There's nothing like a long weekend for getting some Outer Colony work done, and version 0.5.52 should be going live momentarily. This release is focused entirely on the new colonist management interface, which hopefully gives a little bit of the functionality needed to make running a colony easier. My focus here was really on reducing tedium and presenting data in a quickly accessible manner.
With that said, this release is just a first crack at things! I'm the only one who's used it at all so far, and I'm positive you guys are going to recognize improvements that can be made as soon as you try it out. There are a few things I already want to add, like etgfrog's suggestion for showing related skills / stats next to activities in the work configuration view, but I couldn't come up with an elegant way to do it.
I'm thinking tooltips, perhaps! This is to say that when you hover the mouse over a particular job, a graphic will pop up that shows skill and stat levels for everything related to the activity. I didn't have time to code it today, and I didn't want to hold up this initial release any further, but it's something I hope to experiment with in the coming weeks.
With that said, here's a quick overview of the new interface.
It can be accessed from the top menu bar, under Colony Configuration -> General Colonist Management.The first thing you'll see is the simplified activity management view. You can change views by clicking on the drop-down box in the top left corner of the UI. You can check and uncheck boxes here to simply enable and disable types of work for colonists.
Also, in both this and the advanced activities view, you can click the "Auto Configure All" button - this will algorithmically set work priorities on all activities for all colonists, based on their calculated aptitudes. Basically, clicking this button performs the exact same task that a competent minister of labor will perform during his work shift. The algorithm isn't perfect, and players may still want to tweak priorities for a bunch of reasons, but this will generally make colonists do the things they're best at.
The second part of the activity view is its advanced mode. Here, you can set specific priorities for all the different tasks.
Next, there's a skills view. This is pretty straightforward, showing all the skill levels of all your colonists. Consult the map key at the top of the window for a description of how to read the graphics, but hopefully it's visually intuitive. You can also click on the column headers to sort colonists by skill level. For example, if you want to see the most skilled miners, click on the "Mine" column header.
Finally, there's the stats view. This shows all the physical and personality stats for your colonists. Again, you can click on the column headers to sort your colonists, which I've found pretty handy.
If you guys have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to post them, as always! I know there's still a lot of room for improvement here, but I hope it makes the mechanics of playing the game a bit easier.