitation de-buff for a while.

11. more ruins/old locations. For many ruins in Kenshi 1, the assets were.. not that great.I'm sure the 3D artists in the community would be happy to provide you with some free meshes. I certainly would. Crashed starships, ruined buildings and cars.

12. Smarter faction/combat AI. More of a threat assessment vs. reward/desperation. Some opponents might avoid attacking you if you are well equipped and have a large squad, or they might try and talk. Ability to give the hungry bandits some food. On base attacks, have the enemy do more than just rush in to hack at the gate. Add simple siege weapons like catapults or have sappers with explosives that can destroy wall sections (depending on faction).

13. Alert/alarms and automatic response actions. If your dude in the watchtower spots approaching enemies, they raise the alarm. Every character automatically executes whatever action you specified as an alert action (stand on location X, man turret, etc.. ) and does not resume jobs until alert is over.

14. Jailer/Slaver job. Would automatically bandage and feed captives.

I recall someone mentioning sleep in another thread, so why not expand on that idea?

Different level of tiredness with different penalties, so you can push your people far. Different races have different need for sleep. Also, you could use an assigment schedule like Rimworld has, to assign sleeping and working hours (active in base), allowing you to synchornize and even create multiple shifts without hassle.
Furthermore, everyone needing sleep presents more opportunities for sneaking and subterfuge.

Some other suggestions/thoughts:

1. Herbivores actually eat plants/grass.

2. Farms that can directly produce food (like apples, berries, etc..), rather than it always having to be a material to be processed into food.

3. Being able to access the inventory (loot) of slaves at all times.

Some more things:

1. Wall junctions/crossroads section that enables branching wall connections. Basically you can connect walls to it in a star configuration, to enable more diverse base building (and also for wall edges/ sharp turns). This is impossible to do in normal Kenshi - you have to fiddle a lot and even then pathfinding breaks between wall sections if there is a big angle. See image below for problem areas. You simply cannot do nice naturaly wall corners and splits.
https://ibb.co/ccd0D8G

These conectors/junctions should come in 2 flavors - just a normal connection and a small tower (with gates) which would block enemies from just walking freely along the walls. they would have to break down the doors first.


2. Storage priority. Each storage container would have 3 priorities - normal, high or low. On high, character will always bring things to this container if they can. On low, they will actively try to empty this container.

3. More natural world state changes - with actual faction AI. Instead of towns and places just suddenly changing as soon as a flag is triggered, make the change more natural and NPC driven. For example, kidnaping the Phoenix would trigger smaller HN search patrols and would reduce city guards (send them out to search). Likewise, it would trigger higher aggression from other factions - armies would actually be sent out to conquer a town (take over the central government building), with a chance that it would fail. In fact they player could intervene in the fight to help or hinder the invasion. In other words, factions would detect moments of weakness in other factions and try to capitalize. More natural and dynamic.

4. Outfits and lockers. Locker buildings/furnitures that can hold outfits (equipped clothing + weapons + possibly backpack) for several people. Player characters/townies would automatically change outifts as necessary - for example, NPC could have regular clothing, work clothing and combat clothing. Rise the alarm and they would rush to the lockers to equip their combat gear. Send them to work and if the type of work/building has some preffered work gear, and they have it in their locker, they would equip it.
So lockers would have a number of slots depending on size (1, 5 or 10) and each slot would be reserved by a character to hold his outfit(s)

An expansion to faction relations suggestion. Factions would have AI that would decide it's action. Sending raid against a player base, an army against an enemy city, a relief force against a besieged city, or a diplomatic envoy would be examples. AI would take into account it's relative faction/army strength, number of enemies and relations and target importance (re-taking it's own city would be more important than attacking some remote outpost). Possibly other factors. After major battles the AI would take time to consolidate, as to prevent a landslide and too much/too fast fighting.

A well fortified town could be besieged. Thing like catapults and starving the defenders would be a thing. The AI could send relief forces.
A town would be conquered if the central building is taken.

Envoys would travel with bodyguards and can be attacked, talks can be sabotaged.
False flag attacks can be possible if your entire squad is in disguises.

Now, my main hankerin’ is for this here game to stay true to its roots, keepin’ it 100% Chris’s wild imagination, where y’all can just plumb lose yourselves in it. The rest? Aw, that ain’t worth a hill o’ beans, bless yer hearts.

I wish a Rimworld-like simulation system. With which each follower can feel like a real person, rather than a fearless slave who don't have own desire/character

I want to be able to bury my fallen people.

A "grave" building, like a corpse furnace, but you can only put in one person, and the grave's name turns into "Beep's grave" for example.

This would help accepting the death of squad members.