Are you planning to add NPC followers to the game. Followers with rolls like: Guard Pilot Station Administrator Crew Squad leader Captain Follower Farmers? Having NPC followers with rolls would add a lot of fun to the game.
Taelyn has commented that is on their list as a potential feature, and I think it is frequently requested. However, there is no promises that they will be able to do that.
We pretty much have to wait for the next annual survey. I'm pretty sure I voted for an NPC related improvement in the last survey, because I also like storytelling myself. There is a load in this update, and it will take a while to parse; we may be best off linking to threads with additional hints from the devs, and then try hold these up.
I have been hoping for about 5 years now and nothing yet, I haven't lost that hope though, it's still there. This reminds me of Planet Explorers, the very first voxel game I ever played (and still the best). In that game, you also built a colony and you populated your colony with NPCs you recruit from all across the world. They automated everything in your colony. You had farmers to grow and harvest crops, doctors to produce medicine and heal or quarantine NPCs that get sick, miners that went out to collect resources, factory workers that produce stuff and, of course, soldiers to defend your colony or join you as followers. You could even train them up to be more efficient at their jobs. The colony itself, with all it's functions and details, were more complex as well. All this provided many more hours of late-game content to keep you busy, something Empyrion is seriously lacking. Of course, the devs of Planet Explorers were even less experienced with AI coding than Eleon at the time but, instead of throwing in the towel, they simply added failsafes for situations where the AI doesn't work properly - failsafes like stuck NPCs teleporting past objects they get stuck on, for example. It may have been immersion breaking at times but, the simple fact is, it worked. Your colony always kept on running, followers always kept up, You never had to babysit NPCs. Functional NPCs with failsafes like that is far, far better than nothing at all. And it shows. In Empyrion I am already growing bored in the late game whereas in Planet Explorers I would've only just started building up my army and automating ammo production.
