Feature/mod idea: Bulldozer

Getting tired of bots taking tons of time and energy to remove trees/rocks and place tiles

Bots are awesome at placing buildings and clearing small areas, but they're not great at tasks that take a ton of trips, such as paving large areas, especially before you get a lot of speed upgrades. This idea is to add a mid-game (blue science) tool for semi-automatically clearing and paving a bunch of land.

What it is: A new vehicle, called the bulldozer (excavator, paver, whatever), with similar handling characteristics to a tank. It excels at running over stuff, barely slowing down at all and immediately putting the wood/stone in its inventory. It has a few different modes:

• Regular mode is just driving normally, with the improved "running over stuff" characteristics

• Paving mode (a checkbox in the bulldozer's GUI) will automatically place any tiles in the bulldozer's inventory along it's path. Throw some concrete in it, drive to point B, and you get a nice 2 tile wide path.

• Landfill mode, paving mode but able to cross water by placing landfill down as it goes along.

• Rail building mode, a separate checkbox in the GUI. The bulldozer snaps to the rail grid, has reduced turning capabilities to match rail curves, and will automatically place rails (from it's inventory) down along its path.

• Cliff destroying, when supplied with cliff explosives the bulldozer will automatically use them to destroy cliffs it collides with.

What I've outlined so far isn't too useful because it requires the player driving it, and the player can easily place down tiles/rails as they go along. What makes the bulldozer truly useful is the automatic mode, controlled by a bulldozer remote:

• Single-target click: The linked bulldozer travels directly to the target point, engaging in whatever modes have been selected in it's GUI. Want rails from A to B? Put the bulldozer at A, put it in rail mode with a supply of rails, click point B, and off it goes.

• Shift-click: The bulldozer selects an area defined by the rectangle between the bulldozer's current location and the target point and sweeps across the entire area (It can turn in place like a tank, so all movement is along the cardinal axes). This can be used to clear terrain and/or pave an area, but is not usable with rail-building mode.

The automation isn't too fancy (this is blue science after all), but it allows the player to do some large scale construction projects without ordering bots to do thousands of tasks. It would need a couple of alerts (out of fuel and stuck on cliff/water), but I think would be a useful tool mid-game to allow the player to truly start making a large scale factory automatically.