Late game uses when a temporary boost of workforce is useful... Caravan to a new tile and spawn hoard of miners for fast gathering Cleaning, repairing, and hauling after a raid Emergency harvesting during a cold snap or blight (when yield isn't as important) First planting of the season for a small boost to the crop growth time
The greyed out texture the War Queen had in the design comparison is due to the War Queen's age, when mechs are over 100 years old they get the dirtier look. The War Queen and Work Queen are more easily distinguishable from the sides and behind due to the the color variation on the side plates.
Well, with lore like that I can’t help but agree with you, if that was mentioned maybe in the Work Queens description or steam workshop page then that would be fine!
11:50 Or make it so you can easily scrap/recycle the urchins for almost full steel cost? So while they still have a notable steel cost you can reclaim more at a machining table to keep deploying workers. Also would make sense since they are designed to run out of power, might as well make them recyclable. I suppose an alternative to scrapping them would be something like a Resurrect Urchin option in a mech gestator to revive them, but that hardly seems worth it even if the steel/time costs were decreased.
Outside of the reasons you highlighted, I skipped this mod because: I want the work urchins to be part of the actual war queen instead of copy. Given the whole purpose of the queen is to be a mobile gestator + ultratech mech on top of that, it make sense for it to very quickly gestate a variety of mechs depending on your needs. If it can gestate war urchins it can gestate work ones too... Slightly unrelated issue (to this mod anyway): Please let me draft war urchins, their whole point is cannon fodder so it can distract the doomsday guy but mine just went after a random manhunting turkey and ignored the raid! You can imagine what happened next (yes this actually happened).
The hauler is undoubtedly the best. You can never really have enough haulers. The work of just about everything else is sped up a TON if everything is where it should be (especially constructoids, Jesus are constructoids slow haulers)
There is a reason for the farming ones to be at level 6. If it has 10 hours available and you are building it because of an emergency.. Healroot is slow planting and not for emergencies. You always sow that last